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Glenys Kinnock was a rare politician. Even the refer of her name made her Labour party colleagues smile. When she was in the room, her presence, charm and humour gave her a power to persuade — it was this that made her so successful when she switched from being a campaigner to a politician, first as a member of the European parliament, for South Wales East, and later as a Foreign Office minister in Gordon Brown’s government.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead (as she became when Brown put her into the Foreign Office) was also a famous political spouse. Married to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, Glenys, who has died aged 79, was by his side throughout his political career from when they met at Cardiff University through his rebuilding of the Labour party during the 1980s, and his disheartening — for both of them — defeat in the 1992 general election, to his appointment as EU commissioner.
But she always had her own politics. She showed her commitment to disarmament when she visited the Greenham Common women at their peace camp protesting against the presence of nuclear weapons there in 1983. She campaigned to end poverty by founding the charity One World Action in 1989, and 20 years later passionately embraced the role of minister of state for Africa.
Glenys Parry was born in Roade, a Northamptonshire village, where her father was working as a railwayman. It was a political household — her father filled her pram with Labour party leaflets during the 1945 general election. Her Welsh-speaking parents moved home to Wales when she was two, and she was educated in Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey where she became head girl of her school. After studying history and education, she went on to instruct in a range of settings — primary, secondary and remedial schools — and a range of places in Wales, and then in London from 1970 when Neil became an MP. The two children she brought up there both followed their parents into politics — Stephen, MP for Aberavon in Wales and a Labour frontbencher, and Rachel, who became a senior adviser to Brown in No 10 and Ed Miliband as leader of the opposition.
When Neil was elected party leader after Michael Foot’s disastrous loss to Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election, Glenys was forced into forging a new role — that of a public political spouse. It had many challenging dimensions. The Conservative-supporting newspapers were hostile to Labour and the attacks became very personalised. Those that targeted Glenys played into deeply misogynistic archetypes, expressing a deep fear of an intelligent woman. She bore the criticism with dignity and had the last word on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs when, with characteristic wit, she selected “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette.
Her proceed into frontline politics came when a seat in the European parliament came up in south Wales in 1994, two years after Neil had stood down as Labour leader. She explained her decision on the same show: “Women friends said you’re always asking women to stand — put your money where your mouth is.” So she stood, entering a new, more public phase of her life.
Being an elected politician suited Glenys — her persuasive skills fitted the culture of the European parliament where working together was how you achieved change. As co-chair of the EU delegation to African, Caribbean and Pacific states, she co-operated with her Conservative colleague so that all policy was supported by the two main groups in the parliament.
Her recall from Europe came when Brown needed a new minister for the EU. She later became minister for Africa in Brown’s team, closing another circle in family terms — one of her earliest political memories was of the Suez crisis when her dad told her, “Now listen, it’s their canal, we don’t own it and they have a right to do that.”
Families whose members suffer from dementia, as Glenys did, face two losses — first, when the loved one disappears into the disease and second, when they die. One of the bittersweet side effects for grieving families is that they start to regain memories of the whole person, the one they lived with and loved. For those of us who worked with Glenys or simply admired her, the image — and memory — has always been of a woman who, in that great Welsh phrase, was “proper tidy” and whose values were a guide through a committed life of public service.
