Dennis Skinner is unique, part parliamentary court jester, and part leftwing crusader. Familiar throughout the nation and loathed and liked with equal passion within Westminster, his great days may now be over.
Although warmly welcomed back in 2000 after his cancer specialist gave him the all clear, MPs have only seen a muted version of Mr Skinner since his return. Once Labour's leftwing Cromwell, the unyielding, incorruptible, puritanical, abrasively proletarian conscience of the hard left, he has recently seemed to pull his punches.
Even before his illness, Tony Blair's affectionate tolerance of this NEC member made him seem less a menace, more a mascot, who, in Ken Livingstone's words, was "allowed to do terrible things on the best carpet." He could hardly kick with conviction the shins of a Labour government starting to help ex-miners, even if he was the last known defender of Arthur Scargill.
Despite his age, Mr Skinner can still sometimes display the brilliant timing of his humorous, ego deflating interjections of old, but he would be the first to admit that attacking divided Tories since the mid-1990s has been much like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, he remains fiercely class conscious, enraged when it is suggested that he might live in middle class Chelsea with his American girlfriend. She was his researcher until he separated from his wife Mary in 1989.
The end of his marriage also put him at odds with his two brothers, once extolled by him as the "Clay Cross martyrs" - Clay Cross being the pit village of his Derbyshire youth.
Mr Skinner was the third of nine children of the miner Edward Skinner, who was sacked after the 1926 general strike, and Mr Skinner's thin skin can be attributed to the failure of his father ever to give him the praise he craved. As a star student, he entered Tupton grammar school at 10 and is remembered for trying to become a heel-and-toe champion and singing Cole Porter lyrics in local workingmen's clubs.
At 17 he followed his father into the mines, first at Parkhouse colliery, near Clay Cross, then at Glapwell colliery, near Chesterfield. By 1966, at 34, he was president of the Derbyshire miners. Selected to succeed another miner, Harold Neal, he became the MP for Bolsover with a majority of more than 20,000 in 1970.
From the beginning he was the anthracite of the hard left, backing any other leftwing faction when not defending his own miners' caste. He opposed all punishment of left rebellions or expulsions, no matter how disruptive. Early in his career he earned his famous tag, Beast of Bolsover, from MP actor Andrew Faulds, after he accused Mr Faulds of lobbying for the Arabs. Mr Skinner's dislike of oil from the Middle East came from the fact that it competed with his coal.
The height of his political career was in the 1980s - he was a member of Labour's NEC from 1988 and the terror of the Tory benches. But Labour MPs sometimes resented his showmanlike parliamentary interventions, such as his suggestion to Margaret Thatcher on the day she resigned that she become the head of the centralised European bank.
He was notably embarrassed on his 65th birthday shortly before the 1997 general election when John Major congratulated him on becoming a pensioner. Surprisingly, he failed to regain his NEC position in 1998, but was returned again in 1999 despite poor health. Mr Skinner remains determined to run again at the next election despite mutterings about his age.
In battling for lefty and miners' causes, Mr Skinner learned an important lesson: "I realised that you could get into trouble with a dull speech. But if you can keep them laughing, you can get away with murder." He has done that for more than 30 years in his grumpy Derbyshire growl.