Tony Blair leads tributes to Frank Field, ‘an independent thinker always pushing at the frontier of new ideas’ – UK politics live

Tributes paid to former Labour minister and welfare campaigner Frank Field, who has died at the age of 81

Good morning. Tony Blair, the former Labour figure, has been among the many figures this morning paying tribute to Frank Field, the former Labour MP and campaigner against poverty, who has died at the age of 81, after a long illness.

Field was appointed minister for welfare reform when Blair became prime minister in 1997. It was a surprise appointment, because Field had not been a frontbencher and his proposals for welfare (often hard to place on a conventional left/right spectrum) were generally assumed to be too radical for his party. And so it proved; he clashed with Gordon Brown, the chancellor, and was out of office within about a year.

Frank had integrity, intelligence and deep commitment to the causes he believed in.

He was an independent thinker, never constrained by conventional wisdom, but always pushing at the frontier of new ideas.

As a former colleague, I watched in admiration as Frank Field navigated a career as a formidable MP, and as a minister, tasked with ‘thinking the unthinkable’ on social care.

He was neither cowed by the establishment or whips - which made his campaigns against hunger and food poverty, for climate change and the church, even more effective.