Frank Field

[maryportfuncity 9,983]

If he is that near the end he's a sizeable miss from the main list

[DCI Frank Burnside 2,654]

4 minutes ago, maryportfuncity said:

If he is that near the end he's a sizeable miss from the main list

Perhaps but I think Lawson and Skinner will make up for it. I think both will go this year

[Octopus of Odstock 1,848]

If he is near the end, then thank you @msc for your foresight all those years ago to disqualify Natalie Fornasier! 

 

 

 

[OneManJury 84]

Not dead yet? Get on with it!

[Windsor 2,142]

3 hours ago, YoungWillz said:

 

3 hours ago, Ulitzer95 said:

Received an update on Frank Field yesterday from a sitting MP. I’m told he’s very close to the end now.

Thanks

 

If true, I’m beginning to wish I had chosen even more Franks. 

[Summer in Transylvania 1,606]

Releases his memoir next month.

[Sir Creep 7,011]

He’s fine.  Y’all been duped again.  ‘See you in 2024’.

[maryportfuncity 9,983]

25 minutes ago, Summer in Transylvania said:

Releases his memoir next month.

 

 

Does he mention us?

[Gooseberry Crumble 5,201]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/29/frank-field-politics-poverty-belief-cancer-labour-interview

 

Frank Field gives an interview and says its strange taking so long to die.

[YoungWillz 18,926]

1 minute ago, Gooseberry Crumble said:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/29/frank-field-politics-poverty-belief-cancer-labour-interview

 

Frank Field gives an interview and says its strange taking so long to die.

At last Frank and I agree.

[gcreptile 10,210]

Sounds like a very slow and unaggressive cancer that was allowed to spread and become terminal out of sheer negligence.

At that speed, death could still be months away. The jaw problems could affect his eating though.

[The Old Crem 3,164]

Now we know it’s Prostate cancer it is less surprising he has survived so long - it’s common for even the end stages of that cancer to last a long time. 
 

Sounds like he could be around for a few months yet as he is still hoping to visit the House of Lords. 

[Joey Russ 7,118]

Kinda reminds me of Lee Kerslake, which still means he’s probably a goner this year 

[OneManJury 84]

Still waiting. Get on with it, I said!

[Sean 5,997]

I wonder if he will go downhill quickly now his book is completed and he has the relief he got to the end of it.Think he is hanging on to visit the house of Lords one last time.

 

 

[The Old Crem 3,164]

Just now, Sean said:

I wonder if he will go downhill quickly now his book is completed and he has the relief he got to the end of it.Think he is hanging on to visit the house of Lords one last time.

 

 

He probably finished the books months ago since it’s being published now. 

[Sean 5,997]

Good point.

 

 

[The Daredevil 1,076]

Swears oath to King, in wheelchair

[maryportfuncity 9,983]

On 29/01/2023 at 12:57, gcreptile said:

Sounds like a very slow and unaggressive cancer that was allowed to spread and become terminal out of sheer negligence.

At that speed, death could still be months away. The jaw problems could affect his eating though.

 

 

DDP Drop 40, mind - just so long as it's less than ELEVEN months both sides can declare a result!

[Sean 5,997]

32 minutes ago, maryportfuncity said:

 

 

DDP Drop 40, mind - just so long as it's less than ELEVEN months both sides can declare a result!

He sounds pretty bad although that is to be expected as the cancer as the cancer is is in his jaw.Reckon he will go well before Christmas.

 

I believe that is his friend Baroness Meacher pushing him.She was the one who announced he was under palliative care over 15 months ago.

[msc 17,708]

Tessa Jowell looked healthier in her last appearance. April tops imo.

[Sean 5,997]

Yeah we didn't get a good sight of him there bit he looked  gaunt and grey from what I could make out.

[YoungWillz 18,926]

Mail article excerpt from his memoir about the battles with the Hard Left: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11765211/FRANK-FIELD-battled-Labours-hard-Left-political-career-Momentum-forced-out.html

[gcreptile 10,210]

Times interview 4 days ago:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frank-field-interview-politics-poverty-and-belief-a-political-memoir-7zcp0n3pf

 

Unfortunately behind a paywall.

[Ulitzer95 10,919]

18 minutes ago, gcreptile said:

Times interview 4 days ago:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frank-field-interview-politics-poverty-and-belief-a-political-memoir-7zcp0n3pf

 

Unfortunately behind a paywall.

Unfortunately for them, I'm a paywall thief. See spoiler below.
 

Spoiler

Frank Field: they gave me weeks to live — in 2021

 

The former Labour MP tells Matt Chorley about his cancer, his new memoir and why he feels he has failed in politics

Frank Field should not be here. In 2021 he was told he had weeks to live. He went into a hospice. And then, unusually, he came out again. Eighteen months on he has just published his memoir reflecting on the influence of his strong Christian faith during 40 years as a Labour MP. “I’m just happily waiting for the end,” he says. We speak via Zoom, with the camera off, because his health fluctuates. “As I feel you may hear, the cancer’s moved around in my neck and makes speech rather difficult. I hope it’s clear enough to understand. But I’m just in good spirits really. Surprising given what I am waiting for.”

While he is waiting, he is reflecting on his 80 years of life, and why he believes he has failed. “I believe that my efforts have clearly resulted in failure. But the coming of the kingdom is a prophecy to be fulfilled, and to be seen by other people, so that although I will die with it being incomplete, I’ve no doubt at all that at some stage, it will be completed. And that will be the end of history.”
 

It is odd to hear any politician talking about faith like this. Or indeed this politician. Field admits that while an MP he was largely silent on his religious views because he thought they made him look eccentric. “I didn’t go around saying that, you know, this was an extension of the kingdom,” he says. “I thought I’d look totally cranky if I did that.” Judging by the reaction to the faith of the SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes, and her difficulties around opposing gay marriage and her views on sin, he is probably right. “What’s going to be interesting with Kate Forbes is to what extent, now that there is a leadership contest on, the membership will have different views to the MP activists. My guess is there will be a difference and that she’ll be much stronger amongst the membership than she is amongst the MP activists.”

 

 

How might religious aims differ from those of a secular politician?

“I think they overlap in that both of us were trying to do the right thing,” Field concedes.
 

As an atheist I find it all a bit odd, to be honest. From what I can tell Field’s brand of New Testament Christianity is a bit more optimistic — tales of the Good Samaritan and helping your neighbour in search of redemption — while the Old Testament is a bit more, well, judgy; all sin and damnation. Field actually thinks you need a bit of both.
 

A bit of both is a philosophy that is the hallmark of his life. Born into a Tory household, he joined the Labour Party in his teens. He grew up in leafy Chiswick, in west London, but was the MP for Birkenhead in Merseyside for 40 years. He might have kept quiet about his faith, but he spent years, he says, trying to teach the Labour Party “that we are of fallen nature, and that we live to be redeemed, but we’re not redeemed”. He adds: “If we forget that there’s a dark side to what we get up to, then we can be misleading in the policies that we propose. For a long time in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Labour was really peddling a belief that we were already home and dry, human nature didn’t really have much part to play.”
 

His guiding principle is of “self-interested altruism”, believing that the left focuses too much on the purity of altruism — looking after others, even before your own needs — while the right focuses too much on self-interest and believing the worst of everyone.

What can seem odd to the non-believer is that politicians from the same faith can come to different policy prescriptions. Perhaps the most well-known instance of this involving Field came in 1997. Swept to power on a landslide, Tony Blair appointed him as a welfare minister under Harriet Harman to “think the unthinkable”. He did, thinking more people should take out private pensions, while there should be a crackdown on benefit fraud and tighter controls on incapacity benefit. But it turned out it was all unthinkable. He clashed with Blair and Harman. But most notably with Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer and son of a Church of Scotland minister, who favoured targeted means-testing over Field’s preferred national insurance system where everybody paid in to help others (altruism) while also assuming they might need help one day too (self-interest). “I totally underestimated his ability to keep peddling failure,” Field says of Brown now. “I think he had a different view of human nature to me.”
 

So Field resigned, returning to the backbenches where he would remain for more than 20 years, which he now regrets. “Oh yes, I do think of myself as a failure in that I should have stayed in and fought more long-term. But I had nobody I could go to to talk through the positions in which I found myself and therefore I was much liable to these short-term judgments. It points out a singular weakness on my part — I should have stuck in there and seen what I could have turfed up later.”

One person he did have to talk things through with was Margaret Thatcher. He would regularly pop into Downing Street during the 1980s. He was one of the last people to see her the night before she resigned in 1990, to tell her “that she was finished”. There are persistent rumours in Westminster that they prayed together. “No, nothing like that. It’s amazing how these rumours come up. No, we would have business meetings.”
 

She would be marching around her office in a fit of pique about the latest Tory in-fighting or why President Bush in the White House needed more backbone. “And I kept saying, ‘Prime Minister, will you calm down and sit down with me, I want to talk to you?’ ” So the chastised Iron Lady would sit, and he would get what he wanted, extracting orders for the Liverpool shipbuilders Cammell Laird, with prime ministerial missives fired out across Whitehall. “That was what I loved about her — her total competence as the person in charge, who knew how to run the machine.”
 

Some on Merseyside might think there is something extraordinary about a former Labour MP claiming to have loved Thatcher. “Yes, well, they’ll have to put up with it, won’t they?” It was easier, he thinks, for a backbencher to get what they wanted if their party was not in power. “I always found it amazing that Tory MPs couldn’t go and deal with Mrs T, as I did.”
 

It was his relationship with another female Conservative prime minister that would end his political career. In 2018 he lost a vote of confidence among his local Labour members for siding with Theresa May in Brexit votes. He resigned the Labour whip, with a swipe at Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism. And then he was deselected, so in the 2019 election he stood as an independent — and lost.
 

“People from all over the country came up to help my opponent,” he says. “I remember going to the pub one evening with the little group of supporters that I had and somebody had written on the menu, ‘We’ve come up here to get you out.’ ”

Ironically it is Corbyn who faces the prospect of standing as an independent in Islington North after Keir Starmer kicked him out of the party. “What will happen is Corbyn will have all ragtag and bobtail coming from all over the country to help him. So I would advise him to stand,” Field says, surprisingly. “I think he has a good chance of winning, and that in the long run might be good for more people in future, being prepared to fight when they think the party has behaved badly to them.”
 

Field’s assessment on Starmer is mixed. While he believes Starmer as a Labour frontbencher tried to “foist” Corbyn on the country in two elections, he says the Labour leader would be “very competent” as PM, albeit “not in the category of Blair or Maggie Thatcher”. Field himself nominated Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015, to widen the debate, so played his own small part in foisting Corbyn on Labour, and the country. He blames Ed Miliband for being “mad” to make it so easy for people to join and vote.
 

All that is now behind him. He was given a peerage after the 2019 election, but ill health meant he only managed to take his seat in the House of Lords last month in a wheelchair. And he is still ready to help a Conservative prime minister, if Rishi Sunak wants to think the unthinkable. “I would love him to pick up the phone,” Field says. “I would certainly talk to him and offer him what energy I’ve got in devising that new cornerstone for welfare, which would be a national insurance-based position for care.”
 

For now he is happy to be able to wait. For a phone call. For the end.

I'm glad he's publicly confirmed that he was given weeks to live in 2021. Makes me feel less ridiculous for breaking this on here then him subsequently not dying.