RIP Ronnie Campbell

Among many other good things, a famously hardworking constituency MP, a genuinely nice man, a champion of Julian Assange, a staunch Lexiteer, a pro-life Catholic, a man who astonished his Chinese hosts both by having six children and by having been elected to Parliament as a miner, and, with Dennis Canavan and the late Bob Parry, one of the three Labour MPs who flew to Baghdad in 1990 to secure the release of British hostages. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was demonstrating against Vladimir Putin when Tony Blair was taking him to the opera, so the Left was opposed to Saddam Hussein when the Major Government was arming him, before and after the Gulf War.