Western Mail columnist has died of cancer

AN AMERICAN businessman who settled in Wales and became a Western Mail columnist has died of cancer.

Denis Campbell, who was originally from Boston, had a varied career, working as an international commercial director for Price Waterhouse and later establishing his own marketing company.

After moving to the Vale of Glamorgan in the early 2000s he established a web-based magazine called UK Progressive.

In 2016 he stood unsuccessfully as the Liberal Democrats’ candidate in the then National Assembly election in the Vale of Glamorgan.

He wrote extensively about US politics and predicted Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election of 2008.

In 2012, when Obama stood for re-election, he wrote four short books warning about what would be in store for the US if the Republicans won.

It took less than three weeks for the first book The Vagina Wars: GOP’s War on Women [GOP standing for the Republican Party’s nickname Grand Old Party] to become Number 5 on Amazon

Kindle’s elections/politics list.

He identified 944 separate measures relating to women’s reproductive rights that were considered in 45 US state legislatures in the first three months of 2012.

Mr Campbell said at the time: “The intensification of attacks on women’s reproductive rights is the latest indication of how the right wing in America was hardening up its act.

“A lot of young women today don’t realise how much their predecessors had to fight for birth control and other women’s rights in the 1960s.

“They’re going to have to wake up and campaign all over again. The proposals coming forward in the great majority of states would make it more difficult for women to get access to contraception.”

Writing further of the rise of the right in the US that eventually led to the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, he stated: “I think Congress is going through a very destabilising period at the moment, thanks to the election of so many supporters of the Tea Party at the mid-term elections in 2010. ‘Tea’ stands for Taxed Enough Already, and they managed to get 84 supporters elected on a Republican ticket to the House of Representatives.”

Later Mr Campbell did a series of podcasts with former BBC Wales journalist Phil Parry in which they discussed Welsh and international politics.