Stan was a great fan of Louis Armstrong. My 3 older sisters and younger brother and I have lots of memories of dancing with him at Sunday dinnertime.

Growing up, our family was large and noisy. There were 6 of us (Tom, of course, came along much later) plus any number of visitors in the week – from Labour colleagues to constituents, former pupils to political refugees, and friends who had fought against Franco in the International Brigade, to name a few. As a family we attended meetings, rallies and marches for a host of political causes and, even if I was sometimes a little bored when I was small, I looked forward with pride to Stan taking the platform to speak.

I sometimes felt slightly self-conscious when my friends came to tea: in contrast to the child-centric meals I had at their houses, when they came to ours the entire family would eat together and there was certainly no dumbing down of the conversation. But I grew to appreciate this as I got older. I could turn up at a moment's notice with friends - even as I did on one occasion with 2 car loads of friends en route from the South of France to North Wales with hardly a natural coloured hair between us - and everyone would be offered a place at the tea table, inspiring political debate into the early hours, and a bed for the night.

I remember to this day, my Dad coming home from teaching when I was about 3 or 4 in the early 1970s, with an 11 year old pupil who had been reluctant to go home, on account of the fact that his mum had had to leave him to travel abroad for a few weeks. In a move rather contrary to modern child protection protocols Stan popped the child in the car and brought him home to Harlow for the weekend. A year or so later he came to live with us as our foster brother.

For me, this says so much about my parents’ fearless humanity. They were both uncompromising in their preparedness to do what was right even though, in this case as in many others, it was certainly not the easiest path to take.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s I had no knowledge of many of the television programs discussed by my peers, as content in our house was strictly monitored. At the appearance of the racist comedians that were a staple of Saturday night television back then, the channel would be switched or the television turned off. Indeed, entertainers who expressed support for Margaret Thatcher received similar treatment.

Stan always sat at the head of the table and was certainly sensitive to any sign of disrespect from his children. Yet, he pushed and supported all of us to achieve our full potential, through university, professionally and personally, and was greatly angered by any kind of discrimination or unfairness that we or others experienced as women.

As an MP and MEP, Stan travelled widely. He sometimes expressed his slight unease at the prospect of sitting on plane, as he put it, “up in the Lord Mayor” and, although I understood perfectly, it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that it dawned on me that this was actually Cockney Rhyming slang. He was intrepid in his desire and ability to apprise himself and his family of the history and politics of any planned destination. He spoke French rather well and dabbled in several other languages. Before any trip he would irritate our mum by sitting up in bed half the night muttering from a foreign language phrase book. He had a phenomenal memory and could manage to turn a phrase or two almost wherever he went and, for example, made a very passable speech in Russian at my wedding in Tbilisi. His cultural curiosity, nevertheless, did not generally extend to food. He would usually avoid eating elsewhere if at all possible in order to return home for his favourite salad which, in season, would invariably come largely from the garden.

Even gardening, Stan was rarely seen without a tie. Growing vast quantities of fruit and vegetables was considered a moral imperative, as was our participation in this process. We were charged with tasks such as mowing the lawn, tying up tomato plants or delivering buckets of windfall apples to neighbours, under strict instructions to accept nothing in return. Come autumn it was all hands on deck for picking, wrapping and boxing the apples, hanging the onions, digging the potatoes and photographing the pumpkins that would see us through winter when, at last, we could look forward to occasional Sunday morning trips to Club Row and Colombia Road market instead of gardening. A healthy diet was a virtue, as was physical fitness and well into his 50s Stan would periodically get up from the tea table to perform a handstand, just to prove that he wasn’t past it!

Holidays were in the British Isles and consisted largely of visits to places of historical interest and long walks, with lots of bookshops thrown in! Beaches also featured and sometimes Stan would help to build a wall of sandcastles to protect us all as the tide came in, although he was only once or twice known to remove his shoes and socks; generally, he would sit in shirt, tie, jacket and long trousers with a weighty tome or a pile of papers, writing with his usual fountain pen. In fact, this is just one reason why, when the media identified our Dad as the lover that Hollywood actress Shirley MacLaine had described in her autobiography massaging her back with sun cream on some tropical beach, our whole family was highly amused!

However, the main problem with the credibility of this story was of course, our Dad’s love for our Mum, Sandra. Stan frequently articulated his view that she was, objectively, the most beautiful of women. Sophia Loren, he declared, “wasn't a patch on Sandra”. Sandra was his rock and, without her support, acquiescence, assistance and forbearance, much of what Stan achieved during his life would have been impossible. During one of my visits in his last couple of weeks he recounted again in detail his first meeting with our mum and the early part of his relationship with her. There was little in this story that was unfamiliar and he came back again and again, as he did throughout his life, to the fact that he had been incredibly lucky to have the love and partnership of this truly wonderful woman through 55 years of marriage.

In the end, Stan faced his demise much as he had faced the rest of his life: in control, as he chose, at home in his family’s embrace and surrounded with his books. We will miss him so deeply but, my goodness, we are lucky we had him for so long, and that we have so much to remember him by.