An active Life Peer he was an Opposition Labour spokesman for Energy, Heritage and Treasury matters from 1991 to 1992. In 1997, Tony Blair appointed him a junior minister at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in which role he served until 1999. "A strong belief in maintaining a rural community in this country...the heritage of the country.". "I am antique Blue Labour", he remarked; his friends being Dr Cunningham and Jeff Rooker who were in the same department; being from solid working-class backgrounds they held similar beliefs, which was useful given as Donoughue himself admitted on his appointment he knew nothing about agriculture. He later joined the Countryside Alliance against New Labour's policy on Hunting with Dogs, the Foot and mouth disease outbreak and the sofa politics of No.10. In his advocacy of full checks and balances of Cabinet government that take time to work through policies, he deplored the messianic qualities of the Blair administration and a tendency towards authoritarianism that catapulted Britain into desert wars in the middle east and came to dominate the agenda. Donoughue was a partisan of the Wilson and Callaghan era, in which he started a political career, who he claimed were real Labour people; the contrast with Blair's aloofness towards real people he believed was detrimental to the democratic processes of Whitehall governance.