executive who held various senior positions with the British Council
prior to joining the World Economic Forum
in January 2009 as director, head of Europe and Central Asia. He is the son of Neil Kinnock
, former leader of the Labour Party
and ex-chair of the British Council, and Glenys Kinnock, a former Labour Member of the European Parliament
. He is married to the Prime Minister
of Denmark
, Helle Thorning-Schmidt
, whom he met when they were both studying at the elite College of Europe
in Belgium during 1992–1993.
Stephen Kinnock was a British Council Development and Training Services lobbyist based in Brussels from 1997 when his father was a European Commissioner and was promoted to British Council's Brussels Director in 2002.
I go through life thinking it's all going to end tomorrow.
I don't believe in self-promotion, really I can't be arsed.
I always wanted to be an actor. I had the arrogance to believe I couldn't be anything else.
As far as I'm concerned, I want to be nowhere else. It's difficult in film because everybody wants to make a safe bet with roles. But if you are going to do stuff then you should be getting strong reactions. I don't want audiences to be going, "Yeah, that's all right."
It's something else. I'm speechless. I've just got to step up to the plate and deal with it. I had a confidence about it but then that's because of the people around me who made me feel good about it. I knew positively on Monday. I was in Baltimore when I took the call. My first reaction was I needed a drink.
I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other. That's a simple fact. I've seen a bullet wound and it was a mess. It was on a shoot and it scared me. Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that's what's scary about them.
If I went onto the Internet and started looking at what some people were saying about me - which, sadly, I have done - it would drive me insane.