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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.
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…
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