Prunella Scales wasn’t just a lifelong Labour supporter. She appeared in party political broadcasts for the party during the 2005 and 2010 general elections and was a tireless campaigner.
She called the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock a “dear friend” and, along with her actor husband Timothy West, was a prominent Labour Party supporter when Tony Blair was prime minister.
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Scales and West, who died last November, may not have been among New Labour’s biggest donors at the time, but they were vocal cheerleaders for the Blair government and high-profile activists.
Her activism began much earlier. Back in 1977, at the height of her fame playing Sybil in Fawlty Towers, she attended the launch of the Anti-Nazi League at the House of Commons with Kinnock, Peter Hain and other celebrity supporters.
In the 1980s, she served on the council of the actors’ union Equity and performed at a benefit concert for the wives of striking miners. She also supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
As well as her activism during Kinnock’s leadership, in 1988 she played the Queen in Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution, at the National Theatre, quizzing Anthony Blunt about a painting in the royal collection that may have been a fake.
According to The Guardian, when she later went to Buckingham Palace to receive her CBE, the Queen muttered as she handed over the gong: “I suppose you think you should be up here doing this.”
And ahead of the 1992 general election, which Kinnock lost to John Major, she was quoted warmly praising the Labour leader in an Observer article on the relationship between politics and celebrities.
Timothy West and Prunella Scales.
Pic: PA
After Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997, Scales and West were part of a group of A-list supporters and major party donors that became known as “luvvies for Labour”.
The couple were also active in party events. In 2000, they were among the leading performers in a glitzy centenary celebration for the Labour Party at the Old Vic Theatre in London, hosted by the then prime minister.
A capacity audience of party members attended the event, which was staged to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the forming of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900.
In the 2005 general election campaign, Scales was the presenter for the party’s election broadcast, while she and others, including actor Neil Pearson, were also involved in broadcasts during the 2010 campaign.
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She was part of a group of celebrities and politicians, including Mr Blair, who participated in a “Burma Campaign” to boycott the country in support of Aung San Suu Kyi in her struggle for democracy.
She also appeared with her old friend Kinnock at a 2006 event for the play “The Lady Of Burma” at the Old Vic.
Paying tribute to the couple in West’s 2001 autobiography, A Moment Towards The End Of The Play, Simon Callow wrote: “He (and his wife Prunella Scales) have tirelessly fought the corner of actors; marching, signing petitions, campaigning wherever such things were needed, though never pompously or humourlessly.”
The dynasty lives on, albeit rather differently. The couple’s actor son Samuel West, who plays the irascible Siegfried Farnon in Channel 5’s All Creatures Great And Small, also became a political activist, but unlike his parents was no fan of Mr Blair.
While at Oxford University, he was a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party and later the Socialist Alliance. He was also an outspoken critic of the New Labour government and the Iraq war.
Prunella Scales, however, along with Timothy West, was one of the Labour Party’s most stalwart and loyal showbiz supporters over many years.
