Official portrait of Baroness Randerson Photo: Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Jenny Randerson, who has died at the age of 76, was a Liberal and then Liberal Democrat politician who spent twenty-eight years in a succession of elected posts in Wales, followed by fourteen years as a Life Peer, including three years, 2012-15, as a junior minister in the Welsh Office in the 2010 Coalition.
Randerson’s introduction to Liberal politics came through a knock on the door by a canvasser for Mike German, the candidate for Cardiff North at the 1979 general election. Fatally both she and her husband volunteered to deliver leaflets. By 1983 she was a Cardiff City Councillor. In 1999, at the first election for the Welsh Assembly, she was elected for the Cardiff Central constituency. She became Minister for Culture, Sport and the Welsh Language in the Liberal Democrat/Labour partnership government in 2000. In all her leadership roles Randerson combined vision and determination with her convivial personality, all of which ensured the achievement of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay, putting together its complicated financing package and dealing with location difficulties in its early stages. Together with Rhodri Morgan, the then First Minister of Wales, Randerson set out the …. National Action Plan for a Bilingual Wales” as part of her department’s cultural strategy known as Iaith Pawb (“Everyone’s Language”). Randerson also had a leading role in the introduction of free access to museums across Wales – increasing the attendance of child visitors by 70% in its first full year - and in targeting non-traditional museum attenders such as black and ethnic minorities..Her involvement in cultural affairs was also imbued by her husband Peter’s active local role as a respected amateur violinist. As a tribute to her contribution to the arts in Wales, her funeral was held in the atrium of the National Museum of Wales.
As a forthright advocate of Wales and Welshness it would often come as a surprise to discover that she was born in London. When teased about this she invariably replied that she had spent far more years living in Wales than ever in England.
Her early years were far from straightforward: her parents divorced when she was one year old and she spent some time being brought up by her grand mother. Her father was an architect and her mother an antique dealer. She later took her stepfather’s name of Sinclair. Randerson attended Wimbledon High School and then Bedford College, London University, gaining a BA honours in history. She followed this in 1970 with a PGCE at the Institute of Education at the same university. She married Peter Randerson in 1970 and took up a teaching post at Spalding High School near to where he worked as an ecologist. When in 1974 he took up a lectureship at Cardiff University she took a teaching post at Llanishen High School, moving to Coleg Glan Hafren in Cardiff, lecturing from 1976 to 1999 on economics and politics.
Randerson stepped down from her Welsh Assembly seat in 2011 and was then appointed as Liberal Democrat Life Peer. Within a year she was appointed as junior minister in the Welsh Office in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. As Minister she emphasised the value of the initiative for the Wales Green Building Marketplace which brought together government, universities, environmental champions and the building industry “to ensure that we use our energy intelligently and efficiently”. She was appointed a magistrate in 1982, serving until 1999. She was Pro Chancellor of Cardiff University from 2017, taking up the position of Chancellor from 2019 to 2025. She was also actively involved in a wide variety of local charities, including Wales Council for Deaf People, the Hepatitis C Trust, the Cardiff and Youth Wind Band and the African Mothers’ Foundation.
She unsuccessfully contested Cardiff constituencies in the three general elections, 1987, 1992 and 1997. She occupied a number of Liberal Democrat party posts including Chair of the Executive Committee, Welsh Liberal Democrats, 1988-90. She stood for election in 2008 as Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, being defeated by Kirsty Williams, the Member of the Welsh Senedd for Brecon and Radnorshire.
Jennifer Elizabeth Randerson, Baroness Randerson of Roath Park in the City of Cardiff, 26 May 1948 to 4 January 2025, leaves her husband, Peter, Senior Lecturer in Biosciences, a son, James Peter, born 1976, consultant in political journalism, a daughter, Eleri Kathryn, born 1979, social worker, and three grandchildren.
