Eluned Morgan MS

First Minister of Wales

Eluned Morgan was born on one of the largest council estates in Europe, the daughter of Councillor Elaine Morgan and her husband, the former leader of South Glamorgan County Council and legendary priest in Ely, Bob Morgan.

The vicarage was the centre of the community and provided a welcome to anybody at any time of day or night.

Eluned’s was one of around three families in the community which attended the only Welsh language school in the capital, Bryntaf. At the age of six, she experienced the anti-Welsh language environment, as people threw stones at her school bus. She became one of the 99 founding pupils at the first Welsh language secondary school in Cardiff, Glantaf.

Whie a teenager, she became branch secretary of the Labour Party in Ely.

In 1983, she won a scholarship to Atlantic College, an international sixth form college committed to promoting international understanding where students from more than 70 countries from all different backgrounds and races studied together. This is where her passion for international affairs began. While at Atlantic College she became the branch leader of Amnesty International and later became active in student politics in the University of Hull where she studied European Studies French and Spanish.

In 1988, she travelled to Nicaragua to pick coffee with the Sandinistas and whilst studying in Spain she organised a demonstration on the streets of Madrid against Thatcher who was attending a European summit.

Her first job after university was as an intern in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament.
She then worked for S4C, Agenda TV and the BBC. In 1994, at 27, she was elected as the youngest Member of the European Parliament, representing Mid and West Wales becoming the fifth woman in the history of Wales to be elected, alongside Glenys Kinnock who became a life-long friend and mentor.

After Labour’s UK landslide victory in 1997, Eluned became a key figure in the Yes for Wales referendum campaign. After the narrow victory she was appointed as the Labour representative on the National Assembly Advisory Group and was instrumental in shaping the future of the institution.

As an MEP from 1994-99 she authored a report on education and culture in the information age, and she was the president of the cross-party group on European minority languages, securing rights for minority languages in international treaties.

From 1999 to 2004, she served as the Leader for the Socialist Group on budget control in the European Parliament.

From 2004 to 2009, she authored a Green Paper on Energy in the EU, and led on European laws which dealt with electricity and gas, championing the cause of consumers and ensuring in law that every country in Europe had a strategy to tackle energy poverty.

While a Member of the European Parliament, Eluned married her husband Rhys Jenkins who has recently retired, having served as a GP in Ely for almost 30 years and is now a priest in the church of Wales.

Eluned made history in becoming the first person in Wales to give birth while in full time public office and now has two grown up children.

She established and ran the Cymdeithas Cledwyn society in the Labour Party – a group committed to championing the Welsh language in the Labour Party and to organising events through the medium of Welsh. She chaired the organisation from its inception in 2001 until around 2021.

In 2009, she left the European Parliament and was appointed director of low carbon business development for SWALEC/SSE in Wales. She was responsible for establishing the £7m SWALEC Smart Energy Centre in Treforest. She also became the chair of the Cardiff Business Partnership.

Ed Miliband nominated Eluned for a peerage and in 2011 and she became Baroness Eluned Morgan of Ely. She served as a Whip and Shadow Minister for Wales and Foreign Affairs and she led for the Labour Party in the Lords on the EU Referendum Bill and two Wales Bills. Eluned was also instrumental in ensuring that the most extreme parts of the Conservative 2016 Trade Union Bill were curtailed and stopped highly controversial plans for trade union regulation being forced on Wales.

In 2016, Eluned was elected to the then Welsh Assembly as Labour’s regional member for Mid and West Wales. She established and chaired a cross-party group on arts and health having been inspired by her tenure as the Welsh chair of the charity Live Music Now. She established a care forum think tank, and authored a rural economic development plan for Mid and West Wales.

She was named ITV’s Politician of the Year in 2017.

In 2017, she became the Minister for the Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning.

She struggled to get support to stand as leader of Welsh Labour in 2018, coming third behind Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething, but despite this managed to gain 22% of the vote. In 2018, she was invited to serve in Mark Drakeford’s Cabinet and was appointed Minister for International Relations.

She took a leading role in the pandemic in Wales focusing on the impact on tourism hospitality sports and culture and in October 2020, she was appointed Minister for Mental Health and Wellbeing.

She was appointed Minister for Health and Social Care in 2021.