The resistance to this clause was one of the few rebellions on a home issue under this government.Can you imagine these days a Secretary of State in the Blair government in the formidable position of Dick Crossman deciding to take the precaution of going down to the cafeteria in order to have supper with dissenting MPs? My view at the time was that my boss was very wise to have gone to make his peace with Orme on a personal level. I vividly remember the evening of 30 June 1965, when I was Richard Crossman’s PPS, sitting behind him on a very contentious issue relating to housing legislation. Crossman in his diaries records,I took the precaution of going downstairs afterwards to have supper with Stan Orme and Norman Buchan (MP for Renfrewshire West), two prominent left-wingers. In 1962 he was the odds-on favourite to win the selection conference at Ashton-under-Lyne but lost out to his friend the businessman Bob Sheldon This proved a blessing in disguise for Orme. Throughout his life he was to feel that in view of the number of sorties that he took and his repeated postings that he was lucky to be alive and survive the war.In 1947 on demobilisation he returned to the huge Metro-Vic plant at Trafford Park and soon became a prominent shop steward, working closely with his lifelong Mancunian friend and regional organiser Hughie Scanlon but at odds with Bill (later Lord) Carron, the President of the AEU, John Boyd, the General Secretary, and most of the leadership of his union.Having joined the Labour Party in 1944 Orme served on Sale Borough Council from 1958 to 1965; his first attempt at Parliament was when he was candidate in the then unwinnable seat of Stockport South.

In fact, it was an absolutely perilous assignment as a Pathfinder But one joke he did repeatedly enjoy. “If I had known that Richard Crossman had responsibility for psychological warfare, I would have been even more apprehensive.”I know from friends in the RAF who have nothing to do with politics that they had a great regard for Orme’s skill as a warrant officer and his sheer courage as an aircrew leader. Brian Walden in one of the most memorably eloquent speeches that the Commons ever heard supported Stan and Eric. Later Eric and Stan drifted apart, as Stan began to believe that ministerial office was more effective than being uncompromising in his old beliefs.She is right there were two Stan Ormes. The first was the formidable left-winger forged in Bomber Command, the maelstrom of shop- steward politics at Trafford Park and strong alliances with his parliamentary neighbour in Salford, Frank Allaun, and the General Secretary of the AUEW Hugh (later Lord) Scanlon. He was never to forget the hardship of the people from whom he sprang. Owing his education to the WEA and the National Council of Labour Colleges, he volunteered for the RAF.

His friend Robert Sheldon remembers:Stan used to recall his time as a navigator in the Bomber Command from 1942 only very rarely. The second Stan Orme was the disciplined government minister and the disciplining chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 1987 to 1992.Stan Orme was born into poverty, in Sale in 1923, and brought up by his mother. Not even Eric Heffer, with whom he seemed to be twinned on the third row below the gangway, glowering at Harold Wilson and George Brown and other members of the Labour front bench for falling short of socialism as he saw it. But few, if any, MPs, with the possible exception of Merlyn Rees and James Callaghan, were ever at ease with him. A close friend of the present Pope Benedict XVI, he devoted much of his spare time to helping advance the cause of the Church.Richard Bassett. Complex, deep-thinking, more than a little secretive, often suspicious of his colleagues, prone to answer questions by posing another question in reply, intensely ambitious, Stan Orme was a significant member of the House of Commons, of the Parliamentary Labour Party and of the Labour and trade-union movement from the day he entered Parliament in 1964, and for the next third of a century until in 1997 he was made a life peer.

Unsurprisingly, when British intelligence tried to link up with them at the end of the war, they found most had been liquidated.After the war Vermehrens lived in England for many years, moving to Switzerland in the 1960s, and Erich became a leading voice in the Una Voce movement of the Catholic Church. Canaris quietly replied that it was “not surprising”, given that Germany was losing the war. Hitler sacked him on the spot and the Abwehr was put under Heinrich Himmler’s jurisdiction, causing hundreds of its officers to resign and take up positions elsewhere, even on the Eastern front, rather than serve the SS. The disintegration of the Abwehr took place just as the plans for D Day were being finalised, an unexpected but useful coup for the Allies.The Vermehrens meanwhile were given a home in the South Kensington flat of Kim Philby’s mother where, taken in by Philby’s great charm, they supplied him with lists of the personalities in the Catholic underground in Germany. Vermehren had gone to an address in the Pera district for tea; a secret sliding door revealed the bespectacled Elliot, who cheerfully extended his hand saying, “Erich Vermehren? Why, I believe you were coming up to Oxford.”Though the Vermehrens took no documents or ciphers, British propaganda understandably made the most of the defection, knowing that it would set the vipers’ nest of Hitler’s competing intelligence agencies at each others’ throats just weeks before D Day.On hearing news of the defection, Hitler was incensed and summoned Canaris for a final interview, accusing him of allowing the Abwehr to “fall to bits”.

The young lawyer received two weeks’ training in secret inks before being posted to Leverkuehn’s Abwehr office in Istanbul.He was prevented, however, by the Gestapo from bringing his wife, and she remained “hostage” in Germany. However, the Abwehr officer at the embassy together with the ambassador, who was a close family friend, managed to get her on to the diplomatic courier plane that touched down to pick up the diplomatic bag at Sofia en route from Berlin to Istanbul.In Istanbul, meanwhile, Vermehren had made contact in early January 1944 with Nicholas Elliot, the SIS’s counter-espionage man in the British embassy. Then, returning to Berlin on leave, Erich agreed with his wife that they defect together to the British and that she should accompany him back to Istanbul.On the train from Berlin to the Turkish capital their plan received a temporary setback when a high-ranking Gestapo officer was discovered to have taken the compartment in the wagon-lit next to the Vermehrens. Sure enough, at the Bulgarian frontier crossing, Frau Vermehren was arrested by Gestapo agents and taken to the German embassy in Sofia, while Erich continued alone to Istanbul. Unsurprisingly, neither Plettenberg nor her husband was prepared openly to resist Hitler but both found themselves involved in the various German resistance circles, several of which centred on Vermehren’s cousin Adam von Trott.It became increasingly clear to von Trott that the Vermehrens were in danger in Germany. The cousinhood of good German families then, as now, dominant in the country’s foreign service ensured Erich’s transition from civilian life to the cloak-and-dagger world of the Abwehr.