Lord Dick Taverne, a one-time Labour Minister turned Lib Dem peer, has died at the great age of 97 – and with him has passed the once leading force of social democracy in British politics.

A Charterhouse and Balliol College Oxford educated intellectua, Taverne was a barrister who entered Parliament as Labour MP for Lincoln at a by-election in 1962, and quickly rose to be a minister in Harold Wilson’s government of the late 1960s, serving as a Home Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury.

Taverne had the distinction of being both the first social democrat to leave Labour because of its swing to the left, and (apart from David Owen), the last survivor of those rebels who broke with the party to create the SDP.

In those distant days, Labour was strongly anti-European. In 1973 T

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