Reliable and principled Labour MP who was invaluable as a parliamentary aide to Jack Straw
The most outstanding political characteristic of Colin Pickthall, the former MP for Lancashire West, who has died aged 81, was his loyalty to the Labour party he had joined as a teenager. The fact that this was coupled with a singular lack of personal ambition, itself a considerable rarity at Westminster, meant that he was regarded as highly reliable by his senior frontbench colleagues and respected by his fellow Labour backbenchers.
Despite this innate modesty, Pickthall was a man of unshakeable principle. A former schoolteacher, he opposed a plan in 2003 to introduce variable top-up student fees, allowing elite universities to charge more. "Even contemplating voting against a Labour government makes my knees knock," he wrote at the time.
As someone who had joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at university in 1963, Pickthall revealed, on announcing in 2004 his intention to stand down from parliament at the next election, that his decision the previous year to vote in favour of the Iraq war had been difficult for him and he criticised the "wrong intelligence" given to the House of Commons.
And as a patron of Humanists UK, he campaigned vigorously for animal rights and took on supporters of hare coursing before it was banned by the Hunting Act of 2004. He himself introduced an unsuccessful private member's bill in 1993 to ban what he termed the "last spectator blood sport". This was an issue of particular significance in his constituency which, since 1836, had been the setting of the sport's Waterloo Cup, the premier event in the coursing calendar, staged at Altcar, near Southport.
When Pickthall took his seat in the Commons in 1992 he drew attention in his maiden speech to previous Labour MPs for the area (known until 1983 as Ormskirk). These had included the former prime minister Harold Wilson and the maverick Robert Kilroy-Silk, the latter of whom had predicted on his first day at Westminster that he, too, would become prime minister. "Even if I had a scintilla of ambition to be prime minister I should never be daft enough to say so in front of a camera," Pickthall said; his speech was primarily concerned with the economy and housing problems of his area.
He was appointed in 1992 to the select committee on agriculture, where he remained until Labour took office in 1997, when he became parliamentary private secretary to Alun Michael in the Home Office team. The following year, Michael became Welsh secretary and Pickthall moved to take up the post of PPS to Jack Straw as home secretary and, after 2001, as foreign secretary. Pickthall was known as someone with the courage and confidence to "sock it" to Straw - in private - if he thought his minister was in the wrong on a particular issue. Being without side or pomposity and having an innate sense of what aspects of government policy would wash on the Labour backbenches made him invaluable as a parliamentary aide.
He remained with Straw until he left parliament in 2005, although he did resign for a period of months in 2000 to save Straw's embarrassment when a local party dispute over his 1997 election expenditure had led to a police investigation. Proceedings against two party officials were later thrown out when the case went to court in 2003, with the judge observing that it was improper for the courts to be used to pursue a longstanding grievance for political benefit.
Pickthall was born in Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, the son of a shipyard fitter, Frank, and his wife, Edith (nee Bonser). After Ulverston grammar school, he studied English literature and history at the University of Wales, Bangor, where he was a member of the Labour club. He disclosed in 2004 that, 40 years earlier, he had thrown an egg at the Conservative prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, but was ashamed to have mistakenly hit Lady Douglas-Home - not least because he thought at cricket he had a very good aim.
He took a master's degree at the University of Lancaster, studying the influence of socialism on 20th-century poetry, and from 1967 until 1970 was a teacher at Ruffwood comprehensive school, Kirby. He then moved to become senior lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill College of Higher Education (now Edge Hill University) in Ormskirk, becoming head of European studies from 1983 until his election as an MP.
In 1989, Pickthall won the Ormskirk seat for Labour on Lancashire county council and his party took control of the council with a single seat majority. After Westminster, he returned to live in the Lake District and became chairman of Ulverston Labour party. He was elected a member of Ulverston town council in 2012, leading it for five years from 2016.
He was a local historian and an enthusiastic fell walker, and was involved in a number of local environmental projects.
He is survived by his wife, Judy (nee Tranter), whom he married in 1973, and their two daughters, Alisoun and Jenny.