Rt Hon Dr Denis MacShane

Labour Party | Rotherham

Carol Barnes 13 September 1944 – 8 March 2008 - Tribute by Denis MacShane at her funeral in Brighton 17 March 2008

Carol can be summed up in one word – laughter. Her lovely, throaty, low-key laugh punctuated every conversation and all the company she kept. She laughed with the world and sometime at it. Even now she would be saying chin up, bottoms up, cheers, have a drink and laugh not cry.

She was born just after D-Day and was a bridge between two eras – that of dull, drab, conforming, grey post-war England of the 1950s and the explosion of colour and new ways of life that came into being from the 1960s onwards.

Carol was pure 1968 generation. The best  and the brightest of that generation wanted to be journalists. Marx was wrong. First you have to interpret the world before you try to change it. The messages of friendship, admiration and loss  I have received from Carol’s friends are from the best and brightest of that 1968 generation of journalists – Christopher Hitchens, Martin Walker, Roger Alton, John Lloyd, Nik Gowing, Christopher Wilson, Nick Owen. They recognise Carol as one of their own – a journalist’s journalist. Jon Snow, Carol’s dead friend and life-long co-reporter and co-presenter at ITN cannot be here as he is in Baghdad – where else?

For 30 years, Carol was a star journalist. She became friends with intellectual writers like Robert Kee or George Gale. Once Carol came home after a lunch with John Lloyd and told me how much she enjoyed being able to talk to a real intellectual. Thanks, Carol.

Carol was a woman and a mother. She was beautiful. Even in hospital her face was unlined, her blonde hair still glowing, her beauty undiminished.

Clare was her first child and then James followed with Nigel Thomson, the brave front-line news cameraman as his father and Carol’s husband. She was not a nest-maker but a woman who worked and worked as a mother. She was there for Clare and for James through the turbulence of adolescence. How difficult at times but Carol was there – letting go as needed and holding and hugging tight when crises hit.

She shared her children with the families of their fathers – sending Clare to learn the arts of Scottish home cooking standing on a stool at my mother’s sink in Rutherglen or to enjoy the company of Hugh, Nigel’s dad and his family network.

But always there was laughter. To be with Carol was to see the world as une comédie humaine. The pomposity of politicians; the self-importance of so many journalists; the vanity of intellectuals were all to be gently mocked.

Go gently in that good night, dear Carol. I do think her gentleness was important. Others are driven by anger, hate, passions and define themselves by what they oppose or dislike. Carol took the world as it was and in each season, in each setting, in each group she found what there was to enjoy, leaving to others what there was to trash.

She liked her glass of wine, never better than when shared  with her beloved sister, Kay, or her chums at golf or skiing.

Her love, total and complete, was for her children. Clare was so cruelly taken from her. But she was so proud of James who has just finished his masters’ degree and Carol rejoiced in his academic accomplishments. It is to James we look now and hope with our and his love for Carol that his way can be the best tribute to Carol’s memory.

In two week’s we will meet again to celebrate her life. We will raise a glass – more than one to the memory of a warm, wonderful woman. And we will laugh as we laughed over so many years and for so many reasons with Carol. Laughter and love and a life for living are what made Carol. So let our sadness be replaced by laughing at all the good memories. That is what Carol would have wanted and what we must keep doing in her memory.