In the early 1970s, while working at the Brent Law Centre, Dromey was elected as chairman of his branch of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) and as a delegate to the Brent Trades Council. In 1973 he took a leading role in planning the occupation of Centre Point,[5] along with prominent Housing and Direct Action campaigners Jim Radford and Ron Bailey. This high-profile event was designed to highlight and publicise the perceived injustice of London's most prominent (and tallest) building development – which included a number of luxury flats – remaining empty for consecutive years while tens of thousands of people languished on housing waiting lists across the capital. The event was postponed in 1973 but eventually carried out successfully in January the following year.[6]
As secretary of the local Trades Council he also had a prominent role in supporting the strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory which lasted from 1976 to 1978. The mostly-female Asian workforce at Grunwick went on strike to demand that company boss George Ward recognise their union; instead, Ward dismissed the strikers, leading to a two-year-long confrontation involving mass picketing and some violence. The strike was ultimately unsuccessful.[9]
Dromey was appointed deputy general secretary of the TGWU, having lost the 2003 election for general secretary to Tony Woodley by a wide margin.[10][11]
In August 2009, it was revealed that senior Labour figures thought Dromey was likely to be selected in the Leyton and Wanstead constituency for the 2010 general election.[14] The chair of Leyton and Wanstead Constituency Labour Party said he would be "somewhat aggrieved" were Dromey selected[15] and Dromey's wife Harriet Harman had campaigned for all-women shortlists in safe seats.[13] The party's candidates for the constituency were due to be announced in November 2009, though this was delayed for at least two months, with The Daily Telegraph alleging that the announcement was going to be made at the last possible minute so Dromey could be imposed as the candidate using emergency rules.[16] It was revealed in January 2010 that the seat would not be subject to an all-woman shortlist,[17] but the Constituency Labour Party subsequently selected former Hornchurch MP John Cryer as its candidate on 27 February.[18]
In February 2010, Siôn Simon, Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington since 2001, announced his intention to stand down at the imminent general election. The NEC of the Labour Party swiftly announced that Birmingham Erdington would have an open shortlist. Dromey was confirmed to have made that shortlist. On 27 February 2010, it was confirmed that Dromey had been selected as the Labour Party candidate for Birmingham Erdington.[19] He was elected on 6 May 2010.[20]
In November 2011, John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, launched an investigation into allegations that Dromey had failed to declare thousands of pounds in salary. Dromey's entry in the register of Members' interests stated he had declined his salary from Unite since entering Parliament. However, in October 2011 he changed his entry to state "Between the General Election and 30 October 2010, I received £27,867 in salary."[22] Dromey apologised to the House of Commons on 19 January 2012, in relation to this mistake.[23]
Dromey retained his seat in the 2019 general election; although his majority fell to ten percentage points, he won more than 50 per cent of the vote.[25][26]
Dromey was a member of the executive committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL; now Liberty) in the 1970s during a period when the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had taken out corporate membership of NCCL. Dromey denied supporting PIE or its aims, stating that he actively opposed the links between the two groups and voted for the expulsion of the group at the NCCL Annual General Meeting.[30][31]
Dromey stated publicly that neither he nor Labour's elected National Executive Committee (NEC) chairman, Sir Jeremy Beecham, had knowledge of or involvement in the loans, and that he had become aware of them when he read about them in the newspapers. Dromey stated that he was regularly consulted about conventional bank loans. As well as announcing his own investigation, he called on the Electoral Commission to investigate the issue of political parties taking out loans from non-commercial sources. His report was discussed by the NEC on 21 March 2006.[33][34]
Dromey was caught up in a further financial scandal in 2007, as he was responsible for party finances, which included more than £630,000 in illegal donations from David Abrahams. Dromey again claimed to know nothing of the donations, with critics wondering why he had not examined the issue more closely.[35][36]Harriet Harman, Dromey's wife, was also caught up in the affair, as her staff had solicited and accepted donations totalling £5,000.[37][38][39]
Personal life and death
Dromey married Harriet Harman in 1982 in the Borough of Brent, after meeting her on the picket line of the Grunwick dispute in 1977; Harman was legal advisor to the Grunwick Strike Committee. They had three children: Harry (born February 1983), Joseph (born November 1984) and Amy (born January 1987), who has taken Harman's surname. Labour colleague Patricia Hewitt is godmother to one of their children.[40] Their son Joe was a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham between 2014 and 2021.[41] They had a house in Suffolk,[42] in addition to a home in Herne Hill, south London.[43]
The couple decided to send their children to selective schools, the subject of negative comments at the time.[44] Dromey served for ten years on the executive of the National Council for Civil Liberties,[45] a pressure group for which Harman worked as legal officer.[46] Dromey, whose parents were from counties Cork and Tipperary, was a strong supporter of Irish causes in Parliament and in his Birmingham constituency, and a regular attender at the city's yearly St Patrick's Day parades.[47]
Dromey died from heart failure at his flat in Birmingham on 7 January 2022, at the age of 73.[10][48] Former prime minister Tony Blair described Dromey as a "stalwart of the Labour and trade union movement", while Gordon Brown said he had lost "a friend, colleague and great humanitarian who never stopped fighting for social justice". The flags of Parliament were lowered to half-mast, and House of Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle said MPs were "all in disbelief that the life-force that was Jack Dromey has died".[49]
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