Lord Triesman obituary
The wide-ranging diversity of the employment and pursuits in the packed public life of David Triesman, Lord Triesman, who has died aged 82, was fuelled by a visionary idealism he first displayed as a teenage schoolboy and which he thereafter sustained throughout a rollercoaster ride in sport, business and politics,He began his working life as an academic, spent nearly two decades as a trade union leader, ran the Labour party as general secretary for two years in the troubled run-up to the Iraq war from 200103 and then became a government minister in the House of Lords,A qualified senior football referee who had played for Tottenham Hotspur’s youth team in the 1960s, he served as chair of the Football Association from 2008 to 2010,He remained an active member of the Lords and numerous public bodies, and in 2011 founded his own consultancy dealing in property and private equity,In a letter he wrote from Labour’s headquarters as general secretary in 2003, he sought to re-engage the political commitment of disaffected party members, after the early shine of the Blair government was dimmed with disillusion, by defining his own lifelong fervour for a fairer world.
It was this search for fairness that became his lodestar,He himself had been raised in a political household, rattling with the sort of debate and intellectual argument that encouraged radical thinking, and his career experience had taught him to pursue consensus,“I take a pride in making things work,” he said once,Neither of his two most high profile posts, at the Labour party and the FA, was marked by great success in this respect and both were cut short,His job at the top of football – which included chairmanship of England’s 2018 Fifa World Cup bid – came to an immediate end with his enforced resignation in 2010 when a newspaper sting secretly recorded him alleging bribery of referees by Spain and Russia in the run-up to that year’s World Cup.
He had been brought in previously to run the Labour party, chosen for his flair and creativity by the then chair Charles Clarke, and had helped to stabilise party finance and bolster trade union support for an increasingly beleaguered Tony Blair.But tensions emerged when Ian McCartney became chair in 2003 and Triesman’s tenure was abbreviated by a combination of unfortunate personal publicity – it was revealed that he lived in a house owned by an offshore trust in financially advantageous circumstances that the government had promised to abolish – and the outcome of the Brent East byelection that September, the first Labour loss for 15 years, on a humiliating 29% swing against the party.He was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and brought up in a prefab in north London within earshot of Spurs’ former home ground at White Hart Lane.His parents were both Jewish communists: his father, Michael, an advertising manager for the Daily Worker who became a director of a publishing business, and his mother, Rita (nee Lubran), a teacher and actor.His father was of east European extraction and his mother was French.
David’s second given name was to honour Maxim Gorky, the Soviet socialist writer.He was educated at the Stationers’ Company’s school in Hornsey, joined the Labour party at 16 and worked in journalism briefly before resuming his studies at the University of Essex.He graduated with a BA in philosophy and sociology in 1968, the year of student revolution across Europe, by which time he was already known as a founder member of the Radical Student Alliance, had been briefly suspended for his activities and acquired the revolutionary students’ equivalent of a badge of honour, an MI5 file.Between 1970 and 1976 he was a Communist party member, after which he rejoined Labour.He took a master’s in philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge, and from 1970 until 1974 worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, London University, studying addiction.
He then made his first move into the trade union world, employed on secondment at the white collar union the ASTMS (Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs), before returning to academic work as a lecturer and research director at the South Bank Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in 1975,In 1984 he became national negotiating secretary for the lecturers’ union Natfhe and in 1993 moved to become general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, until appointed to run the Labour party,Triesman had become friends with Blair and was fully supportive of his modernising leadership,Among the bonds between the two was a love of music – both played the electric guitar – and Triesman helped to mark a decade of Blair’s leadership of the party in 2004 with a jamming session, playing Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry,It was a measure of the fact that there had been no serious falling out between them the previous year when Triesman had agreed reluctantly to leave the position of general secretary in exchange for an immediate promotion to the House of Lords and a government job in the whips’ office.
He was also a frontbench spokesman until appointed junior minister at the Foreign Office in 2005.When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, Triesman was switched to the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, with responsibility for intellectual property and quality.He was shadow spokesman on business under Ed Miliband from 2010 and for foreign affairs from 2011 until 2015.He was popular at Westminster because he was charming, thoughtful and persuasive in argument.He was also regarded as a man of integrity, winning widespread praise in 2011 for calling out the shortcomings in football when he testified before a parliamentary inquiry into football governance.
One insider in the sport said of Triesman’s term at the FA that he was “too straight, too honest and too nice” to succeed,He had a host of academic awards and visiting fellowships,He also accepted public appointments dealing with education, affordable housing, industrial relations, finance and regulation,Triesman is survived by his wife, Lucy Hooberman, a documentary film-maker, whom he married in 2004, and their daughter, Ilona,David Maxim Triesman, Lord Triesman, politician, trade unionist and merchant banker, born 30 October 1943; died 30 January 2026
Bald eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd: is Budweiser’s all-American Super Bowl ad serious?
Featuring an unlikely animal friendship, the commercial boasts enough patriotic iconography to verge on self-parodyThree years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger
Barclays reportedly cuts ties with lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson
Barclays has reportedly cut ties with the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, after intense scrutiny of the founders’ dealings with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Vodafone has also said it is reviewing its contract for public affairs services with Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010 after Labour lost the general election.Mandelson has tried to distance himself from the lobbying firm after the revelations of the extent of his relationship with Epstein sparked a major political scandal. Mandelson resigned from the Labour party on Sunday.The former minister was sacked as ambassador to the US in September after the emergence of emails that suggested he had a close relationship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial over child sex-trafficking charges
Amazon reveals plans to spend $200bn in one year day after Bezos guts Washington Post
Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race.The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees.Amazon also reported $213bn in revenue on Thursday. The fourth quarter earnings of the ecommerce and cloud computing giant came in slightly below Wall Street estimates even as sales and growth surged.Amazon will increase capital spending to $200bn this year from $125bn, CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release
Bitcoin loses half its value in three months amid crypto crunch
Bitcoin’s price sank to $63,000 on Thursday, its lowest level in more than a year, and half its all-time peak of $126,000, reached in October 2025. A months-long dip in cryptocurrency prices has tanked shares of companies that have increasingly invested in bitcoin, exacerbating broader stock market jitters.Bitcoin rode a high during Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2024 and throughout 2025; its price steadily increased as the president made one industry-friendly move after another. Crypto’s largest currency hit $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and even rose to a record high of $126,210.50 on 6 October, according to Coinbase
Bielle-Biarrey stars as France outplay Ireland to lay down a Six Nations marker
The Six Nations is under way and already a couple of things are crystal clear. It is going to take a seriously good team to beat France in Paris in this year’s championship and watching them attack will be an absolute treat. Ireland were not so much beaten as outplayed by opponents who will be even more dangerous with a dry ball at their disposal.Never mind the argument about brief in-game adverts during ITV’s coverage. Irish fans would probably have preferred a total 80-minute blackout or, failing that, an entire evening of cookery programming
JD Vance’s first Olympic appearance unfolds with more photo-ops than protests
Several thousand spectators who turned up for a Thursday afternoon hockey game in Milan’s western suburbs may have gotten a sneak preview of the 2028 Republican ticket when US vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio attended the United States women’s Olympic opener. With one hockey game already postponed because of norovirus, Olympic organizers could have been forgiven for hoping to avoid any other sudden waves of nausea inside the secondary rink across town.Vance is in Italy to lead the official US delegation at Friday’s opening ceremony, joined by second lady Usha Vance, Rubio and billionaire Tilman Fertitta, the US ambassador to Italy and owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The group watched Thursday’s game from the second and third rows at center ice behind the scorer’s table alongside Olympic gold medal-winning hockey sisters Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Monique Lamoureux-Morando.Maybe it was the roughly four dozen US Secret Service agents forming something close to a Roman testudo around Vance’s party that tempered any potential negative reception
Shell will consider fossil fuel investment in Venezuela, says chief executive
Rio Tinto and Glencore abandon revived $260bn merger plan
‘Orwellian’: Sainsbury’s staff using facial recognition tech eject innocent shopper
How cryptocurrency’s second largest coin missed out on the industry’s boom
Team GB chief predicts ‘most potent’ Winter Games ever with sights set on eight medals
Feyi-Waboso hands England Six Nations injury scare 48 hours before Wales opener