The tireless campaigner for disability rights never forgot his working-class roots, says his friend and fellow Labour peer
Jack Ashley was a widely admired MP and campaigner; his friend Lord Donoughue served as senior policy adviser to the Labour government of 1974-79.
I first met Jack Ashley about 50 years ago in a pub off the Tottenham Court Road through a mutual friend who sensed that we would get on. Jack was lively, nattily dressed and toughly good-looking, with penetrating eyes. He was interested in everything political and also loved sport, especially rugby league, horse racing and snooker (at which he regularly trounced friends at Labour party conferences). And he was very funny, with that wry Merseyside humour about the foibles of his political contemporaries and, not least, himself. Immediately evident above all were his gritty humour, his dedication and his determination to change things for the better in Britain.
We became friends for life, bound perhaps by some common childhood heritage, coming from the provincial working class (he was from Widnes), and its strong work ethic, with Irish blood and priests hovering, lifted by education out of poverty. It was remarkable how Jack went from leaving St Patrick's elementary school on his 14th birthday to doing heavy labour at a copper smelting furnace to then, after the war, achieving a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and going on to become the first working-class president of the Cambridge Union, in 1951. Star quality was there from the start.
Politically, he was always solidly Labour, pragmatic and loyal to his party leaders and to his own deep principles. Soon after he became MP for the safe Labour seat of Stoke-on-Trent South in 1966, he was struck stone deaf after an ear operation went wrong. At first, he was deeply depressed and told me he felt he couldn't continue his political career.
But, true to his character, he revived and in July 1975, he asked me (I was then working as senior policy adviser in Number 10 to his political hero Harold Wilson) to press the PM to help get him one of the new Palantype machines with a text screen that would enable him to participate in Commons proceedings. Wilson reported back that someone in the whips' office questioned "why Jack Ashley should be so privileged?" But Wilson persisted and ensured Jack got the machine that would transform his parliamentary life.
He saw the opportunity to use Parliament as a platform to speak for the whole community of the disabled; he soon became its unofficial leader. In 1972, he hit the headlines campaigning for compensation for the victims of the drug Thalidomide (along with Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times) and then widened his campaign to fight for women who suffered domestic violence and rape. He made such an impact that many thought he was minister in charge of disability, not a mere parliamentary secretary. But for his deafness he might have been.
After coming to join us in the Lords, Jack continued his campaigning and, even after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, debated vigorously from his wheelchair. He was a complete menace in it, actually – he seemed to come down the corridor at 50mph! At our last tea together in the Lords restaurant – and we both acknowledged that it was probably our last – I was again struck by how, despite his disabilities, despite all his successes, he was still the same Jack I had met in the pub long ago.
He was still completely genuine, with his deep integrity and values from the best of the old northern working class, values now sadly disappearing from our political landscape. Still the straight and no-nonsense Jack, never knowingly a victim, still a champion of the underprivileged, of all that is still decent in British society.
In a curious way, despite his impoverished background, despite all the blows that struck him, Jack actually was in some ways privileged. He was privileged to be so talented, to be so brave, to have come so far and to have done so much for so many. He was privileged to have such a beautiful and devoted wife, Pauline, with her Mona Lisa smile, Jack's ears to the outside world. Privileged to have three such lovely daughters, privileged to be such a wonderful man.
Of course, he himself worked so hard to earn those privileges, against all the odds. And some of us were privileged to know him and to love him. I thought the world of him.
Read the Guardian obituary here