Tributes to Sir Tony Lloyd

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I feel humbled to be able to speak about Tony. He shadowed me when I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and it was always a pleasure and an honour to be able to have a private conversation with him. Yes, across the Dispatch Box we might have our disagreements, but behind the scenes I knew that we could have a proper, open, frank conversation. And I will say this about conversations with Tony: I learned something from every one of them. Every single time we spoke there was something new—there was a different perspective that Tony gave me, a different way of thinking about things, and he helped me enormously in the task we both had to try to restore devolved government to Northern Ireland when I was Secretary of State and he shadowed me.

After that time we remained close and would regularly chat about Northern Ireland and what was going on. We often talked about football as well, despite supporting teams from different sides of Manchester. We always had a great conversation and he was always generous and warm and witty.

I was very honoured that last month he was able to co-host with me an event that the British Group Inter-Parliamentary Union held to mark the 75th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights. Tony being Tony, he went around every stall; every possible person met Tony, and he was warm, he was kind, he was generous, and they knew that he was engaged and listening to them, which is a rare quality in the people we come across.

Last week the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) and I were both at a BGIPU conference and our admin official was Joe Perry, who is the newest BGIPU recruit. Joe worked in Tony’s office for many years and we could see just how much he was affected by the loss of Tony—the shock of it, but also the sense of loss of somebody so special to him, somebody who had given him so much. I am very pleased that the three of us were able to spend a little bit of time to toast Tony; we found somewhere he would have liked and it was nice to be able to raise a glass to a good friend and somebody we will all miss desperately.

[Several hon. Members rose—]