Andrew McIntosh RIP

I was sorry to hear the news that Andrew McIntosh has died after a long illness with cancer.

Andrew is most famous for being the moderate Labour leader at the GLC elections in 1980, who was victim of the Ken Livingstone coup immediately after the results. Excitable prophecies that the left would use the same method to ditch Tony Blair immediately after the 1997 election proved wide of the mark.

The Guardian and Telegraph obituaries and tributes capture much his broader contribution.

Andrew was Chair of the Fabians in 1985-86, and continued to take a close interest in the Society, including as a trustee of the Dartmouth Street Trust charitable trust, which supported a number of major Fabian research projects, particularly exploring issues of social inequality and life chances.

I last spoke to him at the end of July, when he had just had the news from his doctors that further treatment was no longer possible. He wanted help to let friends and colleagues in the Fabian Society know that he was nearing death which, as a staunch humanist, he faced with remarkable stoicism. Andrew was always a Labour moderate, but felt fired up by the Coalition's budget, and was particularly keen to see the Fabian Society research its impact on inequality.