Liberal Democrats in Kent, Yorkshire and Manchester in particular will remember Michael Steed as a candidate, councillor, and activist on many issues over more than 60 years.  Others will recall him as party president in 1978-9, as a regular attender of party conferences in spite of being wheel-chair bound by a neurological disease that resisted precise diagnosis, and latterly as an active member of the Liberal History Group and of its journal’s editorial board.

Michael grew up on a farm in Kent, went to a local independent school, and took six months before he went to Cambridge University in 1959 to work on the continent, coming back a convinced European and internationalist. After narrowly losing election to the presidency of the university Liberal Club he became president of the Union of Liberal Students (then a separate organization from the Young Liberals).  There he cultivated closer links with ‘the World Federation of Liberal and Radical Youth’ and its Swedish president, Margareta Holmstedt.  They married some years later, and set up home in Todmorden.

He was, however, always as much of a scholar as a campaigner.  He was a student of David Butler at Nuffield College Oxford from 1963-65 (alongside Alan Beith), and then for many years a lecturer in government at Manchester University.  As a student he already demonstrated an astonishingly detailed knowledge of parliamentary and local government elections.  He contributed the statistical appendix to the Nuffield election studies through many elections, in later ones in cooperation with John Curtice.  Teaching about the British constitution and commitment to political and electoral reform linked his professional and political lives.

Michael was on the radical wing of the 1960 Young Liberals, becoming vice-chair of NLYL’. He campaigned on apartheid in South Africa, on gay rights and on joining the European Community. He fought his first parliamentary campaign in the Brierly Hill by-election in 1967, gaining less than 8% of the vote. From his study of constituency histories and results he then decided that Truro was one of the most promising prospects, and travelled down to fight it in the 1970 election – disappointingly coming third.  He came closest to entering Parliament in the bitter Manchester Exchange by-election in 1973 – a safe Labour seat, almost entirely council housing, where Labour reacted furiously to what councillors saw as a Liberal ‘invasion’, in the wake of by-election wins elsewhere.  After an enthusiastic campaign in a seat that had had no Liberal activity (and which Labour had taken for granted) he gained 36.5% of the vote.  Typically, he afterwards wrote an academic article which noted that the real winner had been the 56% who had not voted.

Michael fought Manchester Central, one of the two seats into which the Exchange constituency had been divided, in February 1974, the European elections in 1979, and Burnley in 1983.  But he put more effort into the national party, as a member of the national executive and then as president.  Like most of his Young Liberal contemporaries he had been unhappy with Jeremy Thorpe’s leadership; happier with David Steel, he nevertheless wanted him to pay more sympathetic attention to the party’s activists.

Alongside his party campaigning, he was a prominent member of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality from the late 1960s, and at one point its treasurer. In the mid-1970s he also created (with Ray Temperton) the Campaign for the North, with financial assistance from Rowntree, to push for regional government for England’s six northern counties.

The neurological illness which later developed confined him to a mobility scooter.  Separated from Margareta and unable to cope with Todmorden’s steep streets, he moved back to Canterbury, where he became an honorary lecturer in politics at the University of Kent and, in time, a local Councillor.  He entered a civil partnership with Barry Clements, which became marriage earlier this year.  And he continued to write on political and historical themes, including for the Journal of Liberal History, and to take an active interest in local, national and international politics until he died.

He was a real Liberal: happy to be in a minority arguing for change on a range of issues, undeterred by those who thought him obsessive or eccentric in his enthusiasms, a valued teacher to a great many students in Manchester and Canterbury, and a scholar who valued evidence and reasoned argument against emotion and prejudice.

William Wallace was a contemporary of Michael Steed at Cambridge and Manchester, and in recent years a colleague on the editorial board of the Journal of Liberal History.

* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.