Glenys Kinnock enjoyed one distinction that her husband, Neil, never attained. For almost a year she occupied a ministerial post in a Labour government that, along with her life peerage, came to her entirely on her own merits. In 2009, on her retirement from the European parliament, Gordon Brown persuaded her to become a minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Although today most party leaders’ wives have careers, none has been as politically involved as Glenys Kinnock.
At the Foreign Office she had responsibility first for Europe and then for Africa. Spared the hurly-burly of the Commons, she cut an impressive figure as a minister in the Lords. She also served as an opposition spokeswoman between 2010 and 2013.
The huge irony of her own political career is that it only became possible because of the failure of her husband to win the 1992 British general election. In the immediate aftermath of that defeat, and after his resignation as Labour Party leader, she unexpectedly decided to put herself forward for nomination as a Labour candidate for the European parliament. When Kinnock had wondered aloud who would be selected to replace the sitting MEP for southeast Wales she startled him by saying: “I’m going for it.” He recalled that he nearly crashed the car they were in.
Her election for the seat — in which Labour’s electoral dominance was so overwhelming that she could boast of having the largest majority in Europe — ensured a dramatic change in the life of a woman who until then had been obliged to be content with her role as a supportive wife, mother and infant school teacher. Her election as an MEP in 1994 brought her the individual recognition she was, at last, able to seek.
Initially, she commanded public attention within the parliament because of her name. Her husband had been appointed as a European commissioner shortly after her election, making them one of the best-known couples in Brussels. They entertained a wide array of friends in the handsome Brussels home they bought from Boris Johnson. She soon established herself there and in Strasbourg, winning praise even from political opponents among the Conservatives as a talented and professional politician in her own right.
Glenys Elizabeth Parry was born in 1944 at Roade, near Northampton, into a political household. Her father, Cyril Parry, a former merchant seaman who became a railway signalman, had been politicised by the years of economic depression in the Thirties and was an enthusiastic trade unionist and Labour Party member. He wheeled his infant daughter in her pram when canvassing in the 1945 general election. In 1947, Cyril and Elizabeth Parry returned to their native Holyhead, in Anglesey, with Glenys and her older brother Colin.
Her father continued to work as a signalman, until shortly before he was due to retire when it was discovered that he had suffered throughout his life from colour-blindness. Glenys was devoted to her father and used to take him tea to his signal box and sit with him, listening to tales of the sea and learning about politics. At home, her mother instilled lessons in tidiness and hard work. They were a conventional chapel-going family, although Glenys gave up formal religion in her late teens. She sang in local festivals as a child and she once won the local title of Miss National Savings Queen.
Glenys attended Holyhead Primary School and then Holyhead Comprehensive, where she was head prefect, and then studied history and education at Cardiff University. Politically precocious, she had joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) at the age of 15 and the Labour Party at 16, and met her future husband in the university canteen when he handed her a leaflet advertising a Socialist Society meeting. She became its secretary, while Neil was the chairman, and was also secretary of the Cardiff branch of the National Union of Students.
They were both extremely involved in politics and became known as “The Power and the Glory”, he the “Power” and his attractive and intelligent girlfriend the “Glory”. In later years when they were national public figures this assumed relationship was reversed by an irreverent press that consistently attempted to portray her as a dominating left-wing character who manipulated her husband. She could not help but notice Neil’s red hair and freckles; but what struck her most, when first meeting him was that “he was so loud”. The marriage was one of equals; she was well informed and, although always supportive, prepared to challenge his political judgments.
At university she was recognised as being at least as intelligent as Neil, and although both insisted in interviews that they always respected each other’s views and ambitions their domestic life consigned her to the secondary role while he pursued a political career. Some close friends of the couple thought she may have had greater natural intellectual curiosity, being an avid and enthusiastic reader. Yet she willingly supported her husband during very difficult times combined with being a career teacher and mother.
When she and Neil married in 1967 she wore a silver wedding ring, in order to avoid wearing one that might be made of South African gold and because Welsh gold was too expensive. Her first job was as a teacher at Abersychan Grammar School. After his election to the House of Commons in 1970 and the birth of their two children, Stephen in 1970 and Rachel in December 1971 — the latter birth coinciding with the deaths within a week of both of Neil’s parents — the family moved to west London. She wanted to be part of his life as an MP and not a constituency widow. She eventually worked part-time as a teacher, to be able to combine motherhood and attend functions as the party leader’s wife.
As a convinced feminist she began publicly to support a causes to enhance the equal opportunity of women, particularly in the workplace and in the provision of childcare. She joined the Greenham women on several occasions to demonstrate her solidarity with their objection to the siting of American cruise missiles in Britain and once at a mass demonstration edged her way round the complete perimeter fence of the base, covering a number of very muddy miles. All this roused the ire of the right-wing press at a time when her husband was moving the party away from its unilateralist defence policy.
Labour politics ran in the family. Her son Stephen is the Labour MP for Aberavon and married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark. Rachel is married to Stuart Bentham, a film producer, and worked in the office of Gordon Brown when he was prime minister and for Ed Miliband, his successor as Labour leader.
After visiting Africa in 1985 and witnessing the horror of the famine in Ethiopia, she also began to work in the field of international development, chairing the organisation One World Action, which she helped to found and serving on the board of Unicef. She was able to pursue this political interest vigorously as an MEP; she was the link member of the European parliament with the Department of International Development in Britain, a member of the parliament’s development and co-operation committee and vice-chairwoman of the assembly which links the European Union with the ACP — the countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Although instinctively more left wing than her husband and decidedly slower to embrace the politics of revisionism, she came to accept that the modernisation of the party meant that at a personal level it was necessary also to moderate her previous support for policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and opposition to membership of the European Community.
Glenys Kinnock was sustained by a strong marriage and a rich family life with children and grandchildren living near by. She and Neil were doting grandparents and enjoyed the cinema, opera and the theatre.
Yet the family were all subject to immense strain because of the criticism Kinnock encountered. It affected many old friendships, particularly on the Left. Like her husband, she came to detest the right-wing tabloid press for its intrusions in their family life, for what she regarded as its metropolitan snobbery about the Welsh, and for its later attacks on her and Neil for allegedly being on the EU “gravy train”.
The bras d’honneur gesture that Kinnock made to the cameras in the election year of 1983, after falling into the waves while walking with his wife for a photo opportunity on Brighton beach, seemed to some up his feelings about the press, and hers. She helped him to his feet and spoke eloquently of their devotion to one another.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, politician, was born on July 7, 1944. She died in her sleep, after living with Alzheimer’s disease for several years, on December 3, 2023, aged 79
