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.
Despite her delight in her second career, Lady Kinnock of Holyhead, as she became in 2009, on taking office in the last year of the then Labour government, was the first to insist that she would greatly have preferred to fulfil her earlier ambition to help achieve the election of a Labour government under the leadership of her husband, Neil Kinnock.
