Tributes to Sir Tony Lloyd

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

I am not going to talk for long, because a lot of people knew Tony better than I did, but for the past four years I had the privilege of sharing a borough with him. I was his constituency neighbour, and a better friend and neighbour you could not ask for.

I was trying to think of anecdotes I could use to sum up how good a friend he was to me, but as has been alluded to, Tony’s sense of humour was very dry, which means I cannot repeat quite a few of those anecdotes in the Chamber. I will touch on a couple of incidents. The first was on 13 December, when a bleary-eyed, newly-elected MP for Heywood and Middleton reached out of the bed to grab their phone, which was ringing. It was Tony on the other end, who was clearly in a lot better condition than me. He said, “I think we should probably get together so I can get you up to speed.” This was a man who had just been through a tough election, and his first thought was getting his constituents’ needs dealt with, because there had been a transition on the other side of the borough. There is a lovely story that comes off the back of that, but it is not repeatable, so Members should find me in Strangers later. It was the mark of the man. If we are talking about the spirit of co-operativism that is Rochdale, Tony embodied that. That service never waned, even when his health did.

Most recently, I spoke with Tony one-on-one at the Holodomor commemorations. Tony did fantastic work with the Ukrainian community, especially in our borough. We were stood there in the freezing cold, and I was close enough to him at that point to ask how his treatment was going, and he started asking questions about how I was doing personally. He was so sanguine about it, and he just kept going. We were exchanging casework pretty much up to the last. This was a man who gave his all for something he really cared about. He was a parliamentarian’s parliamentarian, but he was also a fantastic local community representative.

We use a lot of superlatives in this job—we talk about things being awesome, big and grand—but a word that carries a lot more weight for me is “good”. Tony did not just do good; he was good.