Cardiffian David Marquand, who died in April, was a public intellectual and sophisticated thinker of high integrity, acute awareness and resolute sense of purpose. With his open and inquiring mind he searched ceaselessly for solutions to the multitude of intractable problems that seem to be intrinsic to the human condition. He navigated a turbulent course through UK politics while building parallel careers as a distinguished academic, a perceptive author and an astute contemporary commentator, before finally coming to the conclusion all Welsh people with brains and principles invariably arrive at, that there is an urgent need for Wales to become an independent nation state free from the atrocious, crippling grip of Britain/England. He understood fully that the bringing of Wales into being would not only be unimaginably beneficial for Wales, but also for the rest of the UK and for the world.

David Marquand took a long and winding road to get to this considered position – but a dormant Welsh consciousness had always been with him from his earliest years. On the male side of his family his roots lay on the island of Guernsey where his great-grandfather Hilary Marquand (1825-1872) ran away to sea as a cabin boy at age 14. Rising up the ranks to become a master mariner, he settled in boomtown coal port Cardiff in 1867 and founded shipping firm Martin & Marquand with a friend. Operating tugs and a paddle steamer from offices at Dock Chambers (a building in West Bute Street that survives to this day), the firm thrived even after Hilary Marquand’s death from smallpox when only 46. He had five children and two of his three sons took over the running of the business while the third son, the less driven Alfred Marquand (1861-1920), David’s grandfather, became a jobbing clerk. Like all the Marquands up to that point, Alfred was a died-in-the-wool Tory – but that allegiance was blown away by his son, David’s father Hilary Marquand (1901-1972).

This Hilary Marquand was the polar opposite of his namesake grandfather. Instead of an anti-intellectual Tory, he was an idealistic, brainy socialist by the time he was in his teens, selling leftwing newspapers at the dock gates just yards from where his uncles were making enough profits to enable both to live in big houses in posh Penarth. Alfred’s family, in contrast, got by in middle-class Roath, where talented Hilary won a scholarship to Cardiff High School for Boys and then gained entry to University College, Cardiff, graduating with first class honours in history in 1923 and economics in 1924. He garnered academic experience in the USA and England before being appointed professor of industrial relations back in Cardiff in 1930 – at the time the youngest university professor in the UK. Through the 1930s Hilary Marquand built his reputation as a leading authority on industrial relations and an expert on the Welsh economy, writing a sequence of important books on these topics from his committed perspective on the left of the Labour Party. In 1929 he married schoolteacher Rachel Rees (1902-1985) from Ystalyfera, a working-class village and Welsh language stronghold in the western Glamorgan coalfield, and they settled in Llanisien in north Cardiff with their three children including David Marquand.

When WW2 intervened Hilary was drafted into various civil service departments in Cardiff for the duration. To escape the bombing his wife and children moved out of Cardiff from 1940 to 1944, living in a string of rural Glamorgan locations with the home of Rachel’s parents in Ystalyfera always the primary safe haven and welcoming hearth. It was in this period that young David discovered his mother’s side of the family, and thus was implanted in him a deep affinity with Wales and a profound sense of Welshness. The Rees family had an extraordinary history. David’s great-grandfather Ebenezer Rees (1848-1908) was born in Sirhowy, Gwent, and brought up by relatives of his mother in Cwmtwrch, a few miles from Ystalyfera, when orphaned as an infant. Working in the local colliery from the age of seven, in 1868 he was dismissed and blacklisted by the coal owners for being a trade union activist, forcing him and his wife Jane (nee James) to emigrate to the USA. They settled in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, a home-from-home in the Appalachian Mountains for Welsh people fleeing oppressive Britain. Here, where America’s first deep anthracite mine was sunk in 1824 and first ever eisteddfod was held in 1850, Jane taught Ebenezer to read and write before they decided to return to Wales in 1872. In Ystalyfera, with a mission to emancipate the Welsh people through literacy and knowledge, he kept a bookshop before opening a printing works in 1877. As well as countless ballads and pamphlets by poets and authors of the Aman and Tawe valleys, he established many publications centred on social issues and the labour movement serving the industrial areas of the coalfield, most notably in 1898 Llais Llafur (‘Labour Voice’) the first socialist newspaper in Wales – a weekly that would keep going until 1971.

This heritage of Welsh leftist radicalism influenced David hugely and, after the War ended and the Marquand family were back in Llanisien, it was supplemented by his father’s increasing involvement in front-line UK politics. Hilary Marquand was elected Labour MP for Cardiff East in 1945, toppling Churchill’s War Secretary in the landslide that swept the Tories from power. In these heady days, David watched and learned as his father brought his Fabian socialism to Westminster as Paymaster General, Minister of Pensions and then Minister of Health in the Attlee government. When the Cardiff East constituency was abolished in time for the 1950 general election and divided up between new constituencies Cardiff North and Cardiff South-East – where a young Englishman called James Callaghan (1912-2005) won the seat for Labour – Marquand was given the safe seat of Middlesbrough East, far from Wales in northern England, and remained a respected and prominent figure on the Labour left as the Tories returned to power in the 1950s. Tired of Labour infighting and disillusioned with Westminster politicking, he eventually stood down as an MP in 1961 to take up a post as Director of the Institute of Labour Studies in Geneva, a job perfectly suited to his humane, sane and able administrative skills.

By this time, David Marquand was following in his father’s footsteps. After a secondary school education in thoroughly English Emanuel Grammar School in London, where the family had relocated, he studied politics at Oxford University (Magdalen College and, as a postgraduate, St Anthony’s College) and then the University of California, Berkeley. At this juncture a staunch supporter of the Labour Party, he began his eminent academic career as a politics lecturer at the University of Sussex (he would go on to occupy chairs in politics at Salford and Sheffield and become Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford). Meanwhile, over the years, he hugely enriched the UK’s political sphere with a prolific output of superbly-written books, essays and journalism. His first published book, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), set the bar high and remains the definitive account of the life of the first Labour Prime Minister. Marquand went on to write lucid analyses of how best to achieve socialism and forensic dissections of the British State and all its many faults. Particularly noteworthy are The Unprincipled Society (1988), The Progressive Dilemma (1991), The New Reckoning (1997), The Decline of the Public (2004), Britain Since 1918 (2008) and Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain Now (2014).

His direct campaigning career commenced as the losing Labour candidate at Barry in the 1964 general election, when he halved the Tory majority, before he soon became an MP in England when winning the Nottinghamshire seat of Ashfield in 1966. Diligent, calm and civilised, he was a well-respected MP on Labour’s centre-left for 11 years until he resigned in 1977 to become chief adviser to another Welshman, Labour grandee Roy Jenkins (1920-2003), who had also left Westminster to accept the post of President of the European Commission in Brussels. Marquand had seen the writing on the wall for James Callaghan’s faction-fragmented administration and the dedicated Europhile was far more suited to what was then an idealistic and hopeful European project.

Following Thatcher’s win in the 1979 election, David Marquand was one of the key figures in the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. This revisionist ‘centrist’ breakaway from schism-racked Labour, co-ordinated by the ‘Gang of Four’ led by Roy Jenkins, was a real milestone in Marquand’s political evolution as it meant leaving the Labour Party he had joined as a teenager. Despite some early successes, the SDP fizzled out quite quickly, merging with the Liberal Party in 1988 to become the Social Democratic & Liberal Party and ultimately today’s Liberal Democrats. Marquand stuck with this increasingly marginalised alliance until rejoining Labour in 1995 when Tony Blair became leader. But his optimistic faith in progressive gradualism rather than serious radicalism was to again prove mistaken. One word here will suffice as explanation: Iraq. In 2003 David Marquand quit Labour again and dallied with the LibDems. He had one final flirtation with Labour in 2010 when the LibDems enabled the Tories to return to power, but finally broke with them for good in 2016, completely exasperated at Labour’s cowardly failure to campaign against Brexit that proved to be such a deciding factor in the narrow victory for the xenophobes, liars and far-right thugs. David Marquand now synthesised all his knowledge and experience of the British State and his loathing of its centralism, imperialism, corruption, greed, inequality, deference and ignorance. He returned to live in his beloved Wales, overlooking the Severn Sea in Penarth, with his wife since 1959 Judith Reed. And at the same time returned to his deepest instincts, his bone-marrow Welshness, his innate republicanism and the inspiring authentic radicalism and courage of Ebenezer Rees, and joined the Party of Wales. The circle was completed, he had come home.