The former Labour MP for Cynon Valley Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, blazed a trail in pursuit of human rights for all those whose causes she adopted during a long life of passionate political advocacy. Her first campaigns were close to home on behalf of the mining industry in her native Wales, and she would later become strongly identified with sympathy for the Kurdish people of Iraq.
Her commitment to their case and opposition to the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein led to her remarkable speech in the House of Commons in early 2003 in support of the proposed war against Iraq, despite the widespread opposition on the Labour party left, with whom she was customarily associated. The then prime minister, Tony Blair, subsequently appointed her as his special envoy on human rights in Iraq, a post she held until the fall of the Labour government in 2010.
She never regretted her decision – “I knew that I could not face the Iraqi people if I voted against intervention” – and her determined stance later won her political awards as backbencher and campaigning MP of the year.
Clwyd was also a trenchant and articulate journalist, notably for this news organisation and the Observer from 1964 until 1979, and she never hesitated to use this platform to advance her arguments on the issue of human rights, at home and abroad, and as a fearless feminist. Her parliamentary career was dedicated to advancing the rights of women, having had a long and tough fight to secure a winnable constituency in what was then the masculine autocracy of Welsh Labour politics. She was the first female MP to represent a seat in the valleys of the south Wales coalfield and at one point the only female MP in Wales. A smart dresser with an attractive sense of style, she gave many cause to thank her for leading the successful campaign to include a women’s hairdresser among the Commons’ facilities.
She was a strong woman with a cool head, who knew her own mind. Friendly and popular in the Commons, and having spent eight years as a frontbench shadow spokeswoman, Clwyd might have expected to have been appointed a minister when the Blair government took office in 1997. She would have liked overseas development. However, by then she was regarded as a member of the party’s awkward squad. Blair had sacked her from his shadow foreign affairs team for missing a Commons vote in 1995 when pursuing her campaign on Kurdish rights. She had also been dismissed by Neil Kinnock in 1988 from her post as spokeswoman on women and education, for defying the whips in a vote on nuclear weapons.
She had acquired political confidence before arriving at Westminster during five years as a member of the first directly elected European parliament from 1979. On arrival as an MEP she had been against the then common market, but was swiftly won over. She said of the EU in 1992: “It’s where the future lies and you can get things done”, little foreseeing Brexit at the time – a decision she regarded as calamitous in 2016. Her years in Europe also gave her an understanding of an international perspective, finding the House of Commons when she first joined to be “delusional” in its collective belief that the UK did everything better.
Born Ann Clwyd Lewis in Denbigh in north Wales, she was the daughter of Gwilym Lewis, a metallurgist, and his wife, Elizabeth (nee Jones), who had trained as a domestic science teacher. Both parents were from the seaside village of Aberdyfi, in Gwynedd, an area to which Clwyd retained a lifelong attachment. It was not a political household, and she and her younger sister, Gwyneth, were raised with a sense of duty, instilled at chapel and Sunday school.
She spoke only Welsh until the age of five and remained an advocate of the language, later securing European funding for its encouragement and taking the parliamentary oath in Welsh and English. She went to Halkyn primary school and Holywell grammar school before the family moved to Chester when Ann was 14, and then attended the direct grant Queen’s school.
She won a place to study English, Welsh and biblical studies at University College, Bangor, but spent too much time socialising and on student politics, and dropped out without graduating after two years. Subsequently she would become an honorary fellow of the university, among other honorary degrees.
She found a job with BBC Wales and became a studio manager – she did the sound effects for the children’s programme Toytown – which led eventually to journalism as a freelance reporter and producer.
In 1963 she married Owen Roberts, a TV director and producer, and although known for a period as Ann Clwyd Roberts, dropped her husband’s surname in the interests of a shorter byline. She now also had an increasing interest in politics. Having supported Plaid Cymru as a schoolgirl and won a school election as the nationalist candidate, she had developed ambitions to be a Labour MP. She joined the party in 1968 and in 1970 stood in the safe Tory seat of Denbigh. In October 1974 she was selected for another unwinnable seat in Gloucester and thereafter failed to win selection for Birmingham Stechford or for Caerphilly in 1977, or for Ogmore in 1979. During this period she also wrote for the Labour party newspaper Labour Weekly, as the Welsh correspondent. She was elected as the MEP for Mid and West Wales in 1979.
In 1984 she won selection for the Cynon Valley byelection, defeating four former MPs for the seat once represented (then called Merthyr and Aberdare) by Keir Hardie. As a journalist she had campaigned forcefully for compensation for miners suffering from pneumoconiosis, and elected, as she was, in the course of the bitter miners’ strike, she proved a powerful voice in defence of the industry as she would remain throughout. In 1994 she joined a successful sit-in to keep open the Tower Colliery in Hirwaun and stayed underground for 27 hours. The pit continued to produce coal and finally closed only in 2008.
Another significant interest lay in improving the efficiency of the NHS. She was a member of the Welsh hospital board (1970-74) and Cardiff Community Health Council (1975-79). She was appointed by Barbara Castle, then health secretary, as the Welsh representative on the Royal Commission on the NHS, which sat from 1976 to 1979.
In later years she made a powerful political impact after her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, died in the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, in 2012. She told MPs in 2013 that he had “died like a battery hen” and had been treated with coldness, resentment, indifference and contempt on his deathbed, an account that opened floodgates of similar grievances and led the then prime minister, David Cameron, to appoint her to lead a review into the NHS complaints procedure.
Her other campaigns included introducing controls to prevent the practice of rogue plastic surgery, and in 2003 she sponsored a private member’s bill to outlaw female genital mutilation.
She had responsibilities on the opposition frontbench between 1987 and 1995, notably as shadow secretary for overseas development. It was during this time that she first visited Kurdistan, in 1990, and told the Commons: “I have seen for myself the most abject misery, that I would not have thought possible.” After another visit in 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, she said she had cried after hearing from victims of torture, and it was her great regret that Britain had not led the way to regime change in Iraq when it had the chance during the first Gulf war.
She chaired the parliamentary Labour party in 2005, and the all-party parliamentary group on human rights (1997-2019). She was a member of the select committees on international development (1997-2005) and on foreign affairs (2010-19).
When she stood down at the last election, after 35 years representing Cynon Valley, she was the oldest woman to have sat as an MP. Her memoir, Rebel With a Cause, was published in 2017 and dedicated to her late husband and to human rights.
• Ann Clwyd, politician and journalist, born 21 March 1937; died 21 July 2023
• This article was amended on 24 July 2023. A picture caption and the text referred to “the south Wales minefield”: that has now been corrected to “coalfield”.
