The former secretary general of the Council of Europe (CoE), Terry Davis, who has died aged 86, was a Birmingham Labour MP for 28 years, and was popular in his constituency because he understood the problems of the area, where he had been born and where he had himself worked in the car industry. At Westminster he won a reputation as a serious-minded, conscientious MP, but he never held ministerial office and thus chose to focus his later career on the international stage.
Like many of his generation of Labour politicians, Davis was unlucky that his party was out of government for 18 years of his period at Westminster. He was in his early 30s and too inexperienced for office when first an MP between 1971 and the February 1974 general election when he lost his seat. He returned to Commons in 1979, but by the time Labour next won an election in 1997 and Tony Blair became prime minister, Davis was close to 60 and his image did not concur with the New Labour Britpop youthfulness of the era.
He was a cheerful, approachable man, despite his big, burly stature, who was always busily fizzing with ideas and initiatives to build support for Labour politics and to improve people’s lives. He came from a Conservative family but discovered socialism when reading for a law degree at University College London, where he became president of the students’ union. He was further radicalised by the poverty and inequality he saw thereafter in the US during his two years on a scholarship studying for a master’s in business administration at the University of Michigan from 1960.
Davis was a moderate politician in the Labour party, standing for the shadow cabinet on the centrist ticket in the 1980s, but was less concerned about labels than about equality in education and access to healthcare, about women’s rights and the proper use of public funds. He was a passionate visionary for democracy and incurred the wrath of the US administration during his tenure at the Council of Europe for initiating an inquiry in 2005 into the American use of secret detentions and extraordinary rendition, in contravention of the European convention on human rights.
Terry was born in Stourbridge, West Midlands, the elder child of Gladys (nee Avery), a secretary, and Gordon Davis, who worked in the insurance industry. He attended King Edward VI grammar school, Stourbridge (now King Edward VI college) and was the first in his family to attend university. He worked as an executive for Esso, Clark’s Shoes and Chrysler between 1962 and 1971 and was general manager of British Leyland’s parts division when out of parliament for five years from 1974.
He had joined the Labour party in 1965 when working in Somerset and was elected as a member of Yeovil rural district council in 1967 for the village of Long Load, in the first ever contested election for the seat. Back in the West Midlands, he stood unsuccessfully for Bromsgrove in the 1970 election, but won the seat the following year after the death of the Conservative incumbent, inflicting the first byelection defeat on the government of Edward Heath.
Boundary changes led to his own defeat in the renamed Bromsgrove and Redditch constituency in the two 1974 elections. In 1977, when Roy Jenkins stood down as MP for Birmingham Stechford to become president of the European Commission, Davis failed to hold the seat in what was a predictably difficult byelection for Labour, and led to the government’s loss of its overall majority in the House of Commons, and the beginning of the Lib-Lab pact. He recaptured it, however, in the 1979 election and remained the MP in what became (after 1983) Birmingham Hodge Hill until his resignation in 2004 on being elected secretary general of the CoE.
He was on the opposition front bench from 1979 until 1987, first as a whip for a year and then as a spokesman on health and social security. In 1983 he stood unsuccessfully for the post of chief whip and then joined the Treasury team under Roy Hattersley – whom he had supported for Labour leader – and remained there for three years before moving to the Department of Trade and Industry for a year.
In 1987, he became a member of the influential public accounts committee, where he was known as something of a rottweiler during seven years of membership. In 2001 he chaired an independent inquiry into bed-blocking in Birmingham hospitals which led to a report, They Deserve Better, published in 2001.
In 1992 he became a member of the British delegation to the CoE parliamentary assembly. He stood first as candidate for secretary general in 1999, losing by two votes, but won on the first ballot in 2004, serving one term until his retirement five years later. He was rapporteur to the assembly on a variety of significant reports including those on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1994), on the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (1998), on Georgia’s admission to the CoE (1999), on terrorism (2001) and on Nagorno-Karabakh (2002-04). He was an observer of elections in Albania, Georgia, Latvia and Ukraine, and was a member of the UK delegation to the general assembly of the UN, which he also addressed. He was a member of the British delegation to the assembly of the Western European Union for 12 years, leading the British team from 1997 until 2002, and a member of the British delegation to the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe from 1997 until 2004.
Davis was made a member of the Privy Council in 1999 and appointed CMG in 2010.
In 1963 he married Anne Cooper, herself an active politician as a Labour county councillor and the party’s candidate in Bromsgrove and Redditch in 1979. He is survived by her, their children, Katherine and John, two grandchildren and his sister, Joy.
