Frank Doran obituary

Frank Doran, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was an assiduous Labour MP who applied his legal training to a wide range of progressive reforms. He became particularly associated with the fight for improved safety standards in the North Sea.

Doran was first elected, to his own surprise, in 1987. The Tory incumbent in Aberdeen South, Gerald Malone, an ardent Thatcherite who advocated the introduction of the poll tax, turned up to lodge his nomination papers in a vintage blue Rolls-Royce. Doran thought: “This is not Aberdeen. I can win.”

He took the seat with a 1,200 majority and, as an able Aberdeen MP, was a natural choice to speak from Labour’s frontbench on oil and gas under the shadow energy secretary, Tony Blair. In July 1988, this role acquired a much enlarged dimension when an explosion on Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha platform killed 167 workers.

Doran became immersed in the legal, political and human issues that arose from this disaster. Dealing with survivors and bereaved families was a harrowing experience that turned him into a passionate campaigner and considerable expert on offshore safety. The work of supporting families in search of legal redress went on for years.

View image in fullscreen

In 2013, to mark the 25th anniversary of Piper Alpha, Doran initiated a Commons debate in which he acknowledged progress made as a result of Lord (William) Cullen’s inquiry into the disaster, but stressed that the North Sea remained a relatively dangerous place to work and warned against dilution of the independent regulatory regime. He also called for an inquiry on the scale of Cullen into helicopter safety.

Not even his work on Piper Alpha could save him from narrow defeat in 1992. Doran attributed his fate to John Smith’s tax plans. He was alerted to the problem when he told workers on an oil platform that nobody earning under £21,000 would be affected. With one voice, they told him that all of them were earning much more than that.

Doran advised Smith accordingly, but the shadow chancellor, an unswerving believer in redistributionist taxation, put an arm round him and replied: “What’s bad for Aberdeen is good for the rest of the country.” In due course, the rest of the country begged to differ.

Frank resumed work as a solicitor, mainly for trade unions, while gaining the nomination to fight Aberdeen Central in 1997. Returned to the Commons with an 11,000 majority, he became parliamentary private secretary to Ian McCartney and an important figure in drafting national minimum wage and employment rights legislation, a phase of his career which he particularly enjoyed.

Another issue that he was ahead of his time in highlighting was prompted by the liquidation of a large Aberdeen textiles employer, Richards and Co. When the troubled firm sought advice from the Bank of Scotland, they sent in the accountancy firm KPMG to carry out a review. Their conclusions, Doran maintained, were directed entirely towards protecting the bank rather than helping the company. KPMG recommended liquidation and were promptly appointed liquidators, with fees of around £1m. In a harbinger of much wider issues that continue to resonate, Doran highlighted “a clear conflict of interest” and called for advisers to be disqualified from acting as liquidators.

His parliamentary contributions were always articulate and well-researched. After standing down as a PPS in 1999, he enjoyed the freedom to pursue causes and occasionally to dissent, most notably by voting against the government on the Iraq war. He chaired the House of Commons administration committee (2005-10) and the Speaker’s advisory committee on works of art (2010-15).

When boundary changes reduced Aberdeen to two MPs in 2005, Doran won a selection contest against another incumbent to stand in Aberdeen North, thus becoming the only MP to represent three Aberdeen constituencies. He did not seek re-election in 2015, having no wish to become a “skeleton wandering around Westminster”.

Frank was born to Labour and trade union activist parents, Francis Doran and his wife, Betty (nee Hedges), in the deprived Pilton area of Edinburgh. Leaving Leith academy at 16, he was employed by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’s legal department as a clerk. Encouraged to study law, he attended night classes and went on to Dundee University, graduating in 1975. He practised as a solicitor in Dundee and stood unsuccessfully for the European parliament in 1984.

Fellow Labour politician Alistair Darling, who first knew him in this period through their work on the Scottish Legal Action Group, which campaigned for law reform, said: “Frank was driven but in a quiet, gentle way. He had worked his way up and wanted to use the law to help others who needed a hand. He had no ego and would cheerfully work through the night on issues he cared about, like Piper Alpha and the national minimum wage”.

In 1967 he married Pat Govan, and they had two sons, Frank and Adrian. The marriage ended in divorce in the early 1990s. He later began a relationship with a Labour colleague, Joan Ruddock, the MP for Lewisham, Deptford (1987-2015), whom he married in 2010.

On retiring, Doran had looked forward to enjoying the creative aspects of London life that Westminster and constituency work had left little time for. Last year, however, he was diagnosed with cancer.

He is survived by Joan and his sons.