With Heffer and Robert Parry, he defended the pro-Militant Liverpool City Councillors against expulsion in 1985. In 1986 he introduced a Ten Minute Rule Bill to stop local councillors having to pay surcharges and from being disqualified if they failed to pay. For these reasons, he was not targeted by the Militant Tendency, but, precisely because he wasn’t, many in the party thought that he was a Militant fellow traveller. I knew him very well at this time and realised what a dreadful predicament Merseyside MPs faced, not least because Neil Kinnock had managed to give the impression of not only being anti-Militant, but also anti-Liverpool. Loyden’s relations with Militant were ever ambiguous.Eddie Loyden was the son of Patrick Loyden, a van driver, and was brought up in the Liverpool Roman Catholic community. He went to sea with the Merchant Navy in 1938, aged 15, and would later recall many of the dangerous situations in which he was involved as an able seaman on convoys.

His fierce detestation of war emanated from his perilous experiences as a teenager at sea, with U-boats potentially ever-present.Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, remembers conversations with Loyden about seafarers, as his own father was also a seafarer. “He used to produce an endless flow of early day motions, promoting the welfare of those at sea,” says Martin. “It is one of Eddie’s EDMs which is printed in stone as a memorial to Jim Slater who was the Secretary of the National Union of Seamen.”After his marriage in 1944 to Rose Boyle, Loyden returned to the Port of Liverpool and got jobs which involved both work as a launch driver and in the docks. Jack Jones, the legendary general secretary of the TGWU, says: I first knew Eddie as a boatman with the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board; he was a natural shop steward and a good advocate for working people. He was receptive, and he had an excellent lifelong working relationship with me and the rest of the leadership of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.After joining the Labour Party in 1952, Loyden was elected to Liverpool City Council in 1960 and went on to become President of the Liverpool Trades Council in 1967. I learnt a lot about this tight-knit group, since for several years Eric Heffer, former MP for the Walton division of Liverpool, would give me a lift back after late-night sittings, accompanied by Eddie Loyden, whose London flat was on the same route. Talk of Liverpool politics confirmed to me that it was politics like no other, with the complication of Derek Hatton, Tony Mulhearn and the Trotskyist Militant Tendency.

Perhaps it was ironic that this very working-class candidate should capture the seat of Liverpool Garston, with its large number of prosperous middle-class owner-occupiers as well as the huge Speke council estate and the big Leyland car plant.His Liverpool Parliamentary colleague Bob Wearing, the MP for West Derby, recalls: Eddie certainly stuck to his working-class roots. He showed great guts in a whole number of matters, not least in the four years when he was out of Parliament between 1979 and 1983 He was a completely straight and good colleague. As Secretary of the Merseyside group of MPs between 1976 and 1979, and later as the Vice-Chairman of the Liverpool District Labour Party, he performed considerable service.In 1988, being a Liverpool football supporter, he attended the terrible match at Hillsborough which ended in catastrophe. For years later, he championed the interests of the much-abused Liverpool fans; he thought that they were hugely maligned. One of my later memories of Loyden is the vehemence with which he opposed a football identity card scheme which he claimed would have caused even greater damage than occurred at Hillsborough.In the same year as Hillsborough, he came number 15 in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills and tried to introduce an amendment to the Data Protection Act to require local authorities to make more information accessible to disabled people. But things really got rough for Loyden when he launched a criticism of Ron Todd, the General Secretary of his own trade union, the T&GWU, for supposedly betraying the dockworkers when he initially thought to avert confrontation with the Government over the abolition of the dock labour scheme in 1989.Personally I suspect that the most lasting of Loyden’s achievements will be his contribution to ending the casual status of dockworkers’ jobs.Tam Dalyell. Janko Bobetko, the one-time Chief of Staff of the Croatian army, was one of the key officers who established a viable military force during Croatia’s war of independence against the Serb-dominated former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s.

Yet he fought one of his major battles seven years after his retirement when in 2002 he became the most senior official from Croatia to be charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Then aged 83, he was also the oldest person to be indicted. Milan Bobetko, army officer: born Crnac, Croatia 10 January 1919; Chief of Staff, Croatian army 1992-95; married (three sons); died Zagreb 29 April 2003. Then aged 83, he was also the oldest person to be indicted.Bobetko won that battle. He refused to surrender, thereby contributing to the outbreak of a dispute between the Croatian government and the Hague-based ICTY when Zagreb challenged the charges. It was an unusual situation for Prime Minister Ivica Racan’s pro-Western government, which was caught between the conflicting requirements of co-operating with the tribunal – thereby promoting its membership bid for the European Union and Nato – and appeasing Croatia’s public, which considered Bobetko a national hero.In the end, Bobetko’s poor state of health helped resolve the conflict. After months of squabbling, ICTY’s doctors confirmed Zagreb’s claims that Bobetko was too ill to stand trial.