Gerald Kaufman

After graduating from Oxford, where he was secretary of the Oxford University Labour Club while studying philosophy, politics and economics, he worked as a journalist at the Daily Mirror and the New Statesman and as a comedy writer at BBC Television. He served as an adviser to Harold Wilson during Wilson’s first tenure as Prime Minister before being elected to the House of Commons himself at the 1970 general election. He was chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee from 1992 to 2005 and was knighted in 2004. He became Father of the House in 2015 and served until his death in 2017. Kaufman wrote many articles and also books, including How to be a Minister (1980), an irreverent look at the difficulties faced by ministers trying to control the civil service and Meet Me in St Louis, a study of the 1944 Judy Garland film.