FATHER OF THE HEARSE!
7/50
27th February 2017
British politician Sir Gerald Kaufman has died to give The Crowdsourced Deathlist another success. A leading student politician in the 1950s, Kaufman became a confidant of the future PM Harold Wilson, and later a sketch writer for TV satirical show That Was The Week That Was, before he won election as the Labour MP for Manchester Ardwick in 1970. Whilst a junior minister in the Callaghan government, he was better known for being a prominent member of Neil Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet throughout the 1980s, famously dubbing the 1983 Labour election manifesto "the longest suicide note in history". He later became a respected if caustic, and outspoken if sometimes controversial backbench MP, and in 2015 became the Father of the House of Commons. In 1962, Gerald Kaufman wrote the famous T3 sketch, The Silent Men of Westminster, and later went onto emulate it in the last year of his life. Kaufman was 86, having spent forty-seven years at Westminster, and making his debut on The Crowdsourced Deathlist.