My daughter Jenny, who has died aged 46 of cancer, was a prodigious writer and communicator whose career took her from the civil service, via 10 Downing Street, to director of external relations at the United Nations Foundation in New York, remaining there until shortly before her death.
She began her career at the Department for Education, where she was an assistant private secretary to three different schools ministers, Stephen Twigg, Jacqui Smith and Jim Knight, before becoming a speechwriter for the junior education minister Lord Adonis (2006-07).
Later she moved to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, where she became head of digital engagement as well as a senior speechwriter for the science and innovation minister Ian Pearson and the secretary of state for innovation, university and skills, John Denham.
From 2011 to 2013 she was news and content manager at the prime minister’s office, responsible, among other things, for the management of the No 10 website and Twitter account.
Having fallen in love with New York on visits there, Jenny left the civil service in April 2013 to take up a job in the city as a communications specialist at the United Nations, before moving in 2017 to the United Nations Foundation, with which she travelled across Africa and South America.
Born in Liverpool, where she was educated at Rainhill high school, Jenny went on to King’s College London, where she gained a BA (2001) and an MA (2002) in English literature, and joined the civil service after graduation.
She made New York her home with her British partner, Guy Oldfield. They married in 2015, settling into the community of Morningside Heights in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she gathered together a whole new raft of friends, while continuing to cherish those she had already made in the UK. In 2017 she and Guy had a son, Levon.
Though fiercely ambitious and determined to make the most of her outstanding talents, in her professional and personal relationships Jenny was always warm, charismatic, inspiring and full of humour. She was also community minded, and volunteered in New York at the Gatehouse Community Garden and for the housing co-op where she lived, even in the later stages of her illness.
Jenny’s mother (my wife), Julia (nee Boyle), died in 2013. She is survived by Guy, Levon, me, and her siblings Claire and Andrew.
