He was subsequently cleared by the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee. He has also had a difficult time living down the warm relationship he struck up with Radovan Karadzic and other Bosnian Serb leaders in the early 1990s. And, hardly a fault but certainly a complicating factor, he is known as a Blair rather than a Brown man. It is also rumoured that John Prescott thought Reid had been plotting against him while he was his junior at Transport.After university and by the age of 30, Reid had got over his flirtation with Communism and rejoined the Labour Party, for which he worked as a researcher. Since then his loyalty to the party, its modernising tendency and, above all, its leadership has been complete. The key to Reid’s rise has been his relationship with two men in particular, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.Shortly after he became leader in 1983, Kinnock, it is said, decided to hire Reid when he heard that Reid had analysed the split in the party as not being between Marxists and non-Marxists but between Marxists and (Rosa) Luxembourgers, the latter group correctly aspiring to a pluralist coalition of the left. Reid helped to brief Kinnock for Prime Minister’s Questions with Mrs Thatcher, and prepared his briefs for his media interviews.

Reid left in 1985 to pursue a parliamentary seat, but is clearly a prominent member of the “Kinnocracy”, those now at the top of New Labour who endured Labour’s locust years. It is an impressive roll call that includes two more Cabinet ministers (Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt), the armed forces minister Adam Ingram, Peter Mandelson and, strictly unofficially, Alastair Campbell.Reid was an early proponent of the modernising cause: “I always believed socialists, or indeed any rational person, should be revisionist on principle.” Maybe he was inspired by Eduard Bernstein’s idea of “permanent revisionism”. In 1983, Reid was asked by Kinnock to put down on one piece of A4 paper the reasons for Labour’s unelectability. Bernstein or not, Reid found himself on the winning side in the battle for the Labour Party.Reid was, and is, trusted by Blair as readily as he was by Kinnock. True, some in Downing Street might take the view that Reid’s attacks on the security services last week might have gone just a bit over the top.

Some of the newspapers did give the “rogue elements” comments an unhelpful top spin, but it is hard to believe that the thrust of Reid’s counter-attack hadn’t been cleared. Whatever else happens to his government career, Reid’s place as “minister for the Today programme” is secure.Reid has been a good minister, too. He fitted in well to George Robertson’s hard-right team at Defence in 1997, a group designed to dispel any vestigial doubts about Labour being “soft” on defence. He stood up to the rail unions when he was moved to Transport in 1998, making himself unpopular by condemning London Underground workers for a legal strike, and refusing to meet them for talks. He entered the Cabinet in 1999 to take over the rump of the post-devolution Scottish Office.The demands of high office did nothing for his notorious nicotine habit. One mammoth negotiating session over the closure of a shipyard saw him consume 110 Embassy tipped cigarettes.

He has, however, remained teetotal for the past nine years, after being given some firm advice to that effect from John Smith. Like Tony Blair, Reid can play the guitar and could be tempted to use it for therapeutic effect. The sudden death of his wife Cathie in 1998 was a grievous blow. In 1999 he married his second wife, Carine Adler, a Brazilian film-maker.After Peter Mandelson’s spectacular second resignation in 2001, Reid moved to Northern Ireland. Although a Roman Catholic, and the first such to hold the top job in Stormont, Reid used jokes about Glasgow Celtic to defuse tension. He reminded those interested that he also had grandparents of “staunch Presbyterian stock”.