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In his first speech at Westminster in March 1974, a month after being elected as the MP for the then newly created Midlands seat of West Bromwich East, Peter Snape, who has died aged 84, described his constituents as a “special brand” of people.

They were, he said, forthright and honest, with a down-to-earth sense of humour – a portrayal which the ensuing 50 years of active membership of both houses of parliament would also prove to be an unwittingly precise description of Snape himself.

Lord Snape, as he became in 2004, having stood down from the Commons at the preceding election in 2001, was someone who enhanced political life because he was clever and funny and sharp as a tack, but, much more importantly, because he spoke with the authentic voice of lived experience.

He had worked on the railways and been a regular soldier in the army. He knew what he was talking about and he instinctively understood what mattered to the men and women on the streets of West Bromwich, or anywhere else in the industrialised landscape of urban Britain.

He was sometimes wrongly characterised as being on Labour’s rightwing, because he had no time for what he saw as the self-conscious showmanship and posturing of the party’s left (Tony Benn was a particular bugbear) which, in his view, would do little to improve the lives of working people. His was a rooted socialism, founded by a fundamental belief in fairness and equality.

He was also a skilful political tactician, a natural for the Labour whips’ office, in which he served in the difficult days of the Wilson and Callaghan governments before 1979. On one occasion, he was profoundly shocked, when sitting on the government bench as the “duty whip” during a late-night debate, to be unexpectedly joined by the prime minister, James Callaghan, who asked him conversationally (and sotto voce) if he had ever thought of emigrating because “this country is finished”. Snape was still a relatively new and young MP and discreetly kept this exchange entirely private.

That he failed to become chief whip on the three occasions he stood in 1983, 1985 and 1990 for a post that was at that time elected by Labour MPs, was a personal disappointment and more a reflection on the internal politics of the parliamentary Labour party at the time than on his suitability for the office.

He also stood unsuccessfully in 1988 for the role of deputy chief whip. Snape was 55 by the time Tony Blair took office in 1997 and was then apparently deemed not a good fit for the red-rose “new” Labour government, despite unwavering party loyalty. When he left the Commons – with what proved the correct expectation of a peerage – he was subsequently an exceedingly assiduous participant in Lords’ debates.

Snape was “a proud son of Stockport”, in the words of the prime minister, Andy Burnham, who also said: “He was a good friend to me.” He was a lifelong supporter of Stockport County FC, of which he was a board member from 2010 until 2013.

He was born in Stockport, the only child of Kathleen (nee Critchley) and Thomas Snape. His mother was a former laundry worker. His father was a railwayman, a carriage and wagon examiner, but did not meet his son until he returned from second world war service, bringing his boy a train set as a gift.

In accordance with his mother’s faith, Peter was a pupil at Roman Catholic primary schools in Stockport, St Bede’s RC College, Manchester, and Dialstone secondary school in Bramhall, before leaving aged 15 to follow his father into the railways.

He first became a trainee signalman, living in lodgings beside his signal box, Edgeley No 2, constructed in 1884 and still standing today, south of Stockport. When he failed to be given charge of the box after four years, he gave notice and joined the army four days later.

He served with the Royal Engineers and then the Royal Corps of Transport from 1961 until 1967 before returning to the railways as a goods guard for three years and then in a clerical post. He was an active trade unionist in the National Union of Railwaymen, joined the Labour party and in 1971 was elected to Bredbury and Romiley urban district council (then a part of Stockport) where he served until elected to parliament.

He was swiftly preferred as an MP, serving as a member of the Council of Europe and the Western European Union in 1975 before joining the whips’ office. He was a senior whip (1977-79), a junior defence spokesman (1979-82) and a home affairs spokesman for a year thereafter.

Neil Kinnock then appointed Snape as a transport spokesman, where he remained as a useful and combative member of the frontbench throughout Kinnock’s years as leader, from 1983 until 1992. His streetwise political expertise was often called upon as a “minder” in parliamentary byelections and he travelled widely on parliamentary fact-finding missions.

A natural raconteur, Snape could spin any incident into an anecdote. The former prime minister, John Major, recounts in his memoirs how, on a tour of the Middle East in 1982, an all-party group of MPs was caught in crossfire near Bethlehem and had to throw themselves underneath a vehicle. In this incident only Snape “entirely by chance, he claimed, found himself beside one of our attractive guides”. When they met Yasser Arafat on the same trip, the Palestinian leader asked how he should address one of the Tory politicians, Richard Needham, who had explained that he was a half-Jewish, half-Irish earl. “Kneeling,” said Snape. “Kneeling.”

Another much relished anecdote involved a disagreement with Sir Alf Sherman, an adviser to the Thatcher government and based at 10 Downing Street, who wrote to Snape demanding an apology for what he alleged was libel, defamation, impropriety and bias, and threatening legal action. Snape replied suggesting that “some ill-educated nutter has obviously stolen your notepaper”. He heard nothing more.

He suffered a costly court case in 2009 when a newspaper attempted to entrap him as available for hire, purportedly as one of four peers prepared to support legislation in exchange for a fee. Snape was cleared by the privileges committee and successfully sued the Sunday Times, which paid a “substantial sum” towards his legal costs.

He also engendered unfavourable publicity as a result of a share option he had acquired when an unpaid non-executive director of Travel West Midlands, a council-owned bus operator. The company was then bought by National Express, giving Snape an estimated £70,000 profit on his shareholding.

Snape married Winifred Grimshaw in 1963. The couple had two daughters and divorced in 1980. He subsequently married Janet Manley, a schoolteacher, in 2004; they separated and she died in 2024.

In later years he found great happiness with Lynda Waltho (nee Abbott), the former MP for Stourbridge. They were married earlier this year, and she survives him, together with his daughters, Angela and Katie.

• Peter Charles Snape, Lord Snape, railwayman and politician, born 12 February 1942; died 13 August 2026