No one seems to have done one of those 'politician from one country but in another country' infoboxes in quite a while, and since I found out 'marchais' translates to 'walked' the wordplay of this one appealed to me.
George Rene Lewis Walker was a British Labour Party politician and a major figure on the party’s left from the 1950s to the 1980s. He was born into a Roman Catholic family in Kent, and moved to London after the Second World War to join the Trades Union Congress (TUC). In 1951 he was elected at a by-election to Woolwich East, the seat which had become vacant after the death of former Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
Despite succeeding a major figure on the Labour right, Walker became well-known as an ally of the ‘Bevanite’ faction of the Labour Party, and due to its leader Aneurin Bevan’s declining health and Walker developing a respected record as an orator, he became a prominent spokesman for the faction. Satirists commonly joked during his initial emergence that the local Labour Party ‘got Bevin and Bevan mixed up’ when they nominated him for Parliament.
After Bevan’s death in 1960, Walker allied himself with Labour’s Deputy Leader Harold Wilson, and after Wilson became party leader in 1963 on the death of Hugh Gaitskell, he joined Wilson’s Shadow Cabinet. Throughout Wilson’s leadership, he and Walker shared cordial relations despite their political differences only growing during the 1960s and 70s, though Walker was only kept to fairly junior roles. Once Wilson resigned in 1976 and James Callaghan took over as party leader and Prime Minister, Walker left the Cabinet due to a much frostier relationship with the new leader (he had supported the leadership campaign of his left-wing opponent Michael Foot), and kept a fairly low profile during the remainder of Labour’s time in government.
He was elected Chairman of the Labour Party for the 1979-80 period, benefitting from the leftward shift of the membership, and again aided Foot in his second leadership campaign in the 1980 Labour leadership election. This time, Foot succeeded and Walker rejoined his Shadow Cabinet. Like Foot himself, Walker was lampooned by many as a left-wing extremist, particularly due to his public sympathies towards the USSR. Some figures even accused him of being a Soviet spy, though he strenuously denied this and little evidence to suggest he may have been has been found.
While Walker was comfortably elected for Woolwich East in every election he fought, he struggled more to hold the new Woolwich seat created in 1983 due to it containing more anti-Labour areas from the old Woolwich West constituency. Despite this, his divisive politics and the huge swing against Labour, he held the seat at both the 1983 and 1987 elections. With Labour’s move to the right after Neil Kinnock became leader, he never returned to the Shadow Cabinet.
After retiring from Parliament, he chose not to seek to become a member of the House of Lords due to his opposition to the chamber’s unelected nature, and was a vocal critic of Tony Blair and New Labour. In November 1997, seven months after Labour returned to power, Walker died.