Frank Field: Reformer, thinker and maverick

Frank Field was a political loner.

A man of deep Christian faith, his long career was devoted to eradicating poverty and improving the lives of the poor.

But despite his undoubted policy expertise and dedication to the cause, he never found a comfortable place in the broad Labour church.

In 1997, Tony Blair appointed him to "think the unthinkable" about social security. Within a year, he had proved too much of a maverick and fallen out with the New Labour hierarchy.

Yet left-wingers never warmed to him, either, suspicious of his belief that poverty and personal conduct were linked.

When Field went on to advise David Cameron on social policy, support Brexit and criticise Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, he was forced out of the party.

What did you expect, muttered some within the Labour movement, from a man whose close personal friends included Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell?

Frank Ernest Field was born in north London on 16 July 1942.

His parents were working-class Conservatives who believed in the importance of moral character and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" - something, he later wrote, that gave him "a very good feel for where the Labour vote really is".

At grammar school, Field joined the Young Conservatives. In 1960, he was "shoe-horned" out for distributing leaflets against apartheid in South Africa.

A few weeks later, Harold Macmillan made his "Wind of Change" speech and attitudes within the party began to change. For Field, it was a lesson: political leadership matters.

Field studied economics at the University of Hull and spent time teaching further education in south London.

As director of the Child Poverty Action Group and the Low Pay Unit, Field spent more than a decade campaigning on behalf of the poorest in society, while seeking a seat in Parliament.

In 1979, he was elected to represent the safe Labour seat of Birkenhead - which he held for the next 40 years.

Field's election gave him the chance to meet a politician he had long admired - Enoch Powell.

A decade earlier, Powell had delivered his famous "Rivers of Blood" speech on immigration, which had cast him into the political wilderness.

But for Field, this had been "almost the only major political error" Powell had made. The old Tory warhorse and the young Labour MP bonded over discussions on Christian theology.

What Field admired was Powell's willingness to challenge his own party's leadership and orthodoxies - even if it effectively removed him from office.

It was the attraction of one single-minded political loner to another.

"It was impossible not to conclude," he later wrote, that for Powell "the struggle was about achieving long-term objectives, not simply a mastery of the flotsam and jetsam of current events".

In 1980, Michael Foot made Field an opposition spokesman on education, but he soon returned to the back benches.

He fought off left-wing attempts to deselect him in Birkenhead and was given another chance on the front benches by Neil Kinnock. It lasted barely a year.

Instead, Field became chairman of the Social Security Select Committee - where his talents as a campaigner and "one-man think tank" were deployed against Margaret Thatcher's government.

Yet on a personal basis, he got on famously with the Iron Lady. They had met when Field was lobbying her on behalf of his constituents, and he believed he knew how to deal with her.

"I always played a particular role," he explained. "She was Big Mama; I didn't really understand the world. I would explain what my problem was and Big Mama would deal with it for me."

At the end of her premiership, Field even had a role in persuading her to step down.

Aghast at the disloyalty of Conservative MPs who were in the process of removing her from No 10, he went to see her at Downing Street.

"I've come to tell you that you're finished," he said. "If you don't go out tonight, your side will tear you apart tomorrow." Two days later, Mrs Thatcher resigned.

Two days after Tony Blair's election, he called Field to offer him a post in the Department of Social Security - with a brief to "think the unthinkable".

Within a fortnight, according to Alastair Campbell's diaries, the PM had begun to worry that he had appointed "too much of a maverick".

It was also rapidly clear that Field did not get on with his immediate boss, the Social Security Secretary, Harriet Harman.

Field shared New Labour's belief in "work rather than welfare" but he disagreed with Chancellor Gordon Brown's use of tax credits as incentives.

The new welfare reform minister had never believed that the state should play a major role in the provision of benefits and that means-testing only encouraged corruption.

Instead, he thought continental-style social-insurance schemes and mutual societies were better options.

In Blair's diaries, the former prime minister recorded his regret at the appointment - describing Field's solutions as not so much "unthinkable" as "unfathomable".

In his memoirs, Campbell also suggested that Field's manner failed to win him allies. "There is something creepy about the way he puts his case," he wrote. "As if he is the only person with the wisdom."

In New Labour's first reshuffle, Field was offered a sideways move but preferred to leave the government.

In a blistering resignation speech in the House of Commons, he singled out Brown for a reluctance to commit to fundamental reform.

With little prospect of future ministerial office, Field felt even freer to criticise government policy.

He voted against foundation hospitals and opposed Gordon Brown's abolition of the 10p income-tax rate. This provoked the chancellor into a rage, prompting Field to describe him as "uncomfortable inside his own body".

When Blair stepped down as prime minister, Field supported moves to remove Brown from No 10 - believing that Labour could not win with the former chancellor as leader.

In 2008, the Daily Telegraph mischievously named Field among the 100 most influential right-wingers in Britain.

He became increasingly concerned about the number of Eastern Europeans arriving in Britain and, with Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Soames, formed an all-party group calling for "balanced migration".

Field worked to reduce the time limit on abortion and favoured the reintroduction of national service to combat unemployment - but attempts to get him to defect to the Tories never came to fruition.

In 2010, David Cameron invited him to act as a poverty tsar - contributing ideas to help the new coalition government combat deprivation.

Field took on the job with his customary energy. Within months, he had delivered a review on poverty and life chances that recommended targeting help to the under-fives.

Two years later - to his frustration - there was little sign of progress. "I am puzzled as to why the prime minister would be so anxious for me to do all this work when he has yet to show that he has read it," he complained.

After he had spent decades fighting off challenges from the Labour left in Birkenhead, it was a surprise when Field became one of 35 MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for party leader in 2015.

It was not as if he liked the man. In fact, Field predicted he would turn Labour into a "sect".

The decision, he explained, was taken to "broaden the debate" and (somehow) to help demonstrate Corbyn's lack of a plan to control the deficit.

After nearly 40 years as a Labour MP, Field had moved some distance from any semblance of party orthodoxy.

He was one of only a handful among his parliamentary party colleagues to campaign for Brexit, arguing that the EU favoured an economic model that promoted low wages.

And he offended the cherished beliefs of many in his party when he declared that governments should stop offering financial incentives as a path out of poverty.

When he criticised Corbyn for failing to tackle antisemitism, Field faced deselection in Birkenhead.

He fought the 2019 general election as an independent, although he continued to pay his Labour membership fee on a voluntary basis.

After the inevitable defeat, he joined the House of Lords as a crossbencher.

But on 22 October 2021, Baron Field of Birkenhead announced that he was terminally ill and had recently spent time in a hospice.

Too ill to attend a debate on assisted dying, he asked a colleague to read a message, in which he said he had changed his mind on the issue and now favoured people being allowed to end their own lives.

A loner in life as well as in politics, he once told the Guardian he had never had a partner - and that this had left him a little "incomplete".

He will be remembered for ploughing his own political furrow, regardless of the consequences for his career.