Man of justice and fairness (From The Northern Echo)

Man of justice and fairness

10:47am Tuesday 16th March 2010 in

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The Northern Echo’s Political Editor, Chris Lloyd, discusses Ashok Kumar’s enthusiasm for science, his passion for the region and his sense of fairness and loyalty.

THREE weeks before the 1997 General Election, in a stuffy office above a caravan showroom on the edge of Darlington, I interviewed John Major. He was the old-fashioned Conservative Prime Minister about to be swept away by the New Labour landslide.

Thirty miles away, Ashok Kumar was campaigning to regain the coastal seat he had held for five months in 1991. He was one of those Labour candidates who would be swept into government by Tony Blair’s landslide.

The interview was only one of millions of articles that appeared during that election in countless thousands of publications, but something in it caught the eye of Dr Kumar.

After the landslide, Mr Major resigned as Tory leader. As a humble backbench MP, he was allocated an office in the same corridor as Dr Kumar. Although the two politicians were unacquainted, Dr Kumar took the article to Mr Major. Out of kindness, he wanted him to know that the whole country did not cruelly regard him as a grey man who tucked his vest into his pants.

They shared a cup of tea discussing the article’s merits and the nature of the landslide.

A couple of years later, Dr Kumar explained: “You captured the humanity of the man, and you showed him respect.”

The tributes yesterday had these same themes running through them: Dr Kumar showed that great courtesy and sensitivity to everyone.

In these terribly sad circumstances, it is perhaps possible to turn the tables on Dr Kumar and see what we can learn of him from the 24 articles he wrote for this paper over the past decade.

One of the earliest, in 2001, concerned the planned closure of Corus’ research and development site on Teesside, where he had been employed for 14 years as a scientist – it was this that brought him to the Tees Valley from the Midlands, where he had grown up.

He deplored the closure, writing: “My Government is trying to interest young people in taking up scientific and engineering careers, but decisions like the closure of the technology centre make it far more difficult for local youngsters to stay and work in the area where they have family roots.

“It doesn’t have to be like this. Our industrial expertise was founded on scientific inquisitiveness and investigation.”

HE was a passionate advocate of science.

Only last year, he called for a bank holiday on February 12, the birthday of his hero Charles Darwin.

“Winston Churchill is often described as the greatest-ever Briton but, while I consider him to be our greatest politician, Darwin’s contribution to the world is such that he deserves to be remembered as Britain’s most influential son,” he wrote.

Most importantly, he hoped the celebration of Darwin Day would inspire “the next groundbreaking British scientist who could forever change our understanding of the world in the same way as Darwin”.

To Dr Kumar, science went hand-in-hand with education. He had left school at 15 in Derby with two O-levels and found himself unemployable.

At 18, he went back to college, then to university and wound up as a research fellow at Imperial College, London, studying the fluid flow of aircraft wings.

“I am immensely proud to be an engineer,”

he wrote. “Engineering permeates every aspect of our daily life. This must be reflected in the national curriculum.”

But he was worried about other aspects of education. “I remain unconvinced that faith schools have any intrinsic value which outweighs the inevitable segregation they cause,”

he wrote.

His opposition to faith schools – Mr Blair’s favourite policy – was surprising because he prided himself on being a Blairite. He prized loyalty highly.

Yet he went against his party if he felt it was wrong. Last year, he wrote of why he would resign as a Parliamentary Private Secretary if Lord Mandelson pushed ahead with part-privatisation of the Post Office.

He most notably rebelled over Operation Lancet, the five-year, multi-million pound investigation into Ray Mallon and Cleveland Police.

Practically the entire Labour establishment on Teesside sided against Mr Mallon. Dr Kumar was alone in giving voice to the view that something was not right about the apparent witch-hunt against “Robocop”.

Generally, though, Dr Kumar was resolutely loyal, so his call on this very page on March 28, 2006, for Mr Blair to step down stirred national interest.

“If Mr Blair is concerned with securing a lasting and memorable legacy for Britain, then I can think of no better way than to allow a smooth and rapid succession for Mr Brown,”

he wrote, choosing his words with care so as not to offend Mr Blair but to get his message across.

So great was the interest that he was summoned in front of BBC2’s Newsnight to define himself – what precisely did this loyalist mean by those two hand-picked words, “smooth and rapid”?

It would be wrong to portray Dr Kumar as a saint. He was probably too sensitive and possibly too expensive. In 2005, he was the third most costly MP in the country, partly because of his postage costs. He was so worried about his seat’s traditional marginal status, he was continually on election-footing, even though his majority reached more than 10,000.

When receipts were released last year, they showed that he had claimed for mirrors above his bath to be re-fixed, and that he was allowing a friend to live rent-free in one London flat while he claimed expenses on a second.

However, anyone who heard him agonise over wars in Afghanistan or Iraq could not doubt his integrity.

He was born in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1956, and came to this country when he was two. In 1991, he became the first Asian-born politician to win a by-election when he took the unpronounceable Langbaurgh. In 1997, when he won the clumsily re-named Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, he became one of only 12 non-white Labour MPs.

Therefore, war in Asia had a different perspective for him.

Immediately after 9/11 in 2001, he wrote: “Britain is a liberal, multi-cultural nation in every sense. It is that very freedom that is under attack from bin Laden.

“Not to fight means surrendering the stage to those who would wish to bring the world into a new dark age, a dark age illuminated only by the twisted hatreds and phobias of a sectarian elite.”

Eighteen months later, war in Iraq was more difficult. He spent weeks in painful argument with himself over whether he should support his leader, Mr Blair.

“After much soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that the Government’s course of action is the right one,” he wrote.

“I have been pulled in all directions by the war, as have many others.”

It was not, he said, a war against the Iraqi people or against Muslims. “It is a war, purely and simply, against terrorism, dictatorship and murder,” he wrote.

It was, he said, about justice and fairness, principles this most courteous of Labour men applied even to former Tory leaders.