Jack Dormand

Who was Jack Dormand?

John Donkin Dormand, Baron Dormand of Easington, known as Jack Dormand, was a British educationist and Labour Party politician from the coal mining area of Easington in County Durham, in the north-east of England. He was Member of Parliament for the Easington constituency from 1970 until his retirement in 1987.

Described as an "old-style centre-right socialist", Dormand was a working-class child who progressed through grammar school education to study at Oxford and Harvard to a career as an educational administrator before entering Parliament at the age 50, where he was noted as an advocate for education and for mining areas. He never achieved ministerial office, but as a skilled administrator he played a significant role as a government whip in the 1970s, and as Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party when the party was in opposition in the 1980s. An atheist and a staunch republican, he reluctantly accepted a life peerage when he retired from the House of Commons and was an active working peer until his death 16 years later.