Dennis Edward Skinner (born 11 February 1932) is a British Labour Party politician, who served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until he lost his seat to Conservative challenger Mark Fletcher in 2019. He was one of dozens of Labour MPs who lost in once-safe Labour seats that had voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum; the upstart Brexit Party, under the leadership of leading Eurosceptic Nigel Farage, possibly acting on the orders of US President Donald Trump, focussed all its efforts on unseating non-Conservative MPs in 2019. (Skinner himself had supported Brexit, albeit overwhelmingly for opposite reasons to why Farage did.) He was the oldest member of the House of Commons and had the second longest record of continuous service at the time of his departure. He was one of just two remaining MPs at the time of the 2019 general election who had been in office when the UK joined the then European Economic Community in 1973 (the pro-EU Conservative Ken Clarke — who, like Skinner, was first elected at the 1970 general election — being the other) and was the only one who stood for re-election to the Commons in 2019.note Nicknamed the "Beast of Bolsover" for his acerbic style (see the page quotation) and the name of his constituency. He was born as the third of nine children in a coal-mining town, and he was a miner himself before he became an MP. He's often controversial, and was thrown out of the House of Commons several times for breaches of order (including over the quip at the top of the page, in 1984 when he accused Margaret Thatcher of being prepared to bribe judges, and in 2016 when he called David Cameron "Dodgy Dave" over his alleged involvement with companies named in the Panama Papersnote ). He's also famously anti-monarchy and for the abolition of the House of Lords, among his other left-wing positions, and frequently made snarky comments to the Queen's messenger during the state opening of Parliament.
Ironically given his frequent hammerings of Conservative MPs caught having affairs, he himself was caught having an affair during the "dirty Nineties" period where British politics lurched between sex scandals every other week. This led some to call him "the Beast of Legover."
In 2017 a documentary film, Dennis Skinner: Nature of the Beast, was released detailing his life, supported by interviews from his surviving brothers. Filmmaker Daniel Draper explained that he had recently joined the Labour Party and thought of Skinner as the personification of its values.
