Most local opinion favoured Dr John Gillison who represented the area on the London County Council but Mellish was selected after the TGWU dockers' delegates voted for him en bloc.

[1] Mellish was appointed by Harold Wilson as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Chief Whip) which he held during Labour Governments from 1969 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976.

Mellish (who got on well at a personal level with Foot, despite the great ideological differences between the two men) disliked Callaghan so much that he resigned from the cabinet within months of Wilson's own retirement.

[2] In 1976 Mellish argued that the Malawi Asians expelled by Hastings Banda should not be allowed to live in Britain despite possessing British passports: We cannot go on like this.

Mellish's acceptance of a post with the LDDC exacerbated the split with the Bermondsey CLP which had elected a slate of left-wing officers at its annual meeting that same year.

Tam Dalyell later said that "Mellish's final years in the Commons were dogged by controversy and beset with troubles in Bermondsey from hard-left 'yuppie' incomers and the Militant tendency, people who were moons apart from the dockers who had selected him four decades earlier".

Mellish made his discontent public and threatened to resign immediately and force a by-election if Tatchell was endorsed by the Labour Party nationally.

[1] In November, he resigned his seat in Parliament (by becoming Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds) and forced a 1983 by-election in which Mellish campaigned for O'Grady who stood as a Real Bermondsey Labour candidate.

O'Grady performed badly at the by-election although Mellish did take some satisfaction from the heavy defeat of Tatchell by the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes.

In 1985 he stood down from the LDDC and accepted a life peerage on 12 July 1985 as Baron Mellish, of Bermondsey in Greater London,[7] sitting as an independent.

[8] In 1995 during a debate on the commemorations for the fiftieth anniversary of Victory over Japan Day, Hugh Jenkins expressed "sorrow and regret" about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.