Ann Clwyd

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak about my friend Ann Clwyd, whom I knew extremely well. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) for the wonderful way she has put her memories on the record today.

I first knew Ann when she was elected to Parliament along with me in the early ’80s. We shared an office in the Cloisters downstairs, along with about 25 other MPs. It was an extremely noisy place, because Ann had a great deal to say. Lord Campbell-Savours often came along to have an argument with Ann about something, or to tell her what to do, and she told him what to do and so it went on. Tony Benn was next door, and there were a number of others there, so it was not a quiet place.

The office was also home to my dog called Mango, who came in as well. Ann was deeply concerned about Mango’s health and often looked after Mango for me. One day there was a leak in the roof. It was literally a leak—there was a lot of talk about Government leaks, but this was a real leak with water coming in from the roof. The rest of us just moaned and groaned and phoned up services and said, “Please fix this leak”, but Ann? No, no, no. I opened the Evening Standard at lunchtime that day. There was a picture of Ann Clwyd with an umbrella over her head, raincoat, wellington boots—the whole bit—explaining how Parliament had so deteriorated that she was forced to come in with protective gear to get through the day. She had this wonderful panache for publicising events and issues, but that hid a deep steel in what she did.

She represented Cynon Valley, where Tower colliery was. I was at the next desk to her. The miners’ strike came, and they wanted support, so she asked me to get a load of people from my constituency to go to Cynon Valley. We hired a coach and a van, we took food and we went in large numbers. Ann met us there. We built up a great relationship with Tyrone O’Sullivan, and it was an honour to be invited to speak at his funeral recently with my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley.

Ann was somebody who stood up for what she believed in. She and I were two of a very small group of MPs who opposed arms sales to Iraq and spoke up for the Kurdish people during the chemical attack on Halabja. We did a lot of activities around the place and worked closely together with all the Kurdish groups. Ann was rightly seen as a great friend of the Kurdish community. While she and I did not agree on the Iraq war, we were both on the record as opposing arms sales to Iraq. There were not many of us who were opposed to arms sales to Iraq before the war began. I saw Ann as a friend and colleague, and I worked closely with her as vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on human rights.

During the Yeltsin period, we went on a delegation to Russia to try to defend the Chechen people, with the horrors they were going through. Ann was extremely assertive on behalf of the human rights group on that. I distinctly remember sitting in front of somebody who was presumably very senior in something because he had an unbelievable number of phones set out all round his desk, and Ann and I were speculating about which phone led to which person. It was her wit and humour that helped to get things through. I want to put on the record my thanks to her for so much of what she did.

As chair of the human rights group, Ann also led us in a delegation to East Timor in 2000 to witness its referendum. It was difficult, because the Indonesian army was supposedly protecting the integrity of the referendum, which was a strange to-do. Ann, I and the late Alice Mahon were on a delegation, and we visited all the polling stations on behalf of the UN and met many people there. For some reason that I never really understood, Ann brought an amazing amount of luggage, which filled up the very small plane we went in to get there. The rest of us all became porters for Ann Clwyd’s luggage—there was a lot of it, and it was very heavy. When we asked her to explain this, she said, “I don’t think it’s any of your business how many cases I choose to bring, but it’s very much your business that you’ve got to carry them.” So I said, “Thanks, Ann—that’s great.” But we played our part in ensuring that the people of East Timor, who had been through hell for decades, actually saw their independence and some hope for the future.

I want to say a huge thank you to Ann for the friendship, for the humour, and for the steel and determination on the human rights cause and all the other causes that colleagues have mentioned. She was always a good friend to me. We often did not totally agree on everything, but we totally agreed to respect each other in our disagreement, so we always got along very well indeed. That is a good example of how politics can work. I say to all her family: my condolences, and thank you for the life of Ann.