A flamboyant lawyer and Labour MP who championed gay rights, divorce reform and the end of capital punishment, Leo Abse died in August 2008 at the age of 91. Born in Cardiff, Leopold Abse was the grandson of Jewish immigrants who settled in Wales in the 1870s.
His paternal grandfather had built up a chain of cinemas across south Wales, but following his death the business went into decline to a point where the young Leo was sent to work in a factory after leaving school to help the family finances. Following the outbreak of war Abse served with the RAF in the Middle East, East Africa and Italy.
On demobilisation he qualified as a solicitor with the help of an ex-serviceman's grant and set up his own practice in Cardiff, which survives to this day as Leo Abse and Cohen. A socialist from an early age, Abse was arrested for political activities in 1944 after British servicemen in Cairo set up a "Forces Parliament" to debate the kind of postwar society they wanted to see.
In the early 1950s he became chairman of Cardiff Labour Party and later a councillor. Abse unsucessfully fought the safe Tory parliamentary seat of Cardiff North in 1955 before being elected MP for Pontypool in a by-election in 1958. He made his mark as an independently minded backbencher of liberal views, promoting legislation to simplify divorce, legalise gay sex, and end capital punishment.
A popular figure who was elected chairman of the Welsh Labour MPs in 1971, he was a fierce opponent of devolution, claiming it would be hijacked by Welsh language "fanatics". In 1983 Abse won the newly-named seat of Torfaen but retired from Parliament at the 1987 election. He turned his hand to writing books based on his interest in psychoanalysis, including a "psycho-biography" of the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Abse had two children with his first wife, the artist Marjorie Davies, who died in 1996. Following her death, Abse scandalised the tabloid press in 2000 by marrying Ania Czepulkowska, a young Polish artist more than fifty years his junior.