THIS PIECE APPEARED in September 1983 on the eve of the Labour Party Conference, at which Neil Kinnock became leader. His remarks about other members of the party, particularly Meacher, Benn and Wilson, were picked up by all the other Sundays, and the Mail on Sunday led on the story. By midday Mr Kinnock had denied making any of the remarks, but fortunately they were all down in my notebook.
Neil Kinnock not only cares – but more important he has to be seen to care. When I first met him three years ago in the Commons, he was so busy hailing fellow MPs, chatting up a party of blind men, and pumping visiting pensioners by the hand, it was almost impossible to get a word in edgeways.
This week in the South Wales colliery town of Pontllanfraith, it was the same. Arriving at his house, I found a bright scarlet front door, no bell and no Neil. Soon I was joined by a handsome man and his springer spaniel, who with its ginger ears, freckled paws and indiscriminate amiability was not unlike Mr Kinnock.
‘Waiting for Neil are you?’ asked the handsome man, who turned out to be the local youth officer. ‘He’s a great bloke, cares about the area, people love him round here, he remembers their names.’
‘Would he remember to turn up?’ I asked anxiously as it started to rain.
‘Oh yes, he’s always late.’
If you have charm, people will wait for you. As several other people stopped to pass the time of day and sing our Neil’s praises, I realised Mr Kinnock’s warmth is very much a local trait.
And suddenly he drove up in the blue Rover the TGWU have given him to replace the Ford he piled up on the M4. Two weeks holiday in Tuscany had bleached the Tabasco red hair and given him a tan which blended into the freckles. Bouncing out, weighed down by a duvet, two carrier bags and an overweight briefcase, he said we couldn’t get in because he’d forgotten the key, but D’reen up the road had a spare.
‘How was Strasbourg?’ I began, but Mr Kinnock was already pumping the youth officer by the hand, telling him to Give us a Shout if he needed anything.
‘How,’ I began again, but our Neil had bounded into the traffic, across the road to shake hands with an ancient constituent and disappear inside his house. Ten minutes later he was back. The poor old boy’s wife had died recently.
In between waving at passers-by, he tried to light his pipe, but gave up because of the rain which was now sweeping symbolically rightwards. I asked him about his U-turn on the Common Market.
‘The British don’t like the Common Market,’ he replied. ‘But they’re wrongly frightened we couldn’t survive without it. It’s like saying I can’t give up booze because I might freeze to death’.
‘I was addressing the Socialist group over there,’ he went on, then added in outraged tones, as though he’d never done the same thing himself, ‘and in the middle two Frenchmen started talking. I told them to shut up.’
By now we were quite wet, so I was relieved when D’reen arrived with the key. The house inside was delightful and blissfully warm. The knocked-through room contains a pine table and a Welsh dresser. On the walls are Lowry prints, numerous photographs of Mr Kinnock’s wife Glenys and their two children, a framed Private Eye cover featuring Mr Kinnock and Mr Foot, and a certificate to show Mr Kinnock had been down a mine.
Mr Kinnock apologised for the Venetian blinds – without them he’d never get any peace – and offered me real or instant coffee.
‘Instant’s fine,’ I said.
‘Real coffee’s much nicer.’
‘Isn’t it rather middle class?’ I said, teasing.
‘No,’ Mr Kinnock bridled. ‘The Italian working classes wouldn’t dream of drinking anything but real coffee.’
Wasn’t he thrilled about becoming leader?
Just for a second he dropped his guard, grinning engagingly from ear to ear. Then remembering his image as the caring family man who’s unwittingly had a greatness thrust upon him, added ‘But at forty-one, I’m too young. The kids are at the wrong age, Rachel’s eleven, Stevie’s thirteen. Before entering the leadership stakes, I had to think very seriously whether such a commitment would damage the kids.’
Were they impressed?
‘Not very,’ said Mr Kinnock, adding skimmed milk to his coffee. ‘Although I’ve become an excellent source of autographs for Rachel. Stevie’d be more impressed if I captained Wales.’
Neil Kinnock is shrewd enough to realise this may be the last chance for the Labour Party, that unless they clean up their act and present some appearance of unity, they’ll never win another election.
How would he tackle the problem?
‘Left, right and centre of the party have only to observe one discipline, the self-discipline of the will to win. To those who won’t realise this, who insist on short-term squabbles, who’d rather fight ally than enemy, I’ll give no quarter. I’m not asking them to make terrific sacrifices, just to think before they open their mouths. Bloody blinds,’ he leapt restlessly to his feet to adjust them.
Evidently at the TUC conference, he’d commuted between Unions, urging them to boot out their militants. Wouldn’t there be a backlash?
‘People overemphasise the militant danger,’ said Mr Kinnock. ‘They’re terrified of Meacher, they regard him as Benn’s vicar on earth, and use his name to frighten their children. In reality, he’s kind, scholarly, innocuous – and as weak as hell.’
Obviously thinking Hattersley would be elected to the deputy leadership, Mr Kinnock described him as ‘a nice man’.
‘Nice,’ I said incredulously.
‘I can work with him,’ said Mr Kinnock firmly, which means the same thing.
Tony Benn however was dismissed as a spent force. ‘Couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding.’
Was it true he had once described Benn as a blind worm trying to be an adder? For a second Mr Kinnock flickered between discretion and the desire to be credited with a bon mot. He opted for the former, saying: ‘Attribute that to me, and I’ll kill you.’
He has a good face, and, as with most people with charm, it gets more attractive the longer you look at it. Despite reports to the contrary he still has lots of hair, but as he is small – five foot five at the most – people tend to look down on the bald patch. Then there’s the voice, husky and distractingly seductive, which makes everything he says sound wonderfully significant, until you analyse it afterwards.
People accuse Kinnock of laziness. He is assiduous at promoting his own image, making speeches round the country, but less anxious about buckling down to the donkey work of dissecting white papers. It is also said he is not very bright. He failed his degree the first time at Cardiff – not a very academic university. But then being an intellectual didn’t get Mr Foot very far. According to Saatchi and Saatchi, even before the election Kinnock was the man the Tories feared most because he offered a street brightness which appealed to the voter.
What did he feel about the beauty contest set up between David Owen, David Steel and himself, all youngish, attractive and wooing the middle classes?
Mr Kinnock laughed. ‘I’m bound to lose on the beauty stakes, but I’m not after the female vote, I’m after everyone.’
He agreed that the word ‘middle class’ had somehow shifted to embrace everyone in work. ‘It’s given them a terrible self-righteousness. Mrs Thatcher has made them look down on people who haven’t got jobs. But forget the glamour,’ he went on, becoming positively Churchillian, ‘we’ve got a product to sell, we’re not a record sleeve party like the SDP.’
He doesn’t like David Owen much either.
‘He’s intelligent, anyone can be intelligent. What we need in politics is common sense. And the man’s arrogant, orthopaedically arrogant in every pore,’ which once again sounds splendid when delivered with the Welsh ring of confidence, until you get home and look up ‘orthopaedic’, to discover it means curing deformities of the bone, and realise the phrase is meaningless.
Nor did he like the media’s latest interpretation of him as the thinking man’s Harold Wilson.
‘Harold Wilson’s a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit, even if they make him a viscount,’ he snapped. For someone who intends to scourge the party of sniping, Mr Kinnock’s pretty high in the vitriol stakes himself.
Kinnock was born in March 1942, and came from a happy, united family. His father was a miner, later a steel worker, his mother a district nurse. Although both parents worked, and money can’t have been short, they made a decision to have only one child, so all their resources and time could be devoted to Neil. Both sadly died when he was twenty-nine.
Wasn’t he heartbroken that they weren’t alive to witness his success?
‘I am,’ said Mr Kinnock wistfully, then once again remembering his image as the caring parent, hastily added, ‘But it hurts far more that they never knew the kids.’
Kinnock first met his wife Glenys, who teaches backward children, when they were both at Cardiff University.
‘Was it love at first sight?’
‘Not quite so elevated as that.’
‘Lust then?’
Mr Kinnock shot me a calculating look, as though trying to assess my age.
‘Even when one’s young,’ he said winningly, ‘one only lusts after women in their forties, or perhaps thirties,’ he went on quickly, thinking he might have overshot the mark.
People who know the Kinnocks well say the dashing and rather beautiful Mrs Kinnock is the power behind the throne. She believes in the Welsh tradition of women living through their men and driving them on.
‘Would the real cabinet decisions be taken at home?’ I asked.
Mr Kinnock denied this with rather too much conviction.
‘No, no, but I value the woman’s opinions, she’s so bright, and she has a quite uncanny, basic sense of justice, she knows what’s right. She always counsels caution. If you do that, she tells me, you’ll only get into trouble. I try to heed her, it doesn’t always work. She buys all my clothes, even my suits. I don’t know how she copes with me and the children and her job, but she’s like the great footballers, she’s always got time.’
Mrs Kinnock won’t give interviews, because it takes the limelight off her husband, and also, allegedly, because she’s terrified of putting her foot in it. At the time of the Royal Wedding, however, she talked to a newspaper, saying: ‘We were asked to the wedding, but we weren’t in the least interested, and of course we didn’t go.’
According to Kinnock, his wife was misquoted. She wanted to talk about education and politics, and the interviewer kept rabbiting on about the wedding until Mrs Kinnock was goaded into saying they weren’t interested.
‘Weren’t you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mr Kinnock.
‘Didn’t you watch on telly?’
‘No,’ the green eyes flicker, then go opaque when he doesn’t like a subject.
‘None of you?’
‘No – well, Glenys and Rachel watched some of it,’ he admitted. ‘But then Rachel’s very into being a bridesmaid,’ as though that justified such a monarchist lapse.
Actually, went on Mr Kinnock, trimming, he liked the Queen, and Charles was a nice old bumbler.
‘When I was in Strasbourg,’ he added, trimming further, ‘and that Greek idiot was sounding off about the Russians shooting down that plane, I thought thank God we’ve got a queen with dignity, who keeps her nose out of politics.’
Mr Kinnock is spoken of as the Messiah who will lead the Labour Party into the promised land. Whether the land will be as promised is debatable. He’s already fudging on the Common Market and Polaris. But at least there will be no U-turn over the abolition of the private schools. Mr Kinnock is out for their blood. The first year in power, he will make parents pay VAT on school fees. The next, fee-paying will be made illegal.
‘I believe in nurturing parents,’ said Mr Kinnock sanctimoniously. ‘But if I give my kids as much help as I can, it doesn’t affect the other children. But because of the status attached to the independent schools, it makes the maintained sector feel inferior – and they attach far too much importance to academic achievement. What we need,’ he went on, warming to his subject, ‘is intelligence,’ then, remembering he’d attacked Dr Owen for the same quality, ‘or rather common sense.’
Wasn’t it totalitarianism to forbid parents to educate their children as they wished? Britain would be the only country in the free world to do so.
‘Britain’, replied Mr Kinnock heavily, ‘is the only country so divided by class.’
‘It’ll cause a frightful row.’
‘I like rows,’ said Mr Kinnock, radiating egalitarian spite.
Things were getting a bit frosty, so I asked Mr Kinnock how he unwound.
‘By being with the children. I came back knackered from Strasbourg, and helped Rachel with her fractions.’
One would think he was pitching for a job running a children’s home rather than the leadership of the Labour Party.
How had he coped when he’d lost his voice?
Just for one second, again unable to resist a joke, he dropped his guard and became human again: ‘Oh home life picked up dramatically. I wasn’t able to shout at the kids.’
On the way home, I tried to work out how I felt. You can’t help liking Neil Kinnock, as a man devoted to his family with a genuine desire to help those in need. With the leadership only a few days away, he is also obviously proceeding like a batsman on 99, determined not to say anything to rock the boat. Why then do I suspect him of ruthless ambition, calculation and extreme deviousness? Perhaps because these qualities are necessary in a successful politician, particularly one who is going to unite the Labour Party. It is sad that the mantle of power is already turning into a straitjacket.