I’VE several personal memories associated with Sir Tam Dalyell, baronet and Labour politician. I recall a Labour meeting in a council estate at which he called Margaret Thatcher “a bounder” and possibly also “a cad”.

From 1969 to 2005, he was Westminster correspondent for New Scientist and once phoned me collegiately about a science story when, despite getting zero marks in a multiple-choice chemistry exam, I was The Scotsman’s official correspondent for the Edinburgh Science Festival.

On another occasion, dispatched to doorstep him after Scotland voted for devolution, I found no-one in at The Binns, his ancestral stately home. I waited. 

The air turned icy. Down the nearby Firth of Forth, a swift, dark cloud started heading straight towards the house. Aware it had once been home to “Bluidy Tam Dalyell”, alleged ally of the Devil, I shivered. Sleet assailed me. Peacocks gathered round and started pecking at my trousers.

Nightmare: these were Markies trousers! Even their flexible returns policy would not have worn my saying: “I wish to return these breeks or trousers for they have been chewed by peacocks.”

How odd it was. Odd, too, for a toff to self-declare as Tam, normally a proletarian moniker. And he lived in a house called The Binns. If you or I said, “Hello, I’m Tam from The Binns, ken?”, we’d be judged menial.

A textbook maverick, Tam never held ministerial office. In 1978/79, he voted against his own government more than 100 times. Famously, he formulated the “West Lothian Question”, not “What is there to do there?” but “Should non-English MPs be able to vote upon English-only matters after devolution?”

He was also known for opposing all the wars going: Falklands, Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. He just couldn’t find one he liked. He also disapproved of emergencies such as Aden and crises such as Suez.

But, before he could disapprove of anything, Tam was born Thomas Loch in Edinburgh on August 9, 1932. He was raised in the aforementioned Binns, near Linlithgow, West Lothian, family home of his mother Eleanor (“Nora”) Wilkie-Dalyell.

Divide and ruler
His father, Lt Col Gordon Loch, was a soldier and colonial administrator, who’d served in India, the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, reportedly being present at the drawing of the line between Kuwait and Iraq. Perhaps he provided the ruler.

A more embarrassing relative was ancestral uncle James Loch, organiser of the Highland Clearances in Sutherland and elsewhere.

When Nora’s father – Tam’s maternal grandfather – died, she inherited the House of the Binns and accompanying Dalyell baronetcy, created in 1865. Unusually, this baronetcy could be continued through the female line. Gordon Loch took his wife’s surname in 1938. 

Our Thomas later inherited the baronetcy, but never used the title, which is a shame as Baron Tam sounds great.

An only child, Tam was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Harewood Hall prep school, and Eton Borstal. In 1939, he and other Edinburgh Academy infants were evacuated to Banffshire, where he had his appendix taken out by a vet.

At Eton, he fagged for future Tory minister Nicholas Ridley, while Jacob Rothschild, of the banking dynasty, later fagged for him. What a drag.

From 1950 to 1952, he did national service in Germany with the Royal Scots Greys, a regiment founded by the aforementioned “Bluidy Tam”. After failing officer training, he served in common or garden tank crews, and learned cynicism towards authority.

After Cambridge Yoonie, where he became chairman of the Conservative Association and vice-president of the union, he underwent teacher training in Edinburgh, then taught at Bo’ness Academy for three years. From 1961 to 1962, he taught on the ship school Dunera and wrote two books on the subject.

He joined Labour in 1956, following the Suez Crisis, a rumpus about a canal, and after standing unsuccessfully for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles in 1959, became an MP in 1962, defeating future SNP leader William Wolfe in a by-election for West Lothian (later retaining the seat as Linlithgow).

Taking a leak
In a promising start, he became Parliamentary Private Secretary – typical first step to a ministerial career – to Richard Crossman. However, he irritated the party establishment, not least after leaking information about biological weapons research at Porton Down.

In an early campaign, he asked 70 parliamentary questions about plans to build a military airstrip for the American base at Diego Garcia on the Aldabra coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, a sanctuary for the pink-footed booby. He also supported the Chagossians in their campaign to return to Diego Garcia after being expelled in 1968. Given the way they’ve been mucked about recently, he must be spinning in his capsule.

Tam campaigned vigorously against a Scottish Parliament and, when the Scottish Constitutional Convention produced its blueprint for devolution, he was the only Scottish Labour MP who didn’t sign it.

Across Britainshire, he was probably best known for pursuing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano with the loss of 323 lives during the Falklands war of 1982. He claimed the sinking had been ordered to scupper an impending peace deal.

Quoting Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, he described the Falklands conflict as “like two bald men fighting over a comb”, and Mrs Thatcher as “a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat, a crook and a disgrace to the Commons”. But apart from that …

He pursued the truth about the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, remaining unconvinced that Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was responsible and leading 17 adjournment debates on the atrocity.

After the 2001 General Election, as longest continuous serving MP, he became Father of the House, using his position to attack the invasion of Iraq by “fantasist Americans who want to control the world”.

Dodgy dossier
IN February 2003, he became the first Father of the H ordered to leave the Chamber, after questioning the government’s weapons “dossier”. The following month, he called Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair a “war criminal”.

He left the Commons in 2005 after 43 years as an MP, and died at the House of the Binns on January 26, 2017, at the age of 84, following a brief, undisclosed illness

Opponents called him Daft Tam but, behind the scruffy schoolteacher demeanour, lay an analytical brain and propensity for meticulous research. He stuck to his principles, regardless of personal consequence.

Labour leader James Callaghan might have called him a “chump” but, in stubbornly pursuing his chosen causes, he was thick-skinned. “I am a placid fellow,” he said, “who can laugh at bombastic insult.”

Rab is a freelance failure. His erotic journalistic memoir, The Naked And The Deadline, has been shortlisted for Least Shortlisted Book of the Year.