Dr Henry Drucker

DURING the two decades he spent teaching at Edinburgh University, Henry Matthew Drucker left an indelible mark on the political life of Scotland.

Henry was, by common consent, a compelling and inspirational politics lecturer and tutor. So much so that, on completing his last lecture in 1986, he was accorded a standing ovation by his students and showered with flowers as he made his farewells.

He was also an academic entrepreneur, impatient with the status quo, instrumental in driving forward departmental initiatives such as the Unit for the Study of Government in Scotland and the Scottish

Government Yearbook. That strand in Henry's character resurfaced, to powerful effect, in the very different world of philanthropy and fund-raising, when he moved to Oxford University as its first director of development in 1987.

Throughout the 1970s, as Scotland wrestled with its constitutional future and the ruling Labour Party was hit by a latter-day political disruption, Dr Henry Drucker was indisputably the commentator of choice on television, radio, and in the newspapers.

An instinctive populariser, sorely missed in today's more cynical and apathetic climate, in his years in Edinburgh he produced a steady stream of books, ranging from Our Changing Scotland, co-edited with Michael Clarke (1977), through Breakaway, his account of the creation of the Scottish Labour Party (1978) to The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution, co-authored with the future chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, in 1980.

Perhaps his finest work, drawing on his own roots in philosophy rather than political science, is Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, published in 1979. His prediction that Britain was heading for a multi-party future may have proved wide of the mark, but the warning with which he closed that book resonates still.

''The greatest losers from these changes,'' he wrote,

''will be Labour's own doctrinaires, for their role will have been reduced almost to insignificance.''

Henry Drucker came to Scotland and its politics as an outsider. He grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, where his

parents ran a grocery store. He gained his bachelor's degree (in philosophy) from Allegheny College, Pennsylvania.

He came to Britain, in 1964, to complete his doctorate (in political philosophy) under Maurice Cranston at the London School of Economics. Henry's thesis formed the basis of his first book - Political Uses of Ideology - published

in 1974.

That time at the LSE started a lifelong love affair with London, but career opportunity brought the young American academic north, in 1967, to a lectureship in the politics department at Edinburgh. Even to close friends Henry cut a curious figure, with his trademark mutton-chop whiskers and sheepskin coat, and trousers that never quite managed to reach all the way down to his shoes. However, his enthusiasms were infectious, his confidences conspiratorial, his generosity freely given.

Henry Drucker saw no need to mask his own political allegiances. He joined the Labour Party almost as soon as he arrived in Edinburgh and was, for a period, chairman of the central Edinburgh constituency party. Many of his contemporaries in Edinburgh Labour politics were heading for Westminster, some for cabinet office.

He met and married, in 1975, a fellow American, Nancy Newman, a lecturer in Edinburgh's department of social administration. The following year he was promoted to senior lecturer. He was twice made head of department. In his final years in Edinburgh, Henry turned his publishing energies towards Developments in British Politics, now a standard textbook from Palgrave Macmillan in its sixth incarnation, having sold more than a million copies. Henry was general editor of versions one and two, which appeared in 1983 and 1986 respectively.

Henry Drucker made no secret of his ambition to follow in the lineage of James Cornford and John P Macintosh and succeed them to the politics chair in the city he now called home. His own political activism should not have been any barrier. After all, Macintosh was both Labour MP and Edinburgh politics professor for a brief spell in 1977/78.

But when Macintosh died suddenly in July 1978, Henry Drucker failed to realise his dream. Other chairs eluded him, too. Proof, if proof were needed, that great teachers, prolific popularisers of their subject, and restless entrepreneurs have long been regarded as far too subversive to good university order

to be rewarded with chairs.

Instead, Henry and Nancy Drucker left Edinburgh for a fresh start in Oxford, where he was chosen to head up the university's campaign to raise new funding from its worldwide alumni network. Over the next six years that Oxford campaign raised an astonishing total of (pounds) 341m, (pounds) 178m of it in new philanthropic gifts. I met him once, during that phase of his career, quite by chance in a Tokyo hotel lobby. He was in his element, proving another sceptical university establishment wrong.

In 1993 Henry Drucker started his own business, Oxford Philanthropic, to advise universities, arts organisations, charities, and other not-for-profit bodies on fund-raising strategies. He even took on the Labour Party as a client, but famously fell out with Lord Levy over the blind trust that funded Tony Blair's private office in opposition, Drucker called the arrangement ''evil'' and, having resigned as a party fund-raiser, said as much in evidence to the Neill Committee inquiry in 1998.

As a professional fund-raiser Henry Drucker restlessly pushed out the boundaries of that art. His seven-stage model for wooing a donor is now the standard technique in UK fund-raising. Recently he was putting flesh on the concept of venture philanthropy, where the donor relationship is redefined as more akin to a venture capitalist's relationship with the businesses in which they invest.

Henry had fought a long battle against cardiovascular disease. He had twice had open-heart surgery. Because of his failing health, the activities of Oxford Philanthropic were curtailed at the end of last year. This summer he suffered another cardiac arrest. He died while conducting negotiations with a potential new client, the housing charity Shelter, in London. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and his brother, Paul.

Dr Henry Matthew Drucker, philosopher, political scientist, and professional fund-raiser; born April 29, 1942, died October 30, 2002.