Wareing: Old Labour diehard

Wareing - Cheerfully Old Labour

He has represented the Labour stronghold of Liverpool, West Derby, since 1983, enjoying a long and distinguished record in the party in the city.

This included chairmanship of Merseyside County Council's Economic Development Committee, in which capacity he said it was his lot to try to "sell" the area.

In his maiden speech in the Commons he accused the press of conspiring to destroy the Labour Party.

Mr Wareing never lost an opportunity to attack Margaret Thatcher. Once he described her as "President Reagan's poodle" for allowing US inspectors to check up on UK firms using American advanced military technology.

He once suggested that Thatcher was so unpopular on Merseyside that she would be safer in Moscow than in Liverpool.

Mr Wareing joined the Labour Party in 1947 at the age of 16. He was an active anti-European campaigner, crusading under the slogan: "No to the Common Market, Yes to a Socialist Europe." And he was an active CND campaigner.

For a period during the Neil Kinnock leadership, Wareing served as an assistant Opposition whip, with responsibility for Merseyside Labour MPs.

But although he remains a hard-working constituency MP, Mr Wareing was never in line for a full-dress front-bench post.

He is Old Labour through and through, a man who will almost certainly be privately critical of the Tony Blair regime.