Author Description

For more than thirty years, since she was elected the Member of Parliament for the former mining seat of Cynon Valley in South Wales, Ann Clwyd has been one of Labour's star performers. A consummate constituency politician, she has consistently been led by her conscience to support a number of human rights causes and campaigns, often beyond these shores, and most notably in the middle east. After holding a number of shadow ministerial posts she rose to particular prominence when Tony Blair made her his Special Envoy on Human Rights in Iraq in the run-up to the war, an association that would later cause her to be viewed with some controversy from within her own party. Hers is a life that has also encompassed tragedy. In 2012 she railed against the low nursing standards that had allowed staff at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, to treat her dying husband with coldness, resentment, indifference and contempt. Her very public attempts to highlight what she saw as a 'normalisation of cruelty' within the NHS led to opprobrium from some on her own benches, for whom the NHS is above criticism, but led to an impressed David Cameron appointing her to advise on complaint handling within the service. Clwyd's has been a full and meaningful political life and she continues to fight for what she believes in.