Michael Seifert was a communist lawyer who represented and advised many trade unions, international and progressive causes throughout his life.

Michael died aged 74 on July 19 2017. He was born into a Jewish communist family with many international connections.

This sketch by Ken Gill was printed on Michael’s election address in the 1978 local elections where he stood as the communist candidate in Kensington.

His parents Sigmund, a lawyer, and Connie who played a leading role in the Women’s Assembly regularly entertained famous visitors in their spacious family home in Highgate, including Paul Robeson and Charlie Chaplin among other exiles from McCarthyism and prominent personalities from the socialist countries.

Michael’s friends were also welcome to come back with him unannounced after evenings out and be fed and watered.

After Oxford University, where he read history and sold the Daily Worker, he made a wide group of friends whom he kept throughout his life. Michael was articled to Lord Goodman and later joined the family firm, Seifert and Sedley.

He threw himself into organising support for the Free Angela Davis Campaign in the UK and was also involved in defending Trinidadian black power leader Michael X, who was active in London in the early 1970s.

He was secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers in the 1970s and continued to play a part, becoming a vice president and always interested in hearing from younger colleagues.

He established himself as a leading adviser to trade unions through the turbulent years of the miners’ strike, the Wapping dispute and the attempt by the Thatcher government to emasculate the trade unions with punitive fines and injunctions when they supported their members taking industrial action.

His firm devoted many hours of unpaid work supporting the miners and NUM leader Arthur Scargill gave personal testimony to the essential role Michael played during the Great Strike of 1984-5.

He was also a constant source of advice to many other left-wing trade union leaders, including Ken Gill, Alan Sapper and Rodney Bickerstaffe.

His warmth and wholehearted commitment was demonstrated in the personal friendships he had with many of his clients. He became at times almost one of the Gill and Bowden families, spending many days and holidays with them.

Wherever he was he gave instant attention to any call for assistance.

In the days before mobile phones it was quite usual to see Michael having long phone calls on phone boxes during a weekend away to advise on the conduct of a strike or latest writ against one of his trade union clients.

He was also a passionate internationalist, the lawyer for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, where he provided the legal work for the 1988 Mandela Freedom at ’70 Wembley concert, engaging artists such as Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits, Sting and broadcast to 60 countries throughout the world.

He was a close friend and adviser to Mike Terry, the AAM executive secretary, who died in 2008, and some of the political exiles, including Kader Asmal, who returned to become government ministers.

He was delighted to be invited to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in South Africa in 1994.

He was legal adviser to the Morning Star, the Marx Memorial Library and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign for many years, utilising his contacts to assist them in their legal cases. He was also on the board of Friends of the Earth for many years and adviser to Greenpeace from 1990.

A lifelong communist, Michael stood as the communist candidate in the 1978 local elections in Kensington, Colville ward.

Until 1993, when he moved in with his partner, the food writer Caroline Conran, Michael lived in a small flat in Notting Hill where he hosted lively annual carnival parties attended by a diverse range of friends and greatly enjoyed by all.

He found time to give legal assistance to local organisations and was solicitor for the Maxilla Children’s Centre. He gave legal advice to the Tabernacle community centre in Powis Square, which was threatened by the Council with demolition, to secure a preservation order to make it a listed building.

In 1981 his firm acted pro bono and he was a key witness for Tess Gill and Anna Coote in what was to be the well-known El Vino Court of Appeal judgment establishing that it was unlawful sex discrimination to refuse to serve women at the bar.

Michael was widely read with an extraordinary memory, keeping his friends amused with recitals and quotes from literature, poetry and politics.

He was a constant source of jokes and anecdotes, a keen follower of football and cricket, loved children and was quite capable of leading them into mischief.

For many years he walked with the Red Ramblers, a group of mainly legal lefties. Refusing to purchase walking boots or stop smoking, he nevertheless achieved the quite challenging walks around Glenfinnan, in the West Highlands, wheezing along in his plimsolls and without fail led the often riotous evenings over dinner consuming large quantities of wine and spirits.

His wide friendship circles went well beyond his political soulmates, encompassing many in the fields of arts and business, but he never deviated from his core beliefs and he attended events of causes he supported, including the Morning Star and Cuba Solidarity, until he fell ill in 2017.

He is survived by Caroline, by his sister Susan and brother Roger.