Glenys Kinnock, political force in Britain and Europe, dies aged 79

Glenys Kinnock, a former European parliamentarian and British government minister who helped secure women a central role in the continent’s politics, died on December 3 at her home in London. She was 79.

Her family confirmed the death and said she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2017.

Her death was the first in a political dynasty built around her husband, Neil Kinnock, who led Britain’s Labor Party from 1983, and a son, Stephen Kinnock, a Labor lawmaker, both of whom survive her, along with a daughter, Rachel Kinnock. , a former Labor Party campaigner turned television producer.

For years, Glenys Kinnock was seen mainly as her husband’s companion in his unsuccessful attempts to reform the Labor Party and return it to power after the uninterrupted Conservative rise of Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and 1997.

Notably, she was at Mr Kinnock’s side in 1983 when: during a photo shoot on the pebbles of Brighton Beach in southern England he encountered the rising tide. That image of unhappiness haunted him in his failed campaigns to take power as prime minister – a dream that ended in 1992, when he lost the national election and resigned as leader of the Labor Party. The party only returned to power thanks to Tony Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997.

Mr Kinnock’s departure from the British parliamentary joust was significant for Ms Kinnock, who decided to launch her own attempt at a political career by running for a seat in the European Parliament, representing part of Wales, in 1994 , when Britain, before Brexit, was still part of the bloc.

She broke the news about her decision to seek office while she and her husband were driving.

“I almost ran off the road,” Mr. Kinnock said in Martin Westlake’s “Kinnock: The Biography” (2001). The decision, he said, meant she could act “as if her first obligation was to herself, for the first time in her life.”

She won the seat.

By then, she had already defined her own political identity, an identity generally considered further left than that of her husband. For example, at a time when he was trying to distance Labor from its traditional commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, it actively supported the idea.

In 1983, Ms Kinnock had visited women protesting at a US air base at Greenham Common in southern England to call for the removal of US cruise missiles. She also supported militant miners who went on strike in the mid-1980s to protest government plans to close mines.

A year after she became a member of the European Parliament, her husband was appointed a senior executive official of the European Union, and the Kinnocks became known as a power couple in Brussels, the bloc’s headquarters.

Throughout their career, they resisted conservative comments that she was a devious backstage force. The accusation made her angry. “It was brutal, describing me as very manipulative and always undermining Neil,” she said.

The perception persisted. Even the left-wing newspaper The Daily Mirror noted in its obituary: “As Labour’s dynamic duo, the Kinnocks were nicknamed ‘the Power and the Glory’ – and everyone knew exactly who the Power was: Glenys.”

Glenys Elizabeth Parry was born on July 7, 1944 in Roade, a village in the English Midlands, to Cyril and Elizabeth (Pritchard) Parry. Her father was a railway signalman and Labor Party activist. She once recalled him taking her as a baby during election campaigns and stacking pamphlets in her carriage.

In her youth the family moved to Holyhead, on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales. As a teenager she became a member of the Labor Party and an active campaigner against nuclear weapons. She studied education and history at University College, Cardiff, where she met her future husband, and then worked as a teacher. They married in 1967 and were together for 56 years at the time of her death.

Ms Kinnock was a Socialist Member of the European Parliament for 15 years, specializing in international development. In Britain, Conservative-supporting newspapers accused the Kinnocks of living a charmed life and enjoying the benefits of a so-called European Union gravy train.

In 2005, her husband was appointed to the British House of Lords as Lord Kinnock, a title that theoretically allowed Mrs. Kinnock to call herself Lady Kinnock, but she declined to adopt the honorary title, the BBC. reported.

In 2009, Gordon Brown, then British Prime Minister, appointed her as deputy minister. Under British rules, only lawmakers in the lower house or upper house of parliament can be ministers. So Mr Brown made her Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, giving her a seat in the House of Lords. She took over responsibilities for Britain’s relations with Europe and then Africa until Labor lost the 2010 election.

Ms Kinnock resigned from the House of Lords in 2021, four years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

“We can’t imagine what that day was like for her,” her children Rachel and Stephen wrote The Times of London in 2022. “She never complained, but we know she was terrified. For such a formidable, strong, intelligent, funny and dignified woman, it must have been devastating to feel her spirit slipping away.”