# Denzil Davies

David John Denzil Davies PC (9 October 1938 – 10 October 2018) was a Welsh Labour Party politician. He served for 35 years as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Llanelli from 1970 to 2005. He was a Treasury Minister (1975–1979); a member of Labour's Shadow Cabinet team (1979–1988); and a member of the Privy Council.

## Early life

The son of a colliery blacksmith, Denzil Davies was born and brought up in Cynwyl Elfed, in rural Carmarthenshire. From his childhood in this Welsh-speaking area, Davies spoke Welsh fluently. He attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School for Boys in Carmarthen, and then Pembroke College, Oxford, where he graduated with a First Class Honours BA in Law and Gray's Inn where he qualified as a barrister. He lectured in Law at the University of Chicago in 1963 and the University of Leeds from 1964. He practised at the tax bar between 1967 and 1975. Later he also practised in the field of personal injuries and served as a head of chambers.

## Parliamentary career

Davies unsuccessfully sought the Labour nomination for the 1966 Carmarthen by-election, losing out to Gwilym Prys-Davies.
Davies was elected in the 1970 general election as the Member of Parliament for Llanelli, following Jim Griffiths.
From June 1975 to May 1979, he was a Treasury Minister in the Labour Government first of Harold Wilson and then of James Callaghan.
A Eurosceptic, Davies campaigned against Britain's entry into the EEC.
He was a supporter of Welsh devolution in the 1979 Referendum. In 1997, he was a strong critic of the Labour Government's plans for limited devolution for Wales, challenging them as inadequate and undemocratic.
Davies served in a number of posts when Labour formed the Official Opposition after the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, including Shadow Secretary of State for Wales in Michael Foot's Shadow Cabinet and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in Neil Kinnock's. He was popular among Labour MPs, and was regularly elected to the Shadow Cabinet without being part of any factional “slate” and without any organised campaign: in 1986 he reached third place in the Shadow Cabinet ballot.
Like his predecessor as Shadow Defence Secretary, John Silkin, he resigned from the front bench in June 1988 in protest at Neil Kinnock's management style. The trigger for his resignation was Kinnock's announcement, without reference to Davies or the Shadow Cabinet, of a change in Labour's defence policy, from unilateral nuclear disarmament to multilateral nuclear disarmament and then back to unilateral nuclear disarmament, over a period of three days. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Labour Party deputy leadership in 1983.
Davies was one of the few Labour MPs with ministerial experience at the time of the 1997 landslide that returned the party to power after 18 years in opposition. However, he was not included in any of the governments formed by Tony Blair. As a backbencher Davies continued to oppose Britain's membership of the EU.
In March 2003, he was one of the Labour MPs who voted against the Iraq War.
He stood down at the 2005 general election, and was succeeded by Nia Griffith. He died on 10 October 2018.

## Personal life

He married Mary Ann Finlay in 1963. They had a son and daughter. They divorced in 1988. He married Ann Carlton in 1989.

## Publications

* Booth: Residence and Domicile in U.K. Taxation (successive editions)
* Maximise Damages, Minimise Taxes (1993)
* World Trade Organisation and GATT (1994)
* The Galilean and the Goose – How Christianity converted the Roman Empire (2010 ISBN 978-0-9566489-0-7)