The Commission
Helena Kennedy QC
Chair of the POWER Commission
Helena Kennedy is one of the country's leading barristers. She has been involved a large number of prominent cases, including the Brighton Bombing, the Guildford Four appeal and the bombing of the Israeli embassy. She has also acted for many battered women who have killed their husbands. As a life peer, she also participates in the House of Lords on issues concerned with human rights, civil liberties, social justice and culture.
From 1992 to 1997, she was chair of Charter88, the constitutional reform group, which persuaded the government to make devolution and human rights legislation central planks of their manifesto. From 1998-2004 she chaired the British Council, the most successful cultural organisation in the world, which she has led through a period of dynamic change.
Helena - who grew up in Glasgow - has a working-class background. She has said that her career in the courts started with an active trade in representing fellow Scots because solicitors thought she would be able to translate. But it is her ability to communicate rather than translate that has been the basis of her achievements, with her desire to see change being the source of her strength and energy. She is an inspiring orator, with a great ability to make difficult subjects accessible.
She is author of two books Eve was Framed and Just Law and is also on the board of the Independent newspaper.
Ferdinand Mount
Vice Chair of the POWER Commission
Ferdinand Mount was head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit (1982-4), a director of the Centre for Policy Studies (1984-91), and editor of the Times Literary Supplement (1991-2002).
Ferdinand has written political columns for the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Sunday Times. His non-fiction works include The Subversive Family, The British Constitution Now and Mind the Gap: the new class divide in Britain. His novels include The Man Who Rode Ampersand, Of Love and Asthma (winner of the Hawthornden Prize for 1992), Fairness and Heads You Win.
