The death of Merlyn Rees at the age of 85 recalls another death. For Rees, home secretary from 1976 to 1979 in James Callaghan's Labour administration, entered parliament at the Leeds South byelection triggered when the then Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, died in January 1963.
Rees was in some ways an unlucky politician, obliged to bat on several awful pitches and sustaining contusions from dangerous bowling. He had, even more than other Northern Ireland ministers, a wretched time in that grim place between 1974 and 1976, being hit full on by the extreme virulence of the protestant workers' strike during his time as secretary of state for Northern Ireland.
But he kept going on with a sort of bowed and battered courage into the internal horrors of Labour's first nightmare years in opposition after 1979. Rees belonged in the Labour mainstream, a conventional politician perhaps but a kindly, very generally liked one whose ruminative, reasonable style deflected criticism.
He was also the sort of sticker through thick - and after 1983 with Mrs Thatcher's second Conservative victory a great deal of thin - whom Labour in its travails could rely upon for absolute loyalty, continuity and sense.
Merlyn Rees, though university educated, a college lecturer in economics and adoptive to north London, was unostentatiously proud of his roots - unending generations of Welsh miners. He even had, as he said, a great-great grandmother who was a miner, opportunities being then very equal.
For a man firmly on the moderate wing of his party and remote from the orating and outraged style, he had working-class credentials of a kind to embarrass New Labour. His father, Levi Rees, gassed in the first world war, was unable to find work after the general strike and moved to England.
Merlyn, born in Cilfynydd near Pontypridd in 1920, progressed via Welsh and Middlesex elementary schools to Harrow Weald Grammar School, Goldsmiths and the London School of Economics.
He had a brave, interesting war, from 1941, much of it in southern Italy as an RAF Spitfire pilot flying with, and greatly admiring, Group Captain WGG Duncan-Smith - the former Conservative leader's father - whose obituary Rees wrote for this newspaper (December 30 1996).
He left as a squadron leader, having endeavoured, as he would say, to help Major Denis Healey liberate the country. From 1949 to 1960 he taught economics and history at Harrow Weald school, and economics at Luton Collge of Technology from 1962 to 1963.
Politically, this unscheming man made key chance friendships which served him exceptionally well. He had the regard of Morgan Phillips, the dominating personality of the Labour apparatus, the man who made the famous remark about Labour's debt to Methodism being greater than to Marx (Rees was raised a Baptist).
As general secretary Phillips ran the Labour party from its Transport House headquarters and was never satisfactorily replaced.
When Gaitskell died at the high point of his public standing, Phillips had only recently invited Rees to organise the London Festival of Labour, which he did from 1960 to 1962.
Rees had already been the candidate at Harrow East in 1955, 1959 and at the 1959 byelection precipitated by the tragic Ian Harvey case - a gifted Conservative MP ruined by a trivial homosexual charge - so he had enough national profile to inherit the leader's Yorkshire constituency.
The other vital friendship was with James Callaghan who though only a couple of years older than Rees, had entered Parliament in 1946, served as a junior minister and had steadily risen in opposition.
Callaghan's politics, rightwing but outside the elect, high-thinking Gaitskellite group, loyalist but certainly ambitious too, was a good strand to join. Rising in Callaghan's slipstream, with the election of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964 Rees became parliamentary private secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer.
He progressed to junior office as first, army (1965-66), then RAF minister (1966-68) under Denis Healey's new dispensation at defence which had ended the splendid and expensive independence of the service ministries.
Shared Italian war experience may have saved him from the fate of Healey's juniors as described by Frank Cooper, the permanent under secretary. "Denis was always puzzled by junior ministers. He wasn't quite sure what they were for."
Rees finished the first Wilson administration from 1968 to 1970 back with Callaghan at the Home Office. Shrewdly, he declined a promotional chalice rimmed with deadly nightshade. It was suggested that he might like to take up the general secretaryship of the party.
Always loyal and willing to do heavy duty tasks, Rees drew the line at this. As Home Office junior had at one and the same time, to respond strenuously to Enoch Powell's 1968 "River Tiber" speech and defend Callaghan's hard-edged realism over immigration law, embodied in the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1968.
It was a long way from Hugh Gaitskell's high but impossible line of "the open door". But it could hardly have been otherwise and subsequent relative cohesion and peace owe much to the pragmatism of that hour.
Rees always had throughout his career a certain bipartisan standing. He was a through-and-through Labour loyalist, but he could work with Conservatives. In due course he would do so on the 1983 Franks report into the Falklands war and immediately in 1971, he served on the commission of enquiry into the official secrets act.
The big career breakthrough came in the traditional Labour way with election in 1972 to the shadow cabinet and designation as spokesman on Northern Ireland from 1972 to 1974.
With Labour's return to office in that latter year he succeeded to the office itself and the apostolic succession of misery afforded ministers trying to cope with Ulster's rage.
Rees's time in the province began with the humiliation of the protestant workers strike. This aimed at, and achieved, destruction of the executive recently established in Northern Ireland. Rees was blamed for immobility, but any ministers trapped between trying to do greater justice to the Catholic nationalist population and the paranoid certainty of working class Ulster protestantism that any innovation was betrayal, would have met a similar debacle.
Even so it was Rees who ended detention without trial, and special status for political prisoners, two mutually supporting iniquities. He also attempted, as others would later under other names, to create a convention for Ulster, a governmental instrument for a territory governed in a unique fashion - semi-colonialism subject to majority tribe veto.
It failed, as such honorable rational projects have tended to fail given the irreconcilability of tribes hating each other, despising London and being, in the full, soaraway sense of that word, irresponsible.
Rees had inherited from the Ted Heath Conservative government and its (first ever) Northern Ireland scretary William Whitelaw the concept of power-sharing. It was a rational, civilising objective offered by Conservative and Labour ministries with earnest caution.
It was an abstract concept too far for mini-nations habituated in their trench lines. His successor, Roy Mason, essentially played the Orange card defensively, embraced the Protestant status quo as dominant community and became the darling of the Daily Telegraph.
"Nothing," as King Lear says, "will come of nothing." Rees attempted to be an innovating liberal and failed. Mason refused to attempt anything. Rees had, however, a "get out of jail" card.
Harold Wilson announced his sudden, but planned resignation and at Westminster Rees acted as Jim Callaghan's campaign manager. With Callaghan's victory and Roy Jenkins' withdrawal only a few months later from British politics, the Northern Ireland secretary became home secretary in 1976 and served in that great office of state until the fall of the Labour government in 1979. Probably his achievement there was to set up the commission on criminal procedure. Not to be nice about it, too many dishonest policemen had for too long been faking evidence, lying in court, using "verbals" to obtain false convictions and generally disgracing justice.
The practice came under scrutiny after the outrageous Maxwell Confait case, an outstanding police scandal in a long list. The commission was the foundation for modern recorded interviews and the general filtering and surveillance of police prosecution and conduct.
A key factor here was the exceptionally good and personally friendly relations between Rees and his Conservative opposite number, Willie Whitelaw. They had both endured the nails and unreason of Ulster. Both were low on partisanship, both decent, civilised ministers.
On top of which, Margaret Thatcher kept blessedly out of Home Office matters in her early years. Accordingly, Rees-Whitelaw was a continuum of moderate reformism and decent values. No prison hulks were purchased by either man.
But Rees's excessive deference to the established order, in this case, the writ of the American government, led him into the Agee-Hosenball case. This involved the deportation of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned disobliger and hostile publicist of that agency, and his associate, later a long-standing Sunday Times correspondent. It was an unjustifiable accession to a request wrong in itself.
Another attempt to reform the police would fail. Operation Countryman, aimed at the known about but not properly nailed corruption of the Metropolitan Police, was put into the hands of clean policemen from the Dorset force.
The Met with the insolence of an entrenched mafia, drew itself into a protective ring and treated the honest enquirers as contemptible hicks whom they felt no obligation to answer.
Rees might have, should have let blood, but the cleansing of a force which Thatcher would see as wonderful, is a process not fully accomplished today.
And his and Whitelaw's administration of the Home Office did create a process of internal reform and the advancement of unrecognisably superior senior officers which has had gradual effect. Rees inherited a structure in which bawling uncomprehending heavies like "Hammer" McNee could actually become commissioner.
The greatest strengths of Rees as a politician were perhaps seen after he and Labour left office. The period 1979-81 were the darkest in Labour's history. The outbursts of feral leftism at party conference, the restructuring of the election process into an instrument to create left-domination, the defeat of Denis Healey by Michael Foot for the leadership, then the destructive campaign for the deputy leadership by Tony Benn, all culminated in the break-out from the party by 30 sitting MPs and other notables and the creation of the Social Democratic party.
Rees was, with Denis Healey, not merely one who stayed and persuaded others to stay at a time of panic and hysteria. Like Healey, he worked disinterestedly for the party when his own career was effectively over and when the party was at the bottom of a hole it didn't know the way out of.
They were good party men, loyalists rather like AE Housman's "army of mercenaries". Rees took knocks. He was shifted to the energy portfolio (1980-83), lost support in shadow cabinet elections and was blamed for his role in the Franks Report, which blandly cleared government conduct before the Falklands war.
Finally bowing out of front bench politics in 1983, he looked from the gallery where I watched him, like a happy man, released from a great yoke. There was in fact something of a Merlyn renaissance.
His style lightened, he used his accumulated ministerial knowledge to enrich argument. He indulged in little bursts of backbench criticism - notably of Leon Brittan's partisanship at the Home Office during the miners' strike, an occasion where Rees's innate moderation and ancestral loyalties conflicted.
He sought an official enquiry into the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser the Belgrano, abstained over renewal of the anti-terrorist legislation and attacked the telephone tapping of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activists.
But Rees made most impression from the backbenches with a magnificent speech of impassioned commitment to the prosecution of surviving suspects of Nazi crimes.
For him with no Jewish or central European connections, the moral right of wickedness not being watered down by time was categorical.
As a backbench speaker he developed a humorous shrugging unofficial style, genuinely doing the job of elder statesman but without the least tug on a lapel or sentence beginning "When I was...".
Retiring at the 1992 election to a house above Tintern Abbey, Rees commuted to London and did duty in the Lords, a steady attender chipping unself-importantly in and living to see Labour, which he had joined in 1939, back in office.
A working peer as he had been a working MP, he continued to share rough and smooth with his wife since 1949. Coolleen (Clevely) - Irish-extracted, warm, sympathetic, fully involved in Leeds and Westminster and one of the best-liked of all political wives. They have three sons.
Not an inspirational or dominant figure, Rees was perfectly representative of the sensible, conscienced, stable people by whom government is sustained.
Lord Merlyn-Rees, Merlyn Merlyn-Rees, politician, born December 18, 1920; died January 5 2006