The communist firebrand, David Triesman, who morphed into a Labour minister and eventually a peer, was noted for his twin passions: politics and sport. As a minister in the Blair government, general secretary of the Labour Party, Foreign Office minister and FA chair, Lord Triesman, who has died aged 82, was widely praised for the loyalty which won him the respect and love of colleagues.
To Sir Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, he represented a “vital part of the New Labour movement,” who also “became in time a great friend.”
“Passionate about the cause, whether the Labour party or football, he was deeply committed to making change to improve people’s lives,” said Blair. The two shared a love of blues and rock music and sometimes jammed together on electric guitar.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer paid tribute to his “brilliant contribution to our party and country.” But it was a career not unmarked by remonstrations and controversy. A spark of his firebrand nature returned when Triesman accused Fifa of Mafia style corruption. As first patron of the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation and the first independent chair of the Football Association, FA, from 2008 till 2010, Triesman campaigned against racism in football and promoted women’s football. But he soon became a vocal critic of corruption within Fifa’s ranks.
“Fifa, I’m afraid, behaves like a Mafia family,” he told the Lords after allegations of corruption in Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup. “It has a decades-long tradition of bribes, bungs and corruption.”
David Triesman, a smooth, grey haired figure in a dark suit and colourful tie, joined Blair’s government as Foreign Office minister in 2004, sitting on a variety of prominent select committees. Known for his emollient networking style and his conspiratorial smile, he became general secretary of the Labour Party and of the Association of University Teachers, serving as shadow minister for foreign affairs after Labour’s election defeat in 2010.
In that year he also stood down from his FA chairmanship and from England’s 2018 World Cup bid, after a tabloid newspaper recorded him accusing rival bidders of bribery. Those remarks, he asserted, were made in a private conversation and in his words – “never intended to be taken seriously.” But he later went for the jugular by urging Fifa to tackle the corruption charges made against it.
Adept by now in understanding the swerves of political fortune, he was nonetheless shocked when he said he had learned that the FA had to “buy” the right to host the World Cup. Triesman, himself a qualified referee, spoke about how Fifa chose its World Cup hosts at a parliamentary select committee, one year after his resignation.
He made various allegations against Fifa members, including that vice president Jack Warner had demanded £2.5 million to be allocated to a school in his native Trinidad and Tobago, or the request for an honorary UK knighthood from Paraguayan delegate Nicolás Leoz as a bribe for his support.
Both denied the allegations. Leoz was later indicted by the US Justice Department and died under house arrest.
“It was put to me as a former Foreign Office minister I would know how these things were organised and how to achieve it,” Triesman said wryly. He named others who had looked for favours in return for backing England’s bid. Triesman’s direct revelations made under parliamentary privilege boosted the investigations by both BBC Panorama and the Sunday Times into a corruption scandal, ending with the forced resignations of Fifa president Sepp Blatter and others, who were all banned from football activities in 2015.
David Maxim Triesman – named after the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky – was born in humble beginnings to a Jewish communist couple, Michael a newspaper advertising manager, and Rita née Lubran, a teacher and actress, in a prefab in White Hart Lane, north London near Tottenham Hotspur’s old ground. He became a lifelong football fan.
Michael’s forbears hailed from Latvia and Belarus. Their home was full of books, musical instruments and “fierce debates about everything”, Triesman told the JC in 2002. He left the Stationers’ Company’s School at 16, opting for a career in journalism, and studied philosophy and sociology at the new, radical University of Essex. He already rejected the Labour government under Harold Wilson and was one of three who “no platformed” a meeting addressed by TD Inch, a scientist from the Porton Down defence research centre. With his baggy jumper, unruly mass of dark curls, mini moustache and John Lennon glasses, he was the very personification of student activism, reading out a formal war crimes indictment against the beleaguered scientist. It earned him a suspension for several weeks, but supported by a student sit-in and lecture boycott, he was reinstated a week later.
Triesman became the national face of student protest in 1968, regularly featured in the national press, and a leader of the Radical Student Alliance, which helped co-ordinate anti-Vietnam war demos at the US embassy and nation wide protests.
Armed with a master’s in philosophy of science at King’s College London, he alleged he had been rejected by 19 universities to which he had applied for teaching posts, blaming it on his radicalism. Finally, in 1970 the Institute of Psychiatry in London offered him a research post. After joining the South Bank Polytechnic, four years later, he rejoined the Labour Party in 1976 and became deputy general secretary of the further and higher education teachers union in 1983. A decade later he was appointed general secretary of the Association of University Teachers.
His early life hardly predicted such political fortunes. As a communist student leader in 1968 he even had an MI5 file on him. With the rightward move of the Labour Party, Triesman joined a number of party task forces and public sector quangos, relating to education funding, business in the community, prison education and teachers’ pay. He grew closer to the Blairs and became the party’s general secretary, charged with making reforms.
He wanted to make the party more open and responsive to members’ concerns, notably on the Iraq war. He became adept at smoothing union leaders who rejected New Labour’s attempts to persuade the private sector to take over public services, and boosted union donations.
He worked closely with party chairman Charles Clarke – the bruiser to his soft cop – but Clarke’s replacement, Ian McCartney in 2003, rejected Triesman as a “middle class intellectual” and refused to co-operate with him. He believed he was scapegoated for Labour’s loss of Brent East to the Lib Dems in that year, but he had in fact, failed to follow procedure in declaring donations to the Labour Party. Then came revelations that his north London home was owned by an offshore trust, a loophole avoiding the rules on inheritance tax and capital gains tax. The chancellor Gordon Brown had pledged to clamp down on that loophole.
Triesman was told he had to resign, but Prime Minister Blair offered his friend a life peerage. He took his seat in the Lords in January 2004 and became Lords whip, followed by the role of a junior minister at the Foreign Office. He was unhappy at being moved by the new PM Gordon Brown to the newly created Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in 2007, but soon saw the advantages it offered on behalf of the government’s introduction of top-up feeds for students.
His chairmanship of the FA was a rare honour, coming as he approached 65, and the FA harboured great hopes for reform and better relations with the Premier League. Despite a wealth of TV attention, clubs were debt-ridden and often foreign-owned. Triesman insisted on an English member to sit on the boards of foreign-owned clubs, and “fit and proper persons” to own and run them. He also called on the FA to exercise more financial control, and campaigned against racism in football. But he was opposed by critics and forced to resign in May, 2010, after a secret tape was leaked to The Mail on Sunday, accusing Spain and Russia of bribing referees just before the 2018 World Cup.
Triesman became the party’s spokesman in the Lords on business and foreign affairs, during Labour’s subsequent term in opposition, but on its return to power in 2015 he refused to serve under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, resigning the whip in 2020 in protest at Corbyn’s inactivity over allegations of antisemitism. But he rejoined the party when Sir Kier Starmer took over. He was a life-long Tottenham supporter, despite his insight into the uglier side of the beautiful game.
He is survived by Lucy Hooberman, whom he married in 2004, with their daughter, Ilona.
GLORIA TESSLER
Lord Triesman: born October 30, 1943. Died January 30, 2026.
To get more news, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.