People

Alan Donnelly

Alan Donnelly represents FIA President Max Mosley at Formula 1 events.

Donnelly grew up in the north-east of England. His father was a union activist in a shipyard in Jarrow and Donnelly joined the Labour Party at the age of 16 and worked for the party in the 1974 election campaign. He was soon the constituency secretary and after that joined the GMB trade union and became its Health and Safety Officer and after that became National Finance Officer. At the same time he embarked on a political career as a local councillor and as a Labour party activist, running the election campaign of Denis Healey MP in 1983, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who had twice bid for the leadership of the party. In 1989 Donnelly was elected a Member of the European Parliament to represent Tyne & Wear. He soon established himself as a major player as a policy advisor and as spokesman on economic, monetary and industrial affairs for the European socialist parties and as a member of the European Parliament Economic, Monetary and Industrial Policy Committee. He was also President of the European Parliament Delegation for relations with the USA and later became the European spokesman on the automobile industry. He wrote an important paper on German unification which earned him an honorary knighthood in Germany and co-authored an important paper on the European monetary system with another Labour activist David Ward in 1995. He was also a member of Labour's National Executive Committee and in 1998 he became the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party. He quit politics in 2000 to establish his own consulting business, called Sovereign Strategy. One of his clients was the FIA, which asked him to help in its problems with the European Commission. He is one of Mosley's closest collaborators, along with David Ward.