The man sitting opposite me has had fiercer inquisitors than the twenty two year old Brummie student journalist interviewing him.
Yet, I imagine Neil Kinnock, Labour Party leader between 1983 and 1992 and a giant of British political history, sounds and appears largely similar now to how he did before any of those more seasoned figures.
Obviously the march of time has had some effect. The two patches of red hair that formerly flanked his otherwise hairless head have greyed and receded since he was in frontline politics and the lines etching his face have dug deeper.
However, neither his spirit nor his booming South Wales baritone seem to have waned in the 55 years since his election to parliament in 1970, aged just 29.
“Mr Devo, how are you?” he roars in an enthusiastic greeting, before leading me up to his small, wood-panelled office in the House of Lords.
He’s certainly as sharp as ever. I’m trying to bat away pre-interview nerves by indulging in some light mocking of my friend’s appearance. I’ve brought him along to photograph the conversation and he’s wearing a Trumpian combo of a long red tie and a large-collared white shirt.
“At least he’s ironed his shirt” Kinnock interjects. That’s me shot down.
It only takes a few minutes in his company for him to demonstrate the tools he used to climb to the top of his craft throughout the 1970’s and 80’s.
Then, as now, this miner’s son displayed an intensity, wit and articulacy beyond many of his ‘better-heeled’ political contemporaries.
Where it began
Perhaps the origin of these talents can be attributed to his parents, who Kinnock describes as “lovely, gentle, loving people”.
His father, a miner, loved his work. However, he was forced to leave the pits in 1947 due to developing industrial dermatitis, which Kinnock, aged 4 at the time, puts down to a dust allergy.
“It broke his heart” Kinnock says.
“The only other job he could get was in the blast furnaces in Ebbw Vale, where it’s even bloody dustier than it is underground. He used to call it nature’s little joke.”
Both parents were “very bright”, but his mother, a district nurse, was “startingly so”. They were both well read and the house was well-stocked with books.
But this wasn’t uncommon in 1950’s Tredegar, the small, Welsh Valley’s town where he was born and raised, and which he speaks of with a deep, nostalgic fondness.
“It wasn’t untypical of working class people then, where, in the front room of their terraced houses, on each side of the fireplace, it’d be jam packed with books. Usually collected editions of the so-called classics – Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, everybody.”
The place Kinnock describes is a vibrant case-study of a working class people enjoying high-brow, auto-didactic pursuits, funded from the employment and spending power offered by the prosperous mining industry. A town with an amateur dramatics society, operatic society and a male voice choir.
“In the absence of a formal education system, people of talent find ways of expressing themselves.
It’s people with insufficient income to afford expensive pastimes having to make their own nourishment, enjoyment, fulfillment, and doing it through prowess in music or poetry or the arts or just making lovely things.”
However, Kinnock bluntly admits this vibrancy didn’t last – “it died after the 50’s”.
It was a prolonged decline: “Everybody who was ever associated with, or worked with coal mines, knew they were going to shut because they are extractive. They have finite lives.”
Although this slow pace sped up precipitously “when Margaret Thatcher came and utterly annihilated 25% of British manufacturing capacity in four years because of budgetary decisions.”.
The story of Tredegar is that of so many towns across the United Kingdom. Factories and chimneys which once offered good pay and comradery now stand as relics to better days.
Kinnock thinks these areas can be revived, and that “if the economic vibrancy returns then the social and cultural vibrancy will be restored.”
His solution is clear: “we’ve got to go green”.
I ask if this isn’t trying to fit round pegs into square holes. Restoring places built around natural resources which no longer hold value.
“No, no. It’s because of the availability and ambition of investment. Investment will gravitate there if the capitalist system can find a way of mitigating cost.
Also, If there is a government stimulus, enticement and encouragement to locate in particular places, business will go there simply because of the interest in reducing costs.”
This interview took place earlier this year, in Spring. As the weather has deteriorated since, so has the outlook for Keir Starmer’s government.
However, even at this point the Labour leadership had already been forced into rowing back on a number of promises around the scale of investment in clean power.
I asked if this concerned him. While he admits that the timing of announcements and unpreparedness of the government to make forceful, preparatory arguments did cause hesitation, he remains “optimistic” on the green transition, but only because the scale of the natural emergency will force people into the necessary action – “I’m optimistic because of the pessimism”.
In Ed Miliband, this government has an Energy Secretary who is, in his view, “encyclopedic about what needs to be done”.
“I hope his objectives will be sufficiently well supported financially from the public and the private sector to be fulfilled.”
The school of life
Although Kinnock’s father adored life down the pits, he couldn’t imagine a worse fate for his son.
Both his parents saw education “as the way out” of a career spent underground.
“My father, I never forget, he said to me, if you get a degree, see boy, you’ll never have to work shifts. And I used to remember that when, at four o’clock in the morning, I’d be writing a bloody speech.”
Neil Kinnock aced the eleven-plus and won a scholarship to a prestigious local grammar school, a three hour round trip each day. He describes himself during this period as “intelligently dumb”, spending his days in an acutely non-academic fashion:
“I was with a bunch of boys. We played cards a lot, clowned around, had a lovely time and did no work.”
Upon entering sixth form he describes how his “life was transformed because the teachers started treating us like human beings, and I was doing only the subjects I was really interested in.”
He began working hard and took an offer to study Industrial Relations at the University of Cardiff, despite also receiving an offer from the University of Sheffield for History. Cue hostility from Forge Press readers.
It was in the student politics of the Welsh capital where he would gain his “political apprenticeship”.
It was also, he admits, “the first time I’d met any Tories.”
This was his introduction to the upper classes: “it was quickly obvious there were only two kinds of kids in the Rugby Club, and that was boys from the grammar school, like myself, and private school boys”.
“I had parents who said you’re as good as anybody else”
In a time when only 3% of Kinnock’s class and age cohort were attending university, the institutions were largely dominated by the privately educated.
However, exposure to this new demographic didn’t intimidate Kinnock. There was no case of, using 21st century parlance, ‘imposter syndrome’.
Confidence, a resilient self-belief, seems to be a running theme in Kinnock’s life. I ask where it comes from:
“It was partly upbringing because, like a lot of other kids, I had parents who said you’re as good as anybody else.”
Even upon entering parliament, where the class divide between political parties was so stark that “you could tell who was Labour and Tory by their size”, he felt no less sense of belonging, as each MP was equally elected.
Although he’s aware that some from similar backgrounds “did have a real bloody arrested confidence”.
One of those people was Glenys Parry, who Kinnock met for the first time in Cardiff University canteen. She quickly conveyed her admiration for people who did public speaking, swiftly prompting him to “speak in the debating society for the first time to impress her”.
She would later become Glenys Kinnock, spending 56 years married to Neil, until her death in 2023. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2017, and her husband would take on a significant role in her care over her remaining years.
Although being “a multi-talented, quick-witted, very nice looking girl with real poise, and the head girl of her comprehensive with terrific A-levels” Glenys was “totally lacking in confidence” whilst at university.
A working class success story of equal measure to her partner for over half a century, she went on to serve as a junior minister in Gordon Brown’s government, was elected to the European Parliament and received a peerage herself.
He also delights in anecdotes detailing her wit and force of personality. One day the couple were sitting in the Commons having tea with Michael Foot, Kinnock’s predecessor as party leader, when Dennis Skinner, a Labour MP of its’ firebrand left, approached Glenys.
Skinner, an ex-miner himself, was trying to impress her with his rugged vowels and thick north Derbyshire dialect – labelled “all this bloody string vest stuff” by Kinnock – having mistook her for some naive, “pretty, middle class girl”.
Eventually Glenys snapped, “She said to him, Dennis, I don’t know if anyone has told you, but I’m a railwayman’s daughter. He is a very strong trade unionist, and he had to leave school when he was 13.
This means a lot of things, but they include the fact that I’m not impressed by this arse-out-of-trousers-stuff that you are giving me.”
Laughing, Kinnock notes “it was a lovely put down by a working class woman”.
Searching for power
A theme in Kinnock’s career, as Skinner represented in that tale, is a suspicion and hostility towards the ideological rigidity of some on the left.
He sees those, like Skinner, who “affected their proletarianism”, as valuing purity of morals and politics over pursuing the ability to change things through democratically won power.
Although ideologically on Labour’s ‘soft-left’ and a self-described democratic socialist, he was the seminal leader who dragged the party rightwards throughout the 1980s toward, in his view, electability.
During his tenure, he would fight tooth-and-nail to expel members of ‘Militant’, a radical faction of the Labour Party who many deemed corrosive to their relationship with the electorate. The feud reached a crescendo in Kinnock’s ferocious address to Party conference in 1985 – later dubbed ‘The Militant speech’.
The left flank of Labour derided him as a traitor. Over the course of the decade, Labour became anti-unilateral nuclear disarmament and he reversed his personal opposition to joining the European Community, the forerunner to the European Union.
“without democratic power, politics is just a hobby”
Even now you’ll be able to find some veteran party members, in the dark corners of local branch meetings, stewing over his leadership, seeing it as the spark which lit the flame that Tony Blair would carry into government in 1997– in their view beginning the slow descent of a proudly socialist party into a kind of lifeless, centrist managerialism.
Kinnock has little time for people of this persuasion, “those whose ambition was focused on achieving power in the Labour Party, rather than power for the Labour Party”.
Although not of the ultra-left, he thinks he understands them:
“They really do believe, some of them, very earnestly, that the day will come when the injustices and incompetences of Toryism will so outrage the electorate, that they will seek a Labour party that is radical and led by a ferocious, almost revolutionary socialist. People will flock to Labour’s colours and change the capitalist system.”
If this isn’t their view then, he says, “there’s no excuse for their self-indulgence”.
Kinnock’s career has been defined by an opposition to the “nonsense” of those with “a messianic view of what’s possible” in parliamentary politics.
In the gnarled prose of a man who’s spent a lifetime fighting this recurring battle, he states “we are going to secure real, rooted progress by installments, by gradual achievement, by winning more and more understanding and support for our policies, by appealing to the breadth of society. We’re not going to do it by any sectarian means.”
Two seemingly contradictory opinions, shared with equal certainty: the desperate need for the left to win power, and an unshakeable faith in democratic socialism as a means of achieving radical change.
“They’re not contradictory” Kinnock argues, “if you recognise that without democratic power, politics is just a hobby, then you’re not afraid of compromise or pragmatic progress”.
He continues, “It’s only if your convictions are very shallow, egg-shell thin, that you’re afraid of damaging your purity.”
To those people, he offers straightforward advice to “take up fly-fishing. You’ll do less damage.”
Nevertheless, it is the case that, despite this relentless, obsessive focus on winning power, Kinnock suffered defeat in two successive elections. In 1987 he lost by a landslide, despite the general consensus that Labour’s slick, modern operation ‘won the campaign’, and, again, in 1992, in a shock defeat to John Major’s Tories.
The first loss was to Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her powers, a woman who offered, throughout the seven years they stood across from one another in the Commons, none of the bonhomie that Prime Ministers can often share with Leaders of the Opposition in private.
As he puts it, “if you were playing football in the street and your ball went into her garden, you would never knock the door and ask for it back. You just wouldn’t.”
By Kinnock’s assessment she “made up for a chronic lack of confidence by developing a very assertive forcefulness and a strong helping of arrogance. All to cover that she, wrongly, felt inferior to those of a ‘superior’ birth.”
Few expected a Labour win in ‘87, but in ‘92 they were favourites.
“We came bloody close” Kinnock says, “The bottom 11 Tory majorities in April 1992 totalled 1240 votes.”
Partly, he blames this on his shadow chancellor, John Smith, and his refusal to announce their full set of economic policies well ahead of the election, preventing Labour from having adequate time to explain their fiscal decisions.
Smith, the Scottish barrister who would succeed Kinnock as leader, before his premature death from a heart attack in 1994, preferred to wait until the Conservative’s budget later in the year. Using the event to announce Labour’s alternative economic vision.
However, he also wonders if his early resignation could’ve changed the outcome, admitting that he was prepared to do so as early as 1988, “except that I knew nobody else could run the Labour party.”
He continues, “there were people of at least equal, probably superior, capability, but they couldn’t do the vital job of political evolution”.
A slight pain creeps onto his face as he admits that, after 9 years as Leader of the Opposition, he was “just there too bloody long” for the public to make him Prime Minister.
The current crop
Kinnock speaks with an impressive fluency and clarity of thought.
It stands in stark contrast to the robotic delivery of many current Labour Party politicians. Listen to this former leader articulate his political vision and then watch an interview with Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves, speaking in a series of lifeless, pre-written lines. It will make you nostalgic for a time when you were, almost certainly if you’re a regular Forge reader, not yet born.
You can imagine that many in the Commons today would struggle to write with the flowing, illustrative detail in which Kinnock speaks.
In his view, the decline of oracy in politics isn’t permanent, but “a sign of the times. People are now afraid of painting pictures or trying to teach as part of political discourse.”
But, he believes it’s cyclical, the “pendulum will swing in the other direction and we will get the restoration of useful, meaningful political oratory, but it may take some time.”
He stresses that it’s certainly not a case of the electorate disliking flamboyance, arguing that people still vote for Donald Trump, “an arch clown”, and Nigel Farage, “a spiv and a wide boy”.
However, the modern Labour Party doesn’t have a Kinnock, it has Starmer. A leader who, despite winning a landslide victory only 15 months ago, is, at least, 10 points behind Reform’s “spiv” in the polls.
We spoke before Rachel Reeve’s Spring Statement in March, where she announced greater investment in defence and green energy in post-industrial communities like Kinnock’s Tredegar. However, she also announced significant welfare cuts. Following a rebellion by backbenchers, these were later scrapped in July.
Since then, although Kinnock always speaks warmly of Keir Starmer, a personal friend, he has labelled the Labour leadership as “mortally stupid” in its attempt to fight Reform on its own ground, and has warned that Starmer has “months, not years” to get his No.10 operation together and win back the voters abandoning Labour in the polls.
“The Treasury is inherently deflationary. It has huge reservations about public investment”
To me, he makes the broader economic argument that whilst the Treasury, the department led by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, still holds significant institutional power, “no Labour government will ever truly be in power”.
He argues that “The Treasury is inherently deflationary. It has huge reservations about public investment, and is one of the reasons why that investment has been inadequate in the United Kingdom for the majority of our history, both before and after the war.”
He believes that has also led to a dearth of private investment, “as good quality, targeted public investment attracts private money”.
Whilst we were speaking in the – as Kinnock described them – “very early days” of Reeve’s Chancellorship, he chose not to directly answer a question about whether she was doing enough to bring the Treasury into line. Instead, he urged her to “re-read her Mais Lecture of 2024”, referencing the speech she gave in the City of London in January of last year, outlining the issues of neoliberalism and the benefits of public investment.
If she reexamines that and “operates it” then, in his words, “we’ll be OK”. My hunch is that, since then, she hasn’t done quite enough to address that critique.
The present day
Neil Kinnock is now 83 years old. He lives in North London, close to his two children – one of whom is Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP and current Minister for Care in the Department of Health – and grandchildren.
He is also a ‘Lord’, an official title he’s required to take in order to sit in Parliament’s upper chamber, but which he never uses.
What would his parents have made of this accolade? His mother would “not have been too surprised, she thought I should’ve been Viceroy of India” whereas his father harboured “different ambitions” for his son, “a few Welsh caps” in either football or rugby would’ve done the job. In fact, Kinnock Sr would’ve been satisfied if “it had been Tiddleywinks, as long as he saw me in a red jersey”.
Neither of his parents saw him become Leader of the Labour Party, dying a month apart from each other in 1971, a year after Kinnock entered parliament. First, his father, aged 64, from a heart attack and later his mother, 61, partly, in Kinnock’s view, from a broken heart.
When I ask what life is like for him now, he remains composed but his face softens with emotion, his voice faltering, and he takes a beat. Glenys’ passing has been hard for the tight-knit Kinnock family.
“It’s good because of my kids” he answers.
A lifetime in politics, effecting change and defining an era, and yet six decades with Glenys, and the family they built, are quite clearly his proudest achievement.
Photo credit: Oliver Heaton
