The House Article | “No one had as many friends”: Lord Mann pays tribute to Phil Woolas

Phil Woolas: 11 December 1959 – 14 March 2026 | Image by: PA Images / Alamy

4 min read14 min

Phil Woolas, who battled stoically for a year with brain cancer never stopped talking politics and political philosophy.

Having cut his teeth at Nelson and Colne Further Education College, he emerged as one of the great political campaigners.

His political heroes were the gasworkers union leader JR Clynes and John Smith, both Labour leaders and, like Phil, people whose sense of purpose and everyday reality made the GMB union their natural home. This was where Phil enjoyed his working life the most.

Phil was the one politician of his generation who preferred the company of journalists to his political peers. With a television background, he commanded respect among the media – but no one else built as many friendships, as opposed to contacts, as Phil. He understood what a good story was and he had a knack for how to deliver the pictures that made a journalist’s life so much easier. Phil was a teller, not a spinner, of stories.

Phil was also an exceptional raconteur. Once, he recalled, he was to be interviewed by a local Co-op Party while seeking their approval as a parliamentary nominee. He travelled back to his home region for the selection meeting.

The six candidates were sent up a wooden ladder into the attic of the Co-op secretary’s home, a terraced house. As the meeting started, the elderly Co-op host appeared at the top of the ladder with six mugs of hot drinks. “I’ve brought you a drink,” he chimed, “five teas and a coffee for the southerner.”

Phil would roar with laughter at the brutality of his initiation into parliamentary politics. He had already emerged as a Labour student leader, but the many current Labour MPs who have followed in his path know nothing about how much they owe him.

He fought to the very end because he had more to give

Phil understood that the mass of students in his era studied at FE, in technical colleges and in English polytechnics, and ran an entire campaign going out into uncharted territory to bring people in. It worked brilliantly and his strategising, with a tiny group of others, established the Labour Party hegemony in the student movement that was to last nearly three decades.

When I was elected as an MP after Phil, he came up to me in the Commons with one piece of wisdom. “Never forget that they treat people like you and me as the oiks in here.” And it wasn’t the mandarins or Commons staff he was talking about.

Phil was a good minister, and a brilliant MP. He saw his job as to empower those who needed someone to be on their side. He relished winning justice where it was being denied. While some scorn the minutiae of politics, he saw it as fundamental that he was there for his constituents and that he won for them. For Phil, it was the definition of leadership.

And he was at his happiest and most brilliant when given the freedom to campaign for the GMB union. Which other politician would have dared to entrust ex-coalminers from Worksop and Bolsover to march around London with Cedric the Pig to expose corporate guilt?

Clynes used to quote Shakespeare and Milton. Phil graduated in philosophy and had that rarity of a photographic memory. He painted pictures through his words, using philosophy as his guide. He didn’t see himself or anyone else as special or gifted. His essence was to reach out and draw in. For Phil, there were no ordinary people, no common people. Just a mass of extraordinary human beings, none more worthy than others. Like the rest of us, he had plenty of faults, but his Parliament and his party need his philosophy more than ever.

He fought to the very end because he had more to give. But he leaves us with his wisdom. More will miss you, my friend, than you could have ever dared imagine. 

Lord Mann is a Labour peer