Where are they now? Andrew Dismore
Andrew Dismore (Illustration: Tracy Worrall)
3 min read
With a grandfather, father and brother who all served as local councillors, Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP for Hendon from 1997 to 2010, says that politics was a constant presence in his life.
After being elected to Westminster city council in 1982, Dismore went on to become leader of the Labour Group in 1990. He was then selected to fight Hendon – which had not had a Labour MP since 1945 – and won.
Did his political background stand him in good stead for his first few weeks in Westminster?
“Having been a councillor for 15 years, you’ve got to have a pretty good idea of how things work,” he says, “but one thing you’re not prepared for is the sheer volume of what hits you when you get elected.”
Upon reaching Parliament, Dismore was immediately faced with a hospital closure in his constituency, which he says remained one of the biggest challenges in his time as an MP.
“We had inherited a closed hospital, which couldn’t be reopened as they had already started demolishing it,” he says. “My campaign was to try to get the services restored and a new hospital built.”
Dismore also succeeded in introducing a Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. “One of the things I did very early on was go on a trip with the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, and that makes you think about what you can do to try to stop it happening again,” he says. “I then started working in Parliament to bring about Holocaust Memorial Day. The prime minister [at the time] thought it was a good idea, and once that door was unlocked, it happened.”
Having been “very highly rated” as a solicitor before being elected, Dismore says he wanted to enjoy his time as an MP without stretching himself to become a minister: “I thought, well, this is now a second career for me. I’m going to enjoy it and I’m not going to bust a gut to get to the top.”
However, he enjoyed working on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, where he tried to reframe human rights to include ordinary people more frequently. “Human rights, by then, had a bad name as being all about prisoners and asylum seekers,” he says. “I wanted to show the way that human rights principles could be used to improve people’s lives across the board.”
Altogether, we found 200 Labour voters who, one way or another, had been denied the right to vote
In 2010, Dismore lost his seat in the general election by 106 votes. The loss was particularly difficult because, he says, mistakes had been made in the voting process. “The council had administered the election very badly with huge queues at polling stations and postal votes turning up at people’s homes the day after the election – too late to vote,” he says.
“Altogether, we found 200 Labour voters who, one way or another, had been denied the right to vote.”
Dismore says Hendon was the only constituency where issues with the staging of the vote affected the result of the election but, faced with extortionate lawyer’s fees to contest it, he was unable to act. “[It feels] pretty bad,” he says, “when the person who takes over from you does not do a very good job, in my estimation.”
Following his departure from Westminster, Dismore was elected to the London Assembly, where he was able to pursue his interest in the fire service by representing injured workers and their unions. Then, after 40 years in politics, Dismore decided to step away, and now works as a part-time tribunal judge.
“I say the important thing is recognising… [whether] people [are] asking ‘why are you going?’, not ‘when are you going?’” he says. “That’s the important question.”
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