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stammered something about ‘Well, it was quite difficult and I hope it’s OK, but it’s my first . . .’ etc. He picked it up and literally threw it at me. ‘I don’t want your ramblings, I don’t want your half-thoughts. I want your best work, work that you personally will be responsible for. Understand?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said humbly.
    ‘Then come back to me when you’ve done it.’ And he looked back down at his desk. ‘Go on, bugger off,’ he said, without even glancing at me.
    I returned with a different and better draft. This time, he told me to sit down and went through it, explaining the faults, questioning the arguments, above all drilling down to the answer. This drilling down is a process that fascinated me then, and fascinates me still.
    Most people with a tricky problem grasp that it is difficult, and they think about it. Maybe they read up on it, learn what others have said. They think about which of those solutions they find best. They choose one, or they sort of ‘um and ah’ about it and decide it’s really all too difficult.
    Faced with a legal problem, Derry was like the proverbial dog with a bone. He would gnaw at it, examine it, turn it over, bury it, dig it up, step back and stare at it. But he wouldn’t stop or reflect until he had got every bit of meat there was off it, had extracted its essence and mastered it. Above all, he never accepted the conventional analysis just because it was conventional. He went back to first principles, went behind and beneath the conventional, and occasionally – which was his genius – came back with analysis that looked at the problem in an entirely different way. Time and again, I recall a case that looked hopeless when seen conventionally, but was suddenly given hope by being analysed and looked at differently.
    He was completely uncompromising when it came to matters of the mind. Woe betide you if you turned up half prepared, casually interested, semi-engaged. If your grammar or spelling was wrong, you missed a typo, you wrote a sentence that was sloppy, there would be an eruption – and Derry in full flow had an armoury of verbal battery that was truly impressive. I was scared of him, admired him and adored him; but most of all, I was grateful to him.
    Derry was moderate Labour. He had never trifled with ultra-leftism, despised the false intellectual basis of it and regarded its adherents as dabblers. In this he was like Cherie. She too had been a major influence, not because she was my girlfriend and then wife, or even because we spent a long time discussing politics – we didn’t – but because her support for Labour was natural, sensible and born of real-life experience. She too had never had the slightest interest in intellectual or political posturing. Indeed, practically above all of my contemporaries, she stayed in the same spot politically from beginning to end. She watched as those to the left of her moved to the right of her; but, for herself, she remained in the same place. In that sense, she was like my constituency agent John Burton. Over time, I came to see practical, common-sense progressive politics as indispensable to effecting political change, as opposed to talking about it.
    For my first four or five years at the Bar, I was devoted to the law. The work was so time-consuming – I worked at least twelve hours a day – that I had little time for political activism, but I was in my local party, first in Earls Court, then Marylebone, then Hackney; I wrote occasional articles for the New Statesman , at that time a serious weekly magazine; and through Derry I met John Smith and other Labour figures.
    I can’t recall the date I first went to Parliament, but I recall the event and its impact on me vividly. Cherie’s dad, Tony Booth, was a long-time Labour supporter and, as a soap star and celebrity, knew a lot of Labour MPs. One was Tom Pendry. Tom was a very shrewd, capable guy, committed of course, but he had seen enough to make