Neil Kinnock, the former British Labour Party leader whose soaring rhetoric Joe Biden borrowed, dooming his first presidential bid, is supporting the former vice president in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
A member of the House of Lords, where his title is Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty, since 2005, Kinnock told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that Biden would be an ideal Democratic nominee to defeat President Trump in fall 2020.
“From this distance, but as a citizen of the world with grandchildren and deep concerns about our planet and many of those ruling it, I’ll support anyone who can beat Trump,” Kinnock said of Biden, a Delaware senator for 36 years before spending eight more as President Barack Obama’s vice president.
“If the Democratic Party chooses Joe they’ll have someone who is certainly in with a decent chance,” Kinnock added. “That will be because of his proven ability, experience, sense of mature judgment on the major issues, his qualities as a communicator and his normality. Not perfect, but with only mundane imperfections, which, I think, will have real appeal to the electorate.”
Referring to Biden’s status as the second-oldest Democratic candidate in the 20-person field just behind 77-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders, Kinnock said, “He’s also a very fit 76-year-old, as far as I can see, and, as a fit 77-year-old myself, I recognize that it really is the new 60.”
Kinnock was a frequent target of a hostile British press, and for a decade, the Guardian noted, “was ridiculed as an unelectable, ginger, Welsh windbag.” He and Biden became inextricably linked during the run-up to the 1988 presidential race.
Biden was widely viewed as a working-class political wunderkind, having won his first Senate race before he was 30.
At the Iowa State Fair in August 1987, he said: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”
Biden had related the thought before and attributed it to Kinnock, who had asked in a speech earlier in 1987: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys [his wife] the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?”
But when he dropped the attribution, the media pounced. The plagiarism controversy led to further questions about Biden’s accuracy and integrity, including a citation in a law school paper he attributed incorrectly. It also emerged that he had also used passages from the speeches of Democratic greats Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The scandals snowballed and Biden dropped out of the race within weeks.
Kinnock told the Examiner that the pair kept in touch for years after on a personal and professional basis. “Joe Biden and I first met in 1989 when he visited London and came to my Leader of the Opposition’s office. We got on well, as you’d expect because of our similar views on salient issues. I separately explained to his son why he shouldn’t think ill of his father’s decision to quit the nomination race in ’88.”
Kinnock added, “Joe and I last saw each other in early 2008 when I made an official visit to Washington as chair of the British Council … He introduced me to his staff as his ‘greatest ever speech writer … ‘ laughter all around. At that visit, he was the first person to tell me that Barack Obama would be president. Sadly, I didn’t put a bet on. He subsequently arranged for my wife and I to attend various functions at the 2009 Inauguration. We haven’t been in touch since — no problems, just time.”
Kinnock said Biden’s penchant for long-winded speeches and other self-inflicted wounds could even be an asset. “He was an excellent VP, not solely because of loyalty but because of capability too. Mr. Obama picked him because Biden would be ‘a safe pair of hands’ if he’d been unable to continue as president for some reason. Happily, no such reason arose, but Joe proved to be more than up to the task, despite his habit of occasionally off-color spontaneous remarks.”
Kinnock had a long career in British politics, though like Biden to date, at least, he never reached the top position in government. He was elected Labour leader in 1983 after the party suffered its largest defeat since 1935. Kinnock gradually moved his party to the center on issues such as privatization and nuclear arms, but persistently came up short against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party.
Kinnock in 1995 retired from the House of Commons to became a member of the European Commission. He served in Brussels as the commission’s vice president from 1999 to 2004 and was named a life peer in 2005.
