Glenys Kinnock, the former MEP and minister of state at the Foreign Office, who has died aged 79, was a determined feminist who realised her political ambitions by securing recognition as an international stateswoman, after having spent nearly 30 years as a classroom teacher.
She cooked and read and ran what the Welsh might call a proper tidy house, yet was also curious and outward-looking, and everything she did was filtered through the prism of her political beliefs. Clever, funny, smart and resourceful, she had the ability to communicate with anyone; it was particularly noticeable in her instinctive connection with small children. This was almost certainly the same skill that enabled her to handle other politicians so expertly. She was also mischievous: she and a girlfriend once pretended to be models in a shop window, standing stock still and then changing their pose to startle passers-by. Glenys was the daughter of Cyril Parry, a railway signalman and merchant seaman during the second world war, and his wife, Elizabeth (Bet), who took in washing as a young woman and then ran a cafe. She had an elder brother, Colin, and was born in a railway cottage.
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