It is only the passage of time that has revealed the extent of the role played by Tom Sawyer, the former Labour general secretary, who has died aged 82, in the regeneration of his party before its triumphant return to power in the 1997 general election. He used his authority as a distinguished trade union leader and his credibility as a one-time stalwart of the left to show the Labour party membership a way out of the political wilderness.

It was his unseen hand that drew the route map. It was his work on the party’s national executive committee (NEC) that secured a radical review of Labour’s policies, specifically its previous commitments to unilateralism and opposition to Europe, after its humiliating third consecutive general election defeat in 1987. And it was he who recognised the need to modernise the party culture to reflect the politics of the time; he saw that this should address its approach to wealth creation and enterprise, and then effectively erected the scaffolding to remodel Labour’s own constitution.

His aim was to present Labour as an attractive and credible future government, with a realistic agenda that came from a process of democratic policymaking, while simultaneously avoiding the constant political divisions that had historically been publicly aired at party conferences. This was the origin of what became known as “partnership in power”, for which Sawyer prepared the ground as chair of the NEC’s influential home policy committee from 1987 and delivered when Tony Blair won the leadership in 1994 and appointed Sawyer general secretary.

He was a genial man who exuded the calm common sense for which he came to be lauded by successive Labour leaders and it was, perhaps, precisely because of his experience as a leftwing trade unionist, who had led his members out on strike, that he recognised the importance of consensus. He was close to Neil Kinnock and would quote the then Labour leader’s salient comment that “only people with very shallow convictions are afraid of compromise”. Sawyer’s particular skill lay in persuading others to an agreed position without seeming to promote his own viewpoint. Kinnock regarded him as a bridge who could “bring people over” and would quote him the Welsh proverb: “A fo ben, bid bont” (He who would be a leader, let him be a bridge).

The wellspring of Sawyer’s politics was a belief in social justice. He was born in Darlington, in the streets behind the town’s one-time major employer, the Cleveland Bridge Manufacturing company – famed for building the Sydney Harbour Bridge – the son of a railway worker and a domestic cleaner employed by a local doctor. He went to Dodmire primary school, Eastbourne comprehensive school and attended Darlington Technical College aged 13 to 15. He then became a “Stivvie”, apprenticed to Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns, Darlington’s famous locomotive builders, but was unemployed with a wife and son when the company closed five years later.

He moved his family to find work in the booming motor industry, with Lockheed Brakes in Leamington Spa, and most significantly for his career took an interest in trade unions, joining the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). His mentor, Geoff Thatcher, was a shop steward who looked like Karl Marx and opened a door in the young Sawyer’s mind by lending him books and political pamphlets. He was a shop steward himself within two years.

Returning to his home town for a job at Cummins’ Darlington engine plant, he joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) in order to secure union recognition for the white-collar workers. He became secretary of the Darlington Trades Council, met the local Labour MP and joined the Labour party in 1968; three years later he answered a Tribune advertisement for a post as a trade union official with the National Union of Public Employees (Nupe), taking a pay cut of a third of his £1,500 salary. He became deputy to his lifelong friend, Rodney Bickerstaffe, and in 1975 succeeded him as Nupe’s northern region organiser. In 1981, he followed Bickerstaffe to London to become his deputy general secretary at Nupe headquarters, which in turn gave Sawyer his place on the Labour NEC.

Sawyer was already far-sighted as a young, leather-jacketed, leftwing activist, seeing the need to move trade unionism onwards from its cloth-cap image. He had become a night-time student with the Workers’ Educational Association, was reading widely – cultivating an interest that would lead to a 5,000-book library and a fascination for antiquarian literature. As a union official he was involved in the 1973 ambulance workers’ strike in County Durham, in the 1974 widespread industrial action that led to the “three-day week” and the collapse of the Heath government, and in the “winter of discontent” public sector strikes of 1978-79, which contributed to the fall of the Callaghan government.

But he had also developed a concern for society that stretched beyond pay and conditions. This he articulated in a speech at the 1987 Labour conference, when he spoke movingly about his vision of a society where skills and wealth were harnessed to social need, deference replaced with dignity and fear with a sense of security. By this time Sawyer had become a focal member of the party “soft left”. He rejected the mindset of the union left, which had sought a general strike in support of the mineworkers’ year-long action in 1984-85, categorising it as the “worst kind of gesture politics”, but the crucial issue for him became his membership of the party inquiry into entrysim by the Trotskyist group, Militant – notably in Liverpool. His own conversations in the course of the inquiry led him to form a radically differing view from his NEC leftwing former associates, and his was the majority casting vote in 1986 in favour of expulsion of Militant members.

Sawyer played an important role in the 1993 formation of Unison: the amalgamation of Nupe with the Confederation of Health Service Employees (Cohse) and the National Association of Local Government Employees (Nalgo) to form a 1.3 million-member giant. He left the union the following year to become Labour’s general secretary, but first helped the Labour leader, John Smith, to deliver the one-member, one-vote reform at the 1993 Brighton conference.

He was interested in new methods of managing change in large organisations and took advice on the creation of Unison from Cranfield School of Management, a strategy he would subsequently extend to his Labour party constitutional reform during his four years as general secretary. On stepping down from that post in 1998, at Tony Blair’s request, he became a life peer.

He did not take an active role in the House of Lords, but delighted in his post as a visiting professor at Cranfield School of Management from (1999-2013). He was chancellor of the University of Teesside (2005-17) and president of the William Morris Society (2018-23). He was a popular chair of the Notting Hill Housing group and a non-executive director of Investors in People UK (both 1998-2005). He was also a director of the Britannia Building Society (1999-2009), chaired the Reed Health Group (2001-03) and the Royal Mail Partnership Board (2001-07).

Tom Sawyer adopted the name of Mark Twain’s fictional hero as a boy. In 1962 he married Sylvia Park and they had son, Mark; they later divorced. He is survived by Liz (Elizabeth), a former nursing sister and shop steward who became his second wife, their sons, Jack and Tom, and Mark.

• Tom (Lawrence) Sawyer, Lord Sawyer, trade unionist and politician, born 12 May 1943; died 3 August 2025