Roger Stott (56), the British Labour MP for Wigan, who died on August 8th after a short illness, was passionately interested in Irish affairs and bitterly disappointed at being denied ministerial office in Belfast during the years of Conservative dominance in Britain from 1979. His disappointment was therefore all the more acute when he was passed over by his own prime minister, Tony Blair, who led the Labour party back to power in May 1997 after years in the political wilderness.
When Blair was making his appointments, Roger Stott, who had supported the Blair-John Prescott leadership ticket, was summoned late at night to see him only to be told that he was not to join the new government. The decision caused him great disappointment and resentment.
Nevertheless he continued to work diligently, discreetly, and often in total secrecy, with a wide range of contacts across the all-Ireland political spectrum, to promote the concepts of reconciliation, peace and prosperity.
All through the development of the fledgling peace process from the mid-1980s and in more recent years, when the fragile ceasefires wobbled, he would fly to Northern Ireland to intervene with his contacts and argue for peace. These missions frequently drew him to Derry for, as he said, that is where the Troubles began and where, he believed, they would ultimately be ended.
Although he had been denied a ministerial appointment, he was an influential parliamentarian as a member of the British-Irish joint parliamentary body and one of the longest serving members of his party's backbench committee on Northern Ireland, whose firsthand, informed views were sought and taken seriously by ministers.
Roger Stott was born in Rochdale, Lancashire on August 7th, 1943. He was educated at Greenbank primary and secondary modern in the town before going to the local technical college. Later he would attend Ruskin College, Oxford, the educative cradle of the then invincible, British trades union movement.
In 1970 he fought the no-hope, parliamentary election in the Manchester suburb of Cheadle before being selected for the safe Labour seat of Westhoughton, to the north of the city, which he won at a byelection in 1973. The area was to remain his parliamentary powerbase although the constituency was redrawn and renamed Wigan in 1983. At the 1997 general election he held it with an impressive 22,000 majority.
When James Callaghan took over as prime minister in 1976, Roger Stott became his parliamentary private secretary and played an important role as a political bagman during three tense years as the minority Labour government struggled to survive before being annihilated by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He was rewarded with a CBE in Callaghan's resignation honours list.
When Neil Kinnock emerged as the Labour leader soon afterwards, he served as opposition frontbench spokesman on agriculture and then transport before joining Kevin McNamara in shadowing the Northern Ireland Office in 1989.
A few days before the 1992 general election, the two flew into Northern Ireland with high hopes that by the weekend they would be installed as ministers at Stormont but John Major was to dash their hopes with an unexpected victory.
Over the next few years both stalwarts of Old Labour were to fall victim to the reconstructors of New Labour. For Roger Stott, the quintessential Old Labour man with his love of brass bands and rugby league, coming from the mill town of Rochdale, where the pioneers had forged the co-operative movement, the "lasagne luvvies" and "chardonnay comrades" of New Labour were too much to bear.
In 1969, he married Irene Mills, and fathered two sons before the marriage was dissolved in 1982. The following year he married Gillian Pye with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Roger Stott MP: born 1943; died August, 1999