Denis MacShane

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Denis MacShane (born May 21, 1948) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, and was the Minister of State for Europe at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until the ministerial reshuffle that followed the 2005 general election. He first entered Parliament after a 1994 by-election caused by the death of Jimmy Boyce.

He was born as Denis Matyjaszek, to an Irish mother and her Polish husband [1], who had fought in the Second World War and remained in exile after it. After attending Merton College, Oxford where he read history, and doing a PhD in international economics at the University of London, he worked for the BBC from 1969 to 1977. He changed his surname to his mother's maiden name at the request of his employers. He became an activist for the National Union of Journalists and later its president. He was policy director of the International Metal Workers' Federation from 1980 to 1992, then director of the European Policy Institute from 1992 to 1994.

MacShane supported the Solidarity trade union in Poland, where he was arrested in 1982 for attending a demonstration, and deported.

He first contested as parliamentary seat at the October 1974 general election, where he failed to win Solihull. He was elected to the House of Commons in the 1994 Rotherham by-election, and served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to a succession of ministers in the 1997-2001 Parliament. After the 2001 general election, he was made a junior minister at the Foreign Office with responsibility for the Balkans and Latin America. Those responsibilities did not restrain him from a lacklustre defence - on BBC's television's current affairs programme Question Time - of the actions of Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Byers MP in his threats to the independence of the Rail Regulator in the controversy over the collapse of Railtrack, the British national railway infrastructure company. His embarrassment in trying to do so was palpable.

In 2002 he became Minister of State for Europe in the reshuffle caused by the resignation of Estelle Morris.

He caused some embarrassment to the government in 2002 by describing President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela as a 'ranting, populist demagogue' and compared him to Mussolini during a failed military coup attempt to depose the democratically elected president. [2] [3] Afterwards he had to make clear that, as minister with responsibility for Latin America, the government deplored the coup attempt. [4] [5]

On 14 March 2004, his daughter by Carol Barnes, Clare Barnes, died in Australia after her parachute failed to open on her 200th skydiving jump. [6]

After the 2005 general election, he was dropped from the government. MacShane's failure to remain in government is believed by some to have been his falling between the two stools of being neither overtly a Blairite nor a Brownite, and thus, in his own words, having "no hand to push [him] up the greasy pole". However, his position was considered to be untenable after comments he made to a meeting of Durham Labour Students [7] in which he described Gordon Brown's five economic tests as, "a bit of a giant red herring." When contacted by The Scotsman newspaper about whether or not he made the comments he responded: "Jesus Christ, no. I mean, ‘red herring’ is not one of my favourite metaphors. If you think any Labour MP saying the Prime Minister’s most important policy is a red herring, then they would not survive long in the job." However, he had been recorded on a dictaphone, with the tape played on both the Today Program and BBC News 24. MacShane himself wrote in Tribune "I have no idea why I was removed as a minister and it does not worry me in the slightest." [8]

He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 2005. He has continued to write columns for The Guardian since his fall from the heights of government, as well as appearing on television programmes relating to European affairs both here in Britain and in other European countries.

In 2005 he became a signatory of the Henry Jackson Society principles, advocating a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world, including by military intervention. The society also supports "European military modernisation and integration under British leadership". In 2004 he criticised the British Muslim community, saying they didn't do enough to condemn acts of Islamic terrorism. He was a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has strongly supported Tony Blair's foreign policy in relation to the Middle East and elsewhere.

He was chair of a cross-party parliamentary committee looking into Anti-Semitism in Britain which reported in September 2006. Other members included Iain Duncan-Smith and Chris Huhne.

MacShane has been called "one of the few British politicians with a deep knowledge of France."^[1]