Ann Clwyd was every Labour whip’s worst nightmare — a campaigning politician who was prepared to put principle ahead of party discipline. It was for this reason that she was sacked from shadow cabinet positions by two party leaders and was initially blacklisted by New Labour’s inner circle. “I fully understand the need to support party policy,” she wrote in her memoir, Rebel with a Cause, “but I also believe there are times when you simply have to act with your conscience.” It did not help that one of Ann’s most determined political foes was also a veteran whip with direct influence on the internal disciplinary process. Summoned to Blair’s office to explain why she had traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan without permission in 1995, Ann could immediately detect the black hand of Ray Powell, who still held a grudge after their clash at a murky Ogmore by-election ten years earlier. The whips duly had their revenge, ensuring that she would be the first victim of the new regime, dumped from the opposition front bench for the transgression of witnessing a Turkish military assault on her Kurdish friends. Pointing to chief whip Derek Foster, one of Powell’s old USDAW comrades, she left the room with a parting shot: “He’s your problem. He’s old Labour. He’s the man you ought to get rid of.”

Ann Clwyd was a rebel and a fighter. These were the qualities that defined her political career and they were also the reason she could not be called a career politician. Three core principles rooted her political identity. First, she was an internationalist: as an MEP and then as Shadow Secretary for International Development, her commitments and connections fanned out across continents. But this did not make her a relativist and she always refused to abandon human rights to the dogmas of nation, religion or tribe. Second, she was a democratic socialist, a partisan of the labour movement that the Labour party had originally been created to represent. The second was bound up with the first: in the European Parliament of the early 1980s, surrounded by her Eurospectic Labour colleagues, she tried to remind them that “socialism did not stop at our borders; in fact the whole history was one of internationalism.” Third, she was a pragmatist, using the tools of parliament, the art of lobbying and the resources of the press to achieve her aims. She was always prepared to work across party lines in pursuit of a cause and would judge people by their actions rather than party allegiance. Corruption and hypocrisy were among the most pernicious sins in her eyes, but she did not consider them to be the preserve of any particular political persuasion. 

Ann was elected to parliament in May 1984, at the beginning of the Miner’s Strike that would soon evolve into an existential struggle for the entire labour movement. The strike of 84-5 turned out to be a twilight battle and the final defeat of the NUM would mark the end of the organised working class as a political force in the UK. For Ann, as a new NUM-backed MP representing an iconic Welsh coal community, this outcome was not in any way predestined and she would fight hard to secure victory for the miners’ cause at local and national level. This was a position that could not be taken for granted in the Labour party of the time. Neil Kinnock, the son of a Tredegar miner, had deeper emotional ties to the coal heartlands of South Wales than Ann, who grew up in a small hillside village in North Wales, but was trapped by the logic of his own leadership and personal contempt for Arthur Scargill. Ann had no such qualms: whatever she thought of Scargill and his politics, he was defending the livelihoods of her constituents and she was perfectly happy to march alongside him at the head of a flotilla of NUM branch banners or to share a speaking platform at the Aberdare Miners Institute. When it came to her maiden speech in the House of Commons, there was only one possible subject: “I followed the convention and paid tribute to my predecessor and painted a picture of the constituency. Then I let rip.” 

Ann’s defining cause was her support for the victims of Saddam Hussein. She first encountered the world of the Iraqi exiles in Cardiff in the 1970s and was elected chair of the Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI) in 1986. This was a bleak time for the enemies of Saddam. In the context of the Cold War there was nobody else outside of Iraq and the immediate Middle East with any strong reasons or motivations to care about the crimes of the regime. British government policy was worse than indifferent. As the Iran-Iraq war dragged into a deadly stalemate, the Foreign Office noted Saddam’s unquenchable appetite for weapons and decided to treat this as an opportunity to do business. Ann would become one of the most dogged hunters of Trade Minister Alan Clark and pursued a relentless campaign to expose Tory links to the Ba’ath regime. This led, with a kind of remorseless and satisfying logic, to the Scott Report and the ‘arms to Iraq’ scandal, which played its own part in the demise of the Major government. Ann could never forget or forgive Clark’s insouciance and wrote scathingly that he had

summed up the arrogance of ministers when he dared to suggest that Labour MPs were a bit dim not to understand that, from 1987 onwards, they were being misled by the government and that we should have known Britain was selling arms to Iraq. We did suspect it, we did try to expose it, but he and his colleagues lied to cover it up.

But Clark was not alone. When Ann confronted FCO minister William Waldergrove with credible rumours of a chemical weapons attack on Halabja, she was told that there was “no proof.” “I told him to go and get it,” she recalled. (In the end, CARDRI would have to provide this service.) A few months later, she was appalled to see David Mellor shaking hands with Iraqi regime figures at the Baghdad trade fair — again, on behalf of the FCO. This is what the campaigners against Saddam had to face: a solid wall of indifference and cynicism that could rarely be penetrated. It was also an early taste of the amoral realpolitik of Douglas Hurd’s foreign office during the Bosnian war. For those who had been working on behalf of Saddam’s victims from the start it was a record of horror and hypocrisy that never seemed to end.

Ann developed a close bond with the Kurds of northern Iraq. She knew all of the main players and did what she could to publicise their plight in parliament and the media. In the aftermath of the Gulf War she traveled to the Zagros mountains, meeting Kurdish refugees fleeing the prospect of the regime reprisal killings they saw being unleashed on the towns and cities of the southern Shia. Returning to the House of Commons, she “wanted parliamentarians to feel some of the desperation that I had felt and, above all, I wanted the British government to take action.” Her speech in parliament would prove to be the crucial intervention that prompted Major to sponsor no-fly zones and a safe haven status for Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iraqi Kurds accorded her such respect that she was able to act as a mediator between the two main Kurdish factions, facilitating a tense prisoner exchange during the Kurdish civil war of the mid-nineties. Her closest allegiance was to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and she was a loyal friend to its ruling dynasty, the Talabanis. In her memoir, Ann recalled her trip to the Pentagon in 2004 to meet Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. When the conversation came around to the topic of Iraqi presidential candidates, Ann spoke in favour of Jalal Talabani. Talabani would eventually become the first Kurd to hold the office and in this post he kept the Iraqi political establishment together during the civil and sectarian wars of 2006-8. Many of Ann’s old friends — usually Kurds — would rise to positions of prominence in post-Saddam Iraq, often proving to be the most competent and responsible ministers. These included Barham Salih (Deputy Prime Minister 2006-9, President 2018-22), Hoshyar Zebari (Foreign Minister 2003-14, Finance Minister 2014-16) and former Minister of Water (2003-10) and current President Latif Rashid.

Ann’s position on Iraq never changed. She believed that the Ba’ath regime had to be held to account for its crimes, even if this required military confrontation. She believed this before Tony Blair did. “He eventually came round to my point of view,” she liked to point out. From her position in CARDRI and its successor INDICT, she pursued the legal and moral delegitimization of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, keeping the plight of the regime’s victims as visible as possible and pursuing its agents and allies outside of Iraq. This all came to a head in 2003, in the shadow of a looming war, when she was invited to open the Kurd’s genocide museum in Halabja. The Kurds were still legitimately terrified of Saddam’s chemical weapons and she watched as women brought nappies from markets to use as gas masks and convoys of terrified families streamed out of the towns and cities of Iraqi Kurdistan. Her old friend Hero Talabani, the dynamic PUK matriarch, took her to Chamchamal to show her the rocket launchers that surrounded the town. “That’s where they’re going to fire their chemical weapons from,” she told her. In this atmosphere of tension and fear, the contents of the museum served to magnify Ann’s own sense of futility and loss and to reinforce the tragic scale of past events. Even so, her reaction was a surprise:

The day I opened the museum it was snowing, grey and icy. Hundreds of relatives of the dead and victims queued up to watch and tell me their stories. One old man showed me a photograph of fifteen members of his family; he was the only survivor. I was asked to cut the ribbon, but I could feel my voice breaking. I have given thousands of speeches but I simply could not speak. I started walking around the room, trying to compose myself, but when a Kurdish cameraman asked me how I felt I burst into tears. I had never cried in public before.

This was maybe the most eloquent response that she could have given. Her tears were broadcast on television and echoed around Kurdistan. It was the culmination of years of fighting and frustration — years when her commitment had only been matched by the indifference she encountered. She considered this indifference to be a moral abdication, a stain on the human conscience. This was the context of her support for regime change in Iraq.

Ann stood down as MP for the Cynon Valley after the 2019 election. Over the last couple of years she had collected together all of her papers from decades of campaigns and political activity and donated them to the political archive of the National Library of Wales. She would have liked to have entered the House of Lords, not for the pomp and ceremony but for the platform it would have given her to continue campaigning in the way she had always done. This did not happen because of the intrigues of old enemies in the Labour leader’s office, but it did not stop her working for the simple reason that it could not stop her. For Ann, every day was a new day with new challenges and new outrages and new opportunities. Life was activity and action. “The campaigns go on,” she wrote in the prologue to her memoir, “and so do I.” 

R.I.P., Ann.