That a one-time left-wing activist should end up a minister, steeped in Blairite respectability, is so common an occurrence in this government that it no longer qualifies as an irony; it is more a rite of passage.
Health minister John Denham is no exception. He has a particularly colourful radical past, though his ideological passage appears more thoughtful and evolutionary, and less opportunistic than that of some of his colleagues.
Indeed, his transformation from Bennite advocate of 'extra-parliamentary action' to New Labour pragmatist, 'taking inspiration from reality', can be plotted over a decade of knocks at the polls in his home town of Southampton.
'He had to work a long, long time to win Southampton Itchen. He's come up through the school of hard knocks,' says Bob Abberley, Unison head of health, a friend and fellow former Labour activist on the south coast.
Mr Denham explains: 'I am happy with the moderniser label. What has dominated people like me for the last few years was getting the Labour Party to understand the world in which we now live: a world in which 10 times as many people sell life insurance as dig coal.'
Mr Denham cut his political teeth organising against Militant - a bitter struggle that reached its height in a successful coup, codenamed Operation Icepick, at the National Organisation of Labour Students' conference in 1976.
In 1981 he voted for Tony Benn against Denis Healey in the Labour deputy leadership contest. He was selected for Southampton Itchen and after a series of radical public statements was himself accused of 'belonging to a Trotskyist organisation', albeit by the Daily Telegraph.
In fact, the very raison d'etre of his faction - a student-dominated group known as Clause Four - was its anti-Trotskyism.
He was beaten into third place in the 1983 general election, and came second to the Tories in 1987.
Chastened, he made a speech to the party conference that year decrying 'platitudinous repetition of economic policies that may have been relevant in 1976 but were no help for the 1990s'.
He made it to Parliament at the third attempt in 1992, scraping in by 551 votes, and wrote a book, Winning in the South, insisting Labour had to make itself relevant to southern voters.
As an assiduous backbencher he made a number of forays into health. He claimed much of the credit for exposing the Wessex computer scandal in 1992, and later accused local hospital managers of fiddling waiting list figures.
Ironically, but predictably, he was incensed when the boot was on the other foot last year.
Local health activists publicly criticised the government over the shortage of intensive care beds in the town - a problem Mr Denham reportedly and angrily claimed he had attempted to address 'behind the scenes'.
Nationally, his reputation is growing, bolstered by a successful stint as junior minister, then minister of state at the Department of Social Security. He won admiration not just for his handling of pensions policy, but by the dexterity with which he sidestepped the bitter internecine Harriet Harman-Frank Field row.
The pensions world was also struck by his enthusiasm, and his eagerness to speak at conferences, a welcome attribute tempered only by his reportedly dull presentational style.
'He's an unassuming guy, and increasingly effective at the despatch box in his mild-mannered way. He's not into yah-boo politics,' says Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester and vanquisher of Tory former health minister Gerry Malone. 'I think that anybody who can grapple with pensions and benefits will be relieved to take on the NHS.'
The health agenda that Mr Denham confronts is a massive one, and he will be expected not just to pilot the DoH ship deftly but to help bed down the reforms and provide a measure of stability.
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