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Published: 20 January, 2011
by MATTHEW LEWIN

ED MILIBAND has the “X factor” – a mixture of high intelligence, great integrity, imagination and authenticity that the country needs in a political leader, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock told an audience at Burgh House on Thursday.

“He also has great fluency. But I think that when he hits his stride people will see that he is immensely effective. If he shows his sternness as well as his absolutely genuine decency, I think people will back him.”

Mr Kinnock, now living in Tufnell Park and a working peer in the house of Lords with the title Baron Kinnock of Bedwelty, added: “I am in absolutely no doubt that we chose the right guy.”

Lord Kinnock, appearing in the Burgh House “Lifelines” series of interviews, described his childhood and upbringing in Tredegar, South Wales, where he was born in 1942.

His home, he said was “an immensely happy and generous household, full of imagination, colour and culture.”

It was also a staunch Labour Party household. “It was in their bone marrow” he said, and it clearly got passed down in the genes because young Neil joined the Labour Party when he was 14.

He has vivid memories of hearing Aneurin Bevan speaking in Tredegar. “It was the time of the Suez Crisis, and he was speaking at rallies all around the country, the climax of which was in the workman’s hall in Tredegar to a crowd inside of over 2,000. There were another 8-10,000 outside who heard the speech by tannoy. It was riveting. I later discovered that the speech had lasted more than an hour, but it was transfixing. He was magical.”

The young activist managed to get a form of scholarship to a top grammar school, where “I got a double first in clowning around. I deeply regret it now, but it was a hell of a lot of fun at the time.”

But he did well enough to gain admission to University College in Cardiff. “My first year I played rugby, chased the girls, and was a member of the Socialist Society although I didn’t do much there. Then in my first week of my second year I encountered a young woman from Holyhead in North Wales, whose first words to me were: ‘Are you the man from the Socialist Society?’ As it happens I was the secretary. She turned out to be Glenys, and it soon became clear that she wasn’t interested in any sporting prowess, but liked people who were politically active and articulate. So in order to cement what I hoped would be a flourishing relationship I spoke in a debate in her second week and did very well, the rest is history.” They have been married for nearly 45 years.

After working for the Workers’ Educa­tional Association for a few years he learned that the sitting Labour MP for Bedwelty was retiring and he was persuaded to apply for the candidacy. After a dramatic meeting of the party’s general management committee, Neil was adopted by 76 votes to 74, and he went on to win the seat in the general election of 1970 with a massive majority of 24,000 votes. “It was astounding, and a great, great experience – except for the fact that on the same day Ted Heath won the general election.”

Initially he was on the left of the party and, for example, voted against Britain’s entry to the Common Market. “It was stupid and wrong. It had more to do with an opportunistic political attempt to defeat the Conservative government. I was never really an anti-Common Marketeer.”

After the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher, he began to move to the centre ground of Labour politics. “When we lost the ’79 election, I recognised that we hadn’t lost because we weren’t left-wing enough! “Life is too real and too earnest to engage in the fantasies of sectarian politics. I realised it was put up or shut up time, so I accepted Jim Callaghan’s invitation to become education spokesman.”

After the disastrous defeat in 1983 he was elected to the leader­ship with more than 70 per cent of the votes – and he set about trying to modernise the party.

“When you engage in substantial change, you don’t just have to alter policies, you’ve got to transform a mindset. I had to try to convey to people that, for example, it wasn’t a betrayal of socialism to say ‘We have now been in the Common Market for 12 years, so stop deluding yourselves that we are going to pull out and suffer a gigantic loss of jobs and dislocation of the economy.

“One thing I was absolutely determined to do, even if I was only going to be leader for six months, was to change our policy on the sale of council houses – but in a more sensible way than Mrs Thatcher’s way. We had to stop worshipping at the clay altar that there was something implacable and inviolable about people buying their homes.

“Every single change we made, no matter how big or how small, had to be fought for tooth and nail – which is why I describe that period as my midlife crisis.”

So what happened in 1992, when Labour was expected to win the general election? “Well, we just didn’t get enough votes.”

He blamed the aftermath of the disastrous miners’ strike, and the fact that the party just didn’t have the time to make the persuasive case that it needed to make.

“The press ruthlessly exploited memories of the miners’ strike, the winter of discontent and all the rest of it. And then there was me and the negative propaganda and attacks, and maybe my own general shortcomings.”

He resigned the leadership but stayed on in the Commons for another three years until in 1995 he became the European Commissioner for Transport, a job in which he is generally agreed to have done extremely well.

In 2004 he was made a working peer in the House of Lords. Was he enjoying his new existence as a peer?

“In many respects, yes, because for one thing there are a lot of old chums there – it is God’s waiting room after all – but there are also a lot of things to be done, causes to be fought for and questions to be raised and all the rest of it and I’m still fighting for the things I believe in.”