Frances Morrell

Following her death, at 72, he has described her as a brilliant conduit between himself and all the people, including other ministerial

advisers, Labour backbenchers and leading trade unionists, with whom he needed to keep in contact. He found her judgment to be shrewd

After leaving Hull, where she read English, Frances Morrell spent nine years as a secondary school teacher. She then became press officer for the Fabian Society and the National Union of Students.

She promoted Benn's Fabian tract, The New Politics, and in 1973 he appointed her his policy adviser. At the party conference that year, she gave evidence of her credentials by demanding a national plan to redistribute wealth.

Following the October 1974 General Election, he made her his political adviser. Controversially partisan, she worked with "hard Left" constituency activists to try to win him the Labour leadership.

She was a founder member of the Labour co-ordinating committee which engineered a Left-wing manifesto for the 1979 General Election

After Mrs Thatcher's trouncing of Labour, she stood for the Greater London Council, and within 24 hours of being elected, was part of a small clique who replaced the moderate Andrew McIntosh as council leader with Ken Livingstone.

Three years later, and opposed by Livingstone, who accused her campaign of "back-stabbing, arm-twisting and intimidating methods", she became leader of the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea), and promoted anti-racism, sex education and gender consciousness.

Nevertheless, she disenchanted Left-wing activists in the Inner London Teachers' Association by demanding higher teaching standards in the classroom, and battling them over staff redeployment.

When the GLC was abolished, in 1986, and the Ilea became a directly-elected authority, she succeeded in being elected to it, but lost the leadership.

From 1988 to 1991, she was secretary of the Speaker's Commission on Citizenship. She held a number of positions within arts organisations, and was a member of the board of directors of Sadler's Wells and of the NCVQ performing arts advisory committee. For a number of years she was a member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. In 1995,

Goldsmiths' College awarded her an MA with distinction.

Her husband, Brian, whom she married in 1964, died last year, and she is survived by their daughter, Daisy, and her brother, Peter.