The ‘No’ campaign was obviously heading for defeat. But that didn’t stop Shore arguing with all the passion of someone who believed things to be on a knife-edge. Millions watched live on television as this Labour cabinet minister implored them to resist the prophecies of the doomsayers and have confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs.

“The message that comes out is fear, fear, fear,” he said, gesturing towards Heath, the ardent Europhile. “Fear because you won’t have any food. Fear of unemployment … A constant attrition of our morale … A constant attempt to tell us that what we have — and what we have is not only our own achievements, but what generations of Englishmen have helped us to achieve — is not worth a damn.” Now, asserted Shore, that the fraudulent arguments of the Marketeers were exposed, “What it’s about is basically the confidence and morale of our people. We can shape our future … We are 55 million people … I urge you to say ‘no’ to this motion.”

It is one thing to be a fine platform orator; it’s another to have the intellectual heft to back it up. Shore had both gifts. Born in 1924 to middle-class hoteliers, he spent his early years on the Norfolk coast. When the depression forced the sale of the family business, they relocated to Liverpool, with Shore’s father returning to his previous career in the Merchant Navy. After Cambridge, wartime service in India with the RAF and several years as a Labour Party staffer, Shore was elected in 1964 as the member of parliament for Stepney in East London. Within three years, he was inside the Cabinet.

Peter Shore was the kind of politician you rarely see today: an unashamed interventionist who believed that the proper role of government was to use all the levers at its disposal to manage the economy in the interests of the people. Shore saw government as a force for good and understood that, in its relationship with the market, it must act as master and not servant. This meant regulating markets and not allowing them to let rip. It meant speaking the language of competitiveness, exchange rates and industrial strategies. It meant, ultimately, the elevation of the needs of the real economy — where goods were produced and wealth created — over those of finance capitalism; the prioritisation of full employment, growth and living standards over monetary targets as macroeconomic policy goals.

It was this driving philosophy which ensured, during the IMF crisis of 1976, that Shore was not seduced by the arguments of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan or Chancellor Denis Healey — they, along with others in the Cabinet, suggested that if Britain couldn’t spend her way out of recession, she had no choice but to embrace the precepts of Friedman-style monetarism. And it was Shore’s deep-seated belief in the capacity of the state to improve people’s lives — and the duty of democratically-elected politicians to drive such improvements — that informed his opposition to Euro-federalism. Like many who stood in that rich tradition of Left-wing Euroscepticism, Shore’s antipathy was not to Europe, the continent; he simply objected to an arrangement that served the interests of bankers and the multinationals over ordinary working people.

He thought it wrong to give primacy to the views of technocrats over those of elected representatives. Shore saw the objectives of those driving political and economic integration across Europe as antithetical to not only the aims of the British labour movement but the concept of democracy itself.

Oh, to have had Shore and other big beasts of the Eurosceptic labour movement — Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Hugh Gaitskell, Bob Crow and Barbara Castle — around in 2016, to articulate the entirely rational Left-wing case against the EU, and to act as an antidote to the cynicism and hysteria that infected so much of the Left during that period.

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Peter Shore stood for the Labour leadership twice: in 1980 and 1983. What might have been if he’d won, and then become Prime Minister? Labour would not have retreated from its historical economic radicalism. By the early 1990s — just as it had done for the second part of the 1970s — the party had come to broadly accept the argument that “There is no alternative” to market fundamentalism, and that elected governments must be no more than minor actors in the operation of the economy. A Labour Party — and country — led by Peter Shore would not have succumbed to such pessimism. Nor, most likely, would the party have developed the infatuation with the EU which has done so much to alienate millions of its once-loyal supporters over recent years.

The driving philosophy of this government would have been that democratic socialism was possible only if politicians of the Left were willing to step up to the plate and take control of the nation’s economic destiny rather than hive off responsibility to markets and technocrats.

As a Labour PM, Shore would have led from the front in opposing the Single European Act and Maastricht Treaty. Britain would not have entered the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the ignominy of Black Wednesday would have been avoided. Shore would have resisted, too, the drive towards the internationalisation of capital which has facilitated a global market where power and wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and multinationals have the whip hand over elected governments.

He would not have hesitated to prioritise the interests of the productive sector over the City. His Keynesian interventionism and his focus on competitiveness would have ensured Britain did not experience the decimation of her manufacturing base that came to pass under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. Hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs would not have been lost to overseas competitors.

Shore — like so many Labour heavyweights from yesteryear — was a patriot to his fingertips. A Labour Party shaped in his image and following his credo would not have lost touch with working-class communities, a drift that began three decades ago, around the time Shore stepped down from the front bench. And our nation as a whole would have been much the better for it.

The two main contenders from the 1980 election, Denis Healey and Michael Foot, were both political giants. But for most of the run-up to that vote, another man altogether was widely thought of as the favourite. Now largely forgotten, he was also a political heavyweight — but strikingly different from the other two runners. His name was Peter Shore.

While Foot and Healey were clearly the Left and Right candidates respectively, Shore was impossible to pigeonhole, and that ability to win support across all wings of the party was one reason why many on the Left had decided to support him as the most likely to beat Healey — including Foot himself, who was going to nominate Shore until changing his mind and deciding to run himself.

A new biography of this leader-that-never was has just been published with the apt title Labour’s Forgotten Patriot. It’s a superb work which refreshes the political history of the second half of the 20th century by inserting the contribution of a man who, far from being forgotten, ought to be revered on the Left as an example of a tradition of Labour patriotism. Many of Labour’s current problems — more accurately, much of the reason Labour has its current problems — can be traced to the Left’s rejection of that tradition.

I was both lucky and privileged that my first serious job was as Peter’s researcher, so that for four years, I had what was the equivalent of a permanent tutorial in politics and ideas. While many MPs (still) regard their researchers as fodder to be eaten up and spat out when their usefulness is over, Peter saw it as his role to bring his staff on and help foster their careers.

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Don't expect Jeremy Corbyn to go quietly

By Stephen Pollard

I remember in my first week accompanying him to lunch — always at 1.40, after listening to The World at One — in the Policeman’s Café in Westminster Hall. Sat at a table were Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman, and when Peter went to join them I looked for a nearby table to sit at. Peter beckoned me over. “When we have lunch together,” he told me, “we have lunch together.” That was typical. Unless a meeting was highly confidential, I would always be asked to join. Unless I saw things for myself, Peter reasoned, how would I understand the way politics worked?

If Peter Shore is remembered today, it is for his Euroscepticism (although that phrase only really emerged in the early 1990s debates over the Maastricht Treaty). Above all else, he believed in the right of the British people to take the decisions that governed them. For many on the Labour Left, opposition to membership of the Common Market was based on its enshrinement of a capitalist economy in treaty form. For Peter, that was merely a by-product of its fundamental flaw — that it destroyed genuine representative democracy.

It’s striking from reading his speeches how directly relevant Shore’s arguments remain today, contributions that go as far back as the early 1960s, and the time of Hugh Gaitskell’s famous 1962 party conference speech, in which the then Labour leader argued that membership would mean “the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history.”

But there was a far broader thrust to Peter Shore’s politics than mere opposition to the Common Market. It’s that word patriotism. For Peter, patriotism was not the flag-waving nationalism of caricature but a deep seated imperative to improve the lot of one’s fellow citizens.

And nor did it mean the Little Englander approach that some characterise opposition to a European state. Peter carried a copy of the UN Charter in his wallet — he was internationalist to his core but with a sense of history, which was why he was unwilling simply to jettison our Commonwealth links, as many of the Euro enthusiasts would happily have done.

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Counter-factual history can be pointless, but had Michael Foot not changed his mind about standing in 1980, British politics would have been very different. The authors speculate that in 1983, “while any leader would have struggled to win in the face of dominant Conservative statecraft, Shore could have avoided the catastrophe that the Labour Party endured… It is possible that his natural patriotism would not have allowed the Conservatives to so easily play the ‘patriotic card’ and label Labour as unpatriotic.”

The Corbyn leadership provides an obvious demonstration of the dangers facing Labour when it is seen as lacking patriotism (something of an understatement). But Shore’s immediate analysis of Labour’s flawed approach in the days after the 1983 defeat is as valid today as it was then.

Speaking on ITV’s Weekend World, he criticised an outlook that sought to build a majority by mobilising minorities. A majority could not be won “based upon the principles of solidarity and community consciousness which we need in the Labour movement, if you try to enlist the single issue, egotism and selfishness of particular groups”. Labour needed, rather, to develop a broad appeal to the majority of voters.

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By James Bloodworth

This was — a decade ahead of being formulated as such — the fundamental New Labour understanding, so badly ignored by the Corbynites. So while at the last election the pretence was that the Labour manifesto was designed to appeal to a broad base, in reality it was a series of policies designed to satisfy specific interest groups, none of which cohered.

Peter Shore was a figure of his times. He was taken seriously as an economic heavyweight by professional and academic economists but, 37 years after he ended his service as Shadow Chancellor, his variations on Keynesian economic ideas, with prices and incomes policies, state planning and suchlike, are not so much dated as irrelevant now.

But in losing its memory of him, Labour has lost not just a vital aspect of its history but its future. If the party is ever to recover from the damage of the past four years, it will need to convince voters not just that it is competent and can be trusted with the economy. More than anything, it will need to show that it understands what voters want from the Labour Party.

Nothing better illustrates this than the collapse of the Red Wall. As Environment Secretary, Peter Shore’s preoccupation was with regenerating languishing cities and towns. Today there is little evidence that any of the current candidates — with the possible exception of Lisa Nandy — have anything of interest to say on this subject, despite its obvious centrality to politics. As for the issue of values, including patriotism, they are barely the same party.

Peter Shore was a not just a political heavyweight. He was also a good man. In four years of an intensely close working relationship, he did not once raise his voice to me. I miss him as much as Labour should.

Peter Shore Labour’s Forgotten Patriot, by Kevin Hickson, Jasper Miles, and Harry Taylor, is published by Biteback, priced £25