It is very sad to report that David Patterson passed away peacefully in hospital on 24 April 2023 at the age of 83. David was the backbone of Tooting Liberals and the Battersea and Tooting Liberal Democrats for more years than I can think of.

David’s sister reports that David was a Liberal as a teenager. He shot to (relative) fame by winning a Wandsworth Council by-election in the Earlsfield ward in October 1983, joining his colleague Paul Bowdage who had been elected at the 1982 all-up elections. Both subsequently lost their seats in a vicious three-party fight in 1986, when Labour and the Conservatives took one seat each – and control of the council hung in the balance. It has been axiomatic to both main parties in Wandsworth that it is more important to keep the Liberals/Alliance/Lib Dems out than it is to fight each other – they didn’t want the borough to go the way of neighbouring Richmond. Paul and David have been the only councillors the party or its predecessors have ever had in Wandsworth.

I got to know David after the 1987 general election – having been a member of Putney SDP. I spent quite a bit of time in neighbouring Tooting helping out in the party’s heroic but unsuccessful battle to take Graveney ward off Labour, from 1986 (or before) to 2010. After 1986 David was agent for all of that time – he was Tooting’s leading agent until 2019. “Where we work, we win”, we were told. (At least I got a wife out of it!) There may have been little to show for all David’s work in election results, but generations of activists had the benefit of David’s help and advice and went on the achieve great things elsewhere. And for those of us that stayed in Wandsworth, he helped keep us sane.

David was known for kindness, reliability, generosity and unflappability throughout this time – and a dry sense of humour. There are far too many stories to tell. My favourite was the time that council candidates in Battersea were asked to find their own nominations for the elections. They kept promising until David discovered on the final day for submission that they hadn’t been done in one ward. He went down there and signed people up at the bus stop in the morning rush hour and got the nominations in to the Returning Officer at the last minute. If the party in Battersea and Tooting had been reduced to a single person (and there were many thin times), David would have been that person.

Throughout his time, David was totally self-effacing. He never wanted credit or attention. When I was Treasurer, he would quietly approach me with a generous donation, and tell me to keep it quiet. He also kept his politics separate from other aspects of his life. It was only after his death that we found out that he was a practising Quaker. And yet that was completely consistent with the highly principled man we knew.

With unscrupulous and attention-seeking opportunists getting all the press, it is as well to remember that politics also includes people like David. He will be sorely missed.

* Matthew is a Lib Dem activist who blogs at thinkingliberal.co uk.