Stephen Kinnock: ‘We’re learning the lessons of Dad’s election defeat in 1992 – we’re up for the fight’

Emerging as a formidable voice in the Labour Party, with his robust defence of the Tata Steel workers, Stephen Kinnock sits down with Julia Llewellyn Smith to discuss his battle to save jobs in Port Talbot, what it was like growing up in a political family and his heartbreak at losing his mum, Glenys, to Alzheimers

Stephen Kinnock is proving to be a force to be reckoned with (Getty Images)

Stephen Kinnock smiles as he talks quietly about the death just before Christmas of his mother Glenys, aged 73, from Alzheimer’s. To Kinnock, she was “Mum”, to the world she was Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, wife of Neil, Labour leader from 1983 to 1992.

“One of the lovely things that happened after Mum died is we heard those lovely tributes,” he says. “They were very moving and really helped me to deal with the grieving process. You access memories from before that horrible illness took hold, because for the last three or four years she was a very, very different person to before. That change is so all-consuming you find it quite difficult to remember what she had been like.”

Baroness Kinnock was diagnosed with the condition in 2017. “So you grieve twice,” says Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberavon and shadow immigration minister, sitting in his offices in Portcullis House.