DAVID WHITE pays tribute to the former Croydon Labour MP, David Winnick, who has died, aged 92
Veteran MP: David Winnick was elected in Croydon in 1966 and served another constituency for 38 years
David Winnick, who has died this week, aged 92, served as a Croydon Labour MP in the 1960s.
The very first election count I attended was at Croydon Town Hall on the occasion of the 1966 General Election. I met David Winnick there for the first time. He was the Labour candidate for Croydon South, basically the constituency which was later called Croydon Central.
The constituency had been represented by Sir Richard Thompson, a Tory businessman and baronet. Thompson was standing for re-election. On the first count Thompson was declared to be the winner by a slender margin of 100 votes or so. Winnick and his agent, Syed Shah, asked for a recount.
Shah owned a newsagents on Croydon High Street and had already established a reputation as an efficient Labour organiser. On the second count, Shah spotted a bundle of 100 votes for Winnick which had mistakenly been put in the pile for Thompson.
So the eventual outcome was a win for Winnick by 81 votes and a Labour gain in Harold Wilson’s landslide victory. Conservatives Bernard Wetherill (Croydon North East) and Fred Harris (Croydon North West) were the other Croydon MPs elected that day, almost exactly 60 years ago.
Nowadays it’s not unusual to have Labour MPs in Croydon. But back in the 1960s, Croydon was very much a Tory town. So it was a big deal when David Winnick won. There had only once before been a Labour MP in the borough – David Rees-Williams in the Attlee landslide of 1945.
As MP for Croydon South, Winnick was regarded as on the left of the party. This was in part because he opposed the Vietnam War. I remember once when I was canvassing for him, an elderly lady said, “I can’t vote for him, he’s virtually a Communist.”
In fact, I wouldn’t say David was particularly left-wing. Later in life he supported Tony Blair’s Iraq War. When in the 1960s I occasionally discussed with him the views of the Labour Party Young Socialists, which were somewhat to the left of Harold Wilson’s government, he stood closely behind Wilson.
In 1970, David Winnick lost his parliamentary seat in Croydon. He didn’t stand in the next General Election in February 1974 but returned as candidate in the election of October 1974. He lost on that occasion by just 164 votes to the Conservative, John Moore. Moore went on to become a leading figure in Margaret Thatcher’s government. It’s interesting to speculate whether Winnick might have won the October election if he had also stood in the February one.
Parliamentarian: David Winnick was a dedicated back-bench MP throughout his career
I would say that David was generally popular in progressive circles in Croydon while he was MP here, though he never lived in the borough.
Winnick went on to be elected for Walsall North in 1979, a seat which he held for no less than 38 years.
The Guardian’s obituary of Winnick said, “He will be best remembered for an act of singular courage when he succeeded in defeating the plans of the Blair government in its Iraq War era attempt to hold terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge.”
It explains that Winnick “had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but took his stand on civil liberties grounds and, much to the aggravation of ministers, led the charge against the prolonged detention proposal in the Commons in 2005 – and then in the home affairs committee against a further attempt by the subsequent Brown administration to hold suspects for 42 days.
“Winnick’s successful amendment limited the term to 28 days; the vote against the terror bill was the first defeat for the Labour government, nine years after taking power.”
By all accounts, David was a “dedicated” MP when he represented the Walsall seat.
He was chosen to fight the Walsall seat in a byelection in 1976 following the resignation of John Stonehouse, the Labour minister who tried to fake his own death by disappearing from a beach in Miami, leaving his clothes behind in a neat pile, after getting into financial difficulties (Stonehouse’s scam unravelled when he was discovered living in Australia a month later).
From such an unpromising starting point, Winnick was unable to retain the seat for Labour, but he won it back in 1979 and held it through eight subsequent elections.
One of the occasions he came to national prominence was when he headed the campaign to replace Michael Martin as Commons Speaker.
David Winnick, born June 26 1933, died March 25, 2026. He was married to Bengi Rona from 1968 to 1983. He is survived by a son.
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