He distanced the party from the National Union of Teachers

He distanced the party from the National Union of Teachers.All this confirmed, to sceptical minds, that Straw was nothing more than a trimmer, permanently keeping in with the leadership But he has shown that he can step out of line. Then he criticised the monarchy, and proposed reforms that stopped only just short of republicanism.Now, Straw seems almost the quintessential Blairite moderniser. He established then the principle that he has pursued as shadow home secretary: do not oppose for the sake of opposing. Just as he now strives to avoid any charge that Labour is "soft on crime" so, on education, he would not have his party branded as "soft on low standards". Labour, he insisted, favoured a national curriculum and pupil testing as much as if not more than the Tories.

But when he joined the front bench, it was as a member of the environment team headed by Jack Cunningham, a leading member of the old right wing of the party The two remain close friends. By the time he was elected to the Shadow Cabinet in 1987, Straw's instincts were in tune with the modernising ethos of Neil Kinnock, another former Tribune member.His first Shadow Cabinet job was education, an important position at a time when Kenneth Baker was turning the schools upside-down. That was a premature judgement, but the performance diminished his status as an independent force on the front bench and tied him more closely to the party leader.WHEN he entered the Commons, Straw's natural home was the Tribune group. One (Tory) newspaper editor predicted that night that Straw would never recover. This can be a grievous handicap during debates and it is widely blamed for his disastrous Commons performance against Michael Howard last year, when the Home Secretary, seemingly in desperate trouble over his sacking of the prison service head, Derek Lewis, emerged triumphant.

He duly became an MP in 1979 and had made the front bench by 1984.It was not all plain sailing. A child died and his first marriage broke up, though he went on to marry a high-flying civil servant (now in the Treasury) in 1978. And, shortly after he entered Parliament, a virus left him with tinnitus, a cruel combination of a permanent high-pitched noise and deafness in one ear. The professor, Mrs Castle once explained, was employed for his brains, Jack for his guile and low cunning.

She remembers Straw now for his competence and unfailing diligence: after one all-night meeting he drove his boss home at 7.30am, the minister singing to keep him awake.In 1977, Straw, still barely in his thirties, was selected to fight Castle's Blackburn constituency on her retirement, as safe a Labour stronghold as any aspiring young politician could hope for. When Labour returned to power in 1974, Straw became Barbara's adviser at the Department of Social Services, alongside Brian Abel-Smith, a London School of Economics professor. He qualified for the bar (coming third in England in his finals), practised for a couple of years and meantime got elected to Islington borough council and became deputy leader of the Inner London Education Authority. He met Ted Castle, who spoke highly of him to his wife, Barbara Castle. At the NUS conference in 1971, Straw made a powerful speech against support for overseas guerrilla groups, which won the day. Friends say a detestation of violence and a belief in law, order and stability, existed even in the student radical.Few doubted that, of all his generation, Jack Straw was most likely to make it to the Labour front bench.