Neil Kinnock spills the beans on 125 years of Labour Party history

On May 14 1951, the people of Tredegar gathered for the traditional Whitsun Walk through the Welsh mining town. Proud chapels marched through the packed streets, singing hymns and carrying banners. As was tradition, a child from the Sunday School was chosen to receive £2 in an envelope from the town council, handed over by a special guest on the steps outside Bedwellty House.

The special guest that year was local MP Aneurin Bevan, who had served as Minister of Health in Clement Attlee’s government until the start of that year. The child from the Sunday School was nine-year-old Neil Kinnock. ‘There we are, young man,’ Kinnock remembers being told. ‘You make sure the Sunday School spends it wisely – and off I went.’.

Nineteen years later, he would be elected to Parliament for nearby Bedwellty and go on to become one of the major figures in the second half of Labour’s 125-year history, a foil for Margaret Thatcher and the party’s longest-serving leader never to enter Number 10.

But the deep links Kinnock, now 82, has with the party’s history were forged long before he was even born. They are hard to avoid when you’re from Tredegar, a town steeped in socialist politics like no other in the country. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Will Howells, was at the selection meeting of miners that picked Keir Hardie as the Labour candidate for Merthyr Tydfil in 1900, shortly after the Scotsman founded the party.

And Archie Kinnock, his grandfather on his dad’s side, worked alongside Nye Bevan – also a Tredegar native – at the Pochin Colliery. Bevan, who sealed his place in British history by creating the NHS in 1948, is Kinnock’s immediate pick for the greatest figure of Labour history.

Speaking to Metro ahead of the party’s 125th anniversary today, he said: ‘He was the best of the human race, really, because as a politician he was both a plumber who got practical things done, and a poet who could raise people’s hearts and colour their imagination.’.

Our wide-spanning conversation presented an opportunity for the former leader, now Lord Kinnock, to recall his relationships with the figures who defined the party to which he has devoted his life. He was ‘smitten from day one’ with Jennie Lee, Attlee’s influential Minister for the Arts and the wife of Bevan – a ‘very handsome woman’, whom he met when she joined Nye for a visit to The Quarryman’s Arms pub north of Tredegar.

Tony Benn, the passionate socialist who challenged him for the Labour leadership in 1988, was also a ‘good-looking’ man who ‘had all the talents’. However: ‘He contracted the awful self-indulgence of the ultra left, and became almost a sectarian despite preaching diversity. Which is a great shame.

‘I mean, I could give you a list of people who, if they hadn’t died, abandoned the ship or gone daft, could have saved me the trouble of becoming Labour Party leader, which would have given me a much, much better life than I otherwise had, especially in my forties.’.

Someone else ‘impressive, but also self-indulgent’ was Roy Jenkins, the one-time Labour Chancellor who later joined three colleagues to split and form the SDP in 1981. Kinnock considers that the darkest day in the party’s history. ‘They should have stood and fought and try to secure alliance, and sustain the wholeness of the breadth of the Labour Party,’ he lamented. ‘But they didn’t have the guts.

‘So it was easier to leave and try to sabotage the Labour Party, which is somewhere between – in British politics – utterly pointless and self-indulgent.’. Oddly, one politician who is not usually considered as saturated in his party’s extensive history and traditions as other top Labour figures is the man who was named after its founder: Keir Starmer.

‘One of Keir’s great strengths, as well as maybe a flaw – maybe – is that he is not really a politician,’ suggested Kinnock. In a world where few people trust politicians, the quality of not being one can be a ‘source of strength and attractiveness’, he explained. But at the same time, ‘politics is a dirty old trade’ and ‘sometimes it’s a help to have done an apprenticeship’.

‘I think it’s not a weakness of Keir’s that he hasn’t done his apprenticeship, and all the rest of it,’ Kinnock said. ‘I think the strength of not being a politician vastly outweighs any disadvantages.’. And on the day the PM is due to have a high-stakes meeting with US President Donald Trump, his predecessor as Labour leader does not envy the task that lies ahead for him.

‘I’ve worried about the world for probably my whole lifetime. I fear for the world now, in a way that I never have before,’ he said, his gruff but musical voice wavering. ‘I’ll be 83 next month. And the idea that this old man fears for the world is pretty repulsive.’.