High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Eric Graham Varley, Baron Varley, PC (11 August 1932 - 29 July 2008) was a British politician and former Cabinet Minister on the right wing of the Labour Party. Varley was born in Poolsbrook near Chesterfield, Derbyshire and left school at 15 to become a craftsman, first in the local iron works and then for the local mining industry. He was active in the National Union of Mineworkers, and became a branch secretary of the union in 1955, joining the Labour Party the same year. After a period at Ruskin College, Oxford, Varley won the NUM nomination to be the Labour candidate for his home town, where the sitting Labour MP George Benson was retiring from Parliament. He was narrowly selected in June 1963 and duly held the Chesterfield seat in the 1964 election.