Denis MacShane

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The Right Honourable Denis MacShane (born May 21, 1948) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, and was the Minister of State for Europe at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until the ministerial reshuffle that followed the 2005 general election. He first entered Parliament after a 1994 by-election caused by the death of Jimmy Boyce.

He was born as Denis Matyjaszek, to a British woman and her Polish husband, who had fought in the Second World War and remained in exile after it. After attending Merton College, Oxford where he read history, and doing a PhD in international economics at the University of London, he started working for the BBC in 1969. He changed his surname to his mother's maiden name at the request of his employers. He became an activist for the National Union of Journalists and later its president. He was Director of the European Policy Institute from 1992 to 1994.

He was a supporter of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, where he was arrested in 1982 for attending a demonstration, and deported.

He first contested as parliamentary seat at the October 1974 general election, where he failed to win Solihull. He was elected to the House of Commons in the 1994 Rotherham by-election, and served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to a succession of ministers in the 1997-2001 Parliament. After the 2001 general election, he was made a junior minister at the Foreign Office with responsibility for the Balkans and Latin America, becoming the Minister of State for Europe in 2002 in the reshuffle caused by the resignation of Estelle Morris.

He caused some embarrassment to the government in 2002 by describing President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela as a 'ranting, populist demagogue' and compared him to Mussolini during a failed military coup attempt to depose the democratically elected president. [link] [link] Afterwards he had to make clear that, as minister with responsibility for Latin America, the government deplored the coup attempt. [link] [link]

Some people consider him to have been one of the most talented Ministers for Europe, and perhaps the most passionately and naturally pro-european holder of this office.

After the 2005 general election, he was dropped from the government. MacShane's failure to remain in government is believed to have been his falling between the two stools of being neither overtly a Blairite nor a Brownite, and thus, in his own words, having "no hand to push [him] up the greasy pole". He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 2005 in recognition of his work as a Minister. [link] He has continued to write columns for The Guardian since his fall from the heights of government, as well as appearing on Television programmes relating to European affairs both here in Britain and in other European countries.

In 2005 he became a signatory of the Henry Jackson Society principles, advocating a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world, including by military intervention. The society supports "European military modernisation and integration under British leadership".

On 14 March, 2004, his daughter by Carol Barnes, Clare Barnes, died in Australia after her parachute failed to open on her 200th skydiving jump.

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