He joined the Labour Party soon afterwards.But what changed his thoughts about university, was a long train journey with his girlfriend Cathie, whom he married in 1969, and who died suddenly in 1998, to visit her aunt in England. For some reason Cathie bought him a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Walter Shirer to read on the train, and Reid was spellbound. He did an Open University course and was then accepted for Stirling University, where he became rector of the Students' Union at just the same time that the younger Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown held similar posts in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.Unlike them, he joined the Communist Party for two years before he left, disillusioned less - at first - by Marx than by the disciples from Lenin onwards who claimed to put Marxism into practice. He went on to do a PhD on 19th-century West Africa - designed to test whether Marx's theory that social systems were shaped by the means of production could be applied to a non-industrial society He concluded that it could As Blairite as they come, he is no longer a Marxist Of the period, he says: "I used to be a Communist. I used to believe in Santa Claus." But it helped to form his view that political discipline is necessary. He retains a belief that technological change shapes politics and not the other way round.So it was as a working-class intellectual that he became a researcher - a political officer in all but name - of the Scottish Labour Party.

There he met Neil Kinnock at a party conference before the 1983 election. George Robertson had been verbally assaulted in the bar by a young activist who complained about Robertson's lack of Marxism. He was talking rubbish, said Reid, a man who has never knowingly avoided a political argument. The split in the Labour Party was between Marxists and (Rosa) Luxemburgers (who wanted a pluralist coalition of forces on the Left) - not between Marxists and non-Marxists. When the remark - the sort that could only have been made, even facetiously, in the crazy, early-Eighties Labour Party, was repeated to Kinnock, Kinnock signed him up on the spot as a full-time aide, from October 1983.The new leader did not regret it. Reid was loyal and productive, having a hand in the epic attack on Militant at Bournemouth in 1998. He was present at the famous exchange in the Shadow Cabinet room between Derek Hatton and his boss, when Hatton said: "Kinnock, you're a traitor" and Kinnock replied: "Hatton, you're a wanker." It was the kind of reponse Reid, with an ample share of Kinnock's macho approach to politics, would certainly have liked to make himself.

With an academic's understanding of Trotskyism, Reid saw clearly that the Militant party-within-a-party could destroy Labour from within. During the 1984-85 miners' strike he was torn, like Kinnock, between loyalty to individual miners, like those in Cathie Reid's family, and hatred of Arthur Scargill's methods.He had always told Kinnock he wanted to be an MP, and he was elected at Motherwell North in 1987. He joined the front bench two years later and he began to shine as a junior defence spokesman. He was an obvious choice to become the Armed Forces Minister of State after the election, where he played a key role in George Robertson's Strategic Defence Review.By now, although he had been close to Gordon Brown, he was a Blair man. When he was appointed Minister of Transport in 1998, John Prescott was suspicious that he had a direct line to Blair which bypassed himself.