Don Concannon: Don Concannon, who has died aged 73, was one of the most popular men in the House of Commons as Labour MP for Mansfield (1966-89).
A big-hearted, poker-playing 6ft 4in sportsman, he ruffled nationalist feathers as a junior minister in Northern Ireland and then later as party spokesman, but attracted few enemies as a whip apart from the leadership of his own National Union of Mineworkers.
This Scargillite antipathy came about in the 1980s because of his loyalty to the Nottinghamshire miners, who continued working during the 1984-85 strike, and the smouldering confrontation ignited at the 1984 annual Labour conference when Concannon tried and failed to put the case for the Nottinghamshire miners.
He became the focus of hysterical attacks by NUM delegates led by Arthur Scargill and supported by Trotskyists, which pushed the Labour platform - unable to contain the near-riot - into asking Concannon to stand down.
This was hardly the treatment to be expected for a class-conscious Yorkshireman born into a miner's family in Rossington, near Doncaster. The son of a colliery under-manager, he attended local schools and Doncaster Technical College, where he took a City and Guilds course in civil engineering. But studying did not attract the strapping 17-year-old, who applied to join the army; he was accepted into the Coldstream Guards.
His first posting, to Palestine in 1947, was at a tense time, just before the United States persuaded the United Nations to turn most of the British mandate there into a Jewish state. The guardsman never became sympathetic to Zionism, having to patrol in fear of the right-wing Zionist terrorists, the Irgun, a perspective on terrorism that may well also have coloured his term in Northern Ireland.
His next posting, to the Libya of King Idris, was virtually a rest camp, where he discovered his talents as a sportsman, representing the Guards in basketball, football and cricket. He never came to love the Guards' spit-and-polish, not their class orientation. "I never wanted to be an officer myself," he said, "but it is obvious that Guards officers are selected for their background and money more than ability."
He was back in England in 1951 in time for Trooping the Colour; and he guarded Queen Elizabeth when she was a princess living in St James's Palace.
When his time was up in 1953 he went back to the heart of the mining community, as a miner in Rufford Colliery, Mansfield. There he began climbing the ladder in the NUM, and local politics. He also took an economics, politics and trade unionism course at Nottingham University's adult education department. In 1960 he became an NUM branch official. In 1962 he won a seat on Mansfield council. Most importantly, in 1964 he was elected workman's pit inspector for Rufford Colliery. Just before the 1966 election, he was selected as Labour candidate for Mansfield. He increased the Labour majority by 5,000.
At the Commons, he was welcomed by his former sergeant and sergeant-major transmuted into attendants, and his former tutors were in the gallery for his maiden speech, on the Reserve Forces Bill. He became an assistant whip for the East Midlands in 1968, and when Harold Wilson won the March 1974 general election, he was promoted first to pairing whip, then to under-secretary for Northern Ireland.
In 1976 the new prime minister, James Callaghan, promoted him to minister of state for Northern Ireland and later to privy councillor. With Northern Ireland secretary Roy Mason, he approved the £53 million package for the disastrous Delorean car factory.
When Labour lost power in 1979 he became deputy defence spokesman and in 1980 a moderately hardline spokesman on Northern Ireland. In 1981, just as voters were electing the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, Concannon proclaimed that a vote for Sands meant "approval for the perpetrators of the Mountbatten and Warrenpoint murders".
He was booed at the 1982 Labour conference when he defended plastic bullets in Northern Ireland as a "lesser evil" when used against Molotov cocktails.
During the 1984-85 miners' strike he condemned the intimidation of Nottinghamshire miners who were still working. He was attacked as a "copper's nark" by Scargillite MPs. The Scargillites retaliated further by infiltrating up to 100 people into his Mansfield constituency in the hope of deselecting him.
In the wake of the failed strike the Nottinghamshire Union of Democratic Miners broke away from the NUM. Concannon campaigned to persuade the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, to allow the affiliation of the NUDM to the Labour Party.
In October 1985 he was injured in a car accident, which left him with serious face, head and arm injuries. In the summer of 1986 he announced that he would not be standing in the next election and was furious when Alan Meale, then secretary of the left-wing Campaign group, won selection; Concannon refused to support him.
Concannon's last speech in the Commons was one of his saddest. In November 1986 he voted against his party's three-line whip and for the Conservatives' coal industry bill because it accorded Nottinghamshire's breakaway UDM equal rights with the NUM on miners' charitable bodies. To make the speech, the first since the car crash, he had to take tablets before he could rise.
He leaves his wife, Iris, two sons and two daughters.
Don (John Denis) Concannon: born May 16th, 1930; died December 14th, 2003