Timothy West: Churchill actor, Blair supporter

13 November 2024, 20:16 | Updated: 13 November 2024, 20:58

Timothy West played the Tories' wartime hero Winston Churchill three times, yet he was a passionate life-long supporter of the Labour Party.

Along with his wife of 60 years and soulmate Prunella Scales, he campaigned for Labour and was one of the party's most prominent showbiz supporters.

It was after Sir Tony Blair's landslide election victory in 1997 that a group of A-list supporters and major party donors became known as "luvvies for Labour".

More: Timothy West has died, aged 90

From stage and screen, they included impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh, actors Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons, and One Foot In The Grave star Richard Wilson.

West and Scales were not listed among New Labour's biggest donors at the time, but they were cheerleaders for the Blair government and were high-profile activists.

In 2000, the couple 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, compered by comedian and actor Stephen Fry, with Tony Robinson, aka Baldrick in Blackadder, also taking part.

The event was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the forming of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. West spoke in front of a giant photo of socialist hero Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS.

A determined supporter

In a review of West's autobiography, A Moment Towards The End Of The Play, published in 2001, fellow actor Simon Callow paid tribute to his modesty and humility in his political campaigning.

"He has given unstintingly of his time, though he is too modest to mention it, to the charities and causes in which he believes," Callow wrote in The Guardian.

"He has been solidly and determinedly supportive of the Labour Party.

"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."

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Like father, like son? Sort of

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 Sir Tony Blair.

While at Oxford University, he was a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party and later the Socialist Alliance. And he was an outspoken critic of Blair's New Labour government and the Iraq war.