TAMSIN: I remember the 1966 campaign clearly. I was six and, before that, Mum had lugged me round canvassing and leafleting - but the campaign in Exeter is the first where I have vivid memories.

She wasn't expected to win, and neither was my father, who was standing in Falmouth and Cambourne, although he had a better chance than she did.

When they both won, we were carted off to London, literally overnight. It was a dramatic change to our lives. One day we were living in Totnes, having a rural life in this beautiful town; the next, we'd moved in with my grandfather in Fulham. We had to change schools, make new friends, adapt to a new life. We stayed with my grandfather for the first year, then moved to Westminster. From then, my childhood was dominated by the division bell, which was in our dining room.

There was always going to be some resentment about all this change. Along with my brothers, I felt that we'd left people we didn't want to leave. It took time for us to realise that it was a wonderful opportunity and to appreciate that we could have a social life - with parties and trips to the cinema - that we wouldn't have had if we'd stayed in Devon. At the same time, we could go back for the holidays and at weekends.

At school there were some people who held me accountable for everything the government was doing, on account of my mum and dad. It was a shock, but I didn't mind - I learnt to defend myself. I remember one girl coming into school the day after the 1970 election, when Mum and Dad had both lost their seats. In a very supercilious way she said: "I'm glad your parents have lost their jobs."

Of course, then there was another upheaval. Dad went back into general practice, while Mum found work in the film industry. It was all very glamorous. We'd go with her to Cannes and other film festivals, where we'd be fighting
for seats with Donald Sutherland. She was a firm believer that travel was the best education for us - something I now try to practise with my own kids.

But there was never any question that Mum wasn't going to go back into parliament, and soon she was looking for a new seat. When she was re-elected in Crewe four years later, it felt as though normality had been restored. Other people's parents did mundane things on Sunday mornings, like wash the car and look after the garden.

But that was never our parents' style - and there was something reassuring about Westminster life. Whenever the division bell went, you would know exactly where Mum was.

On one occasion she was at home when the bell went and she had to borrow my 12-year-old brother's bicycle and go hell-for-leather down Victoria Street, holding up the whole of Parliament Square, so she could make the vote. She made it in the nick of time. It felt normal to drop in to see her in Westminster - I had more meals there than anywhere else as a child.

She and I have become extremely good friends. We've always talked through lots of things - issues, policies, what works well, what doesn't. Of course, we're never going to do things the same way. She's an old-style campaigner, whereas I've learnt newer techniques in terms of targeting key voters and working out what the result is going to be. She's good at coming up with ideas for leaflets and is excellent at devising snappy slogans. It's her journalist background, I think.

Now I'm in the Welsh Assembly, she's immensely proud of me. She would have loved me to have been in Westminster with her, I know. And it would have been great fun. But now we've got a double act of a different sort - sometimes I'll ring her up to see if there's something she can find out for me in the Commons.

The thing she's drilled into me is the importance of the constituency. Both of us see that it's important to have a relationship with the electorate that is based on the person as much as the party. Watching the way she did it has helped me to realise the importance of building up your base.

Mum's always been seen as a toughie and has this battle-axe image. But some of that is because she's had to be like that. When she started, there wasn't even a female ministerial loo. The atmosphere in Westminster is still far more aggressive and adversarial than what I'm used to in Cardiff.

GWYNETH: Physically we are very dissimilar. She's like my mother-in-law - very tall and good-looking, with these great bones.

Although Tamsin was the youngest and the only girl, I think she's the toughest of the three of them.

As a child, she learnt how to cry prettily, which I've always thought is a useful skill but have never acquired. When I cry, my face screws up, goes red and looks pretty ugly. She would kick her brothers and bash them around when they were little. If they showed the slightest sign of retaliation, she would stand there and her eyes would get very large and fill with tears. Then she would go to her daddy and immediately get his sympathy. It was very crafty.

When I first went to Westminster, we looked for somewhere to live that was near parliament, so that we could spend as much time with them as possible. But
we were always in and out and we relied on a series of extraordinary au pairs to look after the children. Invariably, it was the children who would find themselves looking after the au pairs. They learnt their early medical skills from attending to various injuries and illnesses that had afflicted the au pairs.

We've always been a close family, and discussion has always been a very important part of that. My mother used to have these big Sunday lunches at her house, where the whole family would get together - the noise levels were tremendous. There's a lot of importance attached to good conversation in our family. Tamsin and I talk at least once every day - we both love to gossip.

From being big enough to be pushed around in a pushchair, she's always been involved in my campaigning, and so it was natural that her own children would get involved, too, from an early age. They were doing some delivery for me at the last election when they got a bit grumpy and wanted to know why they had to do it. Tamsin told them that if I wasn't elected then I would be coming to live in the chicken shed at their house. It did the trick. They went out and delivered to a whole estate after that.

But it's not just from me that the politics has rubbed off on her. Her dad was an MP too, after all. I've always seen politics as some kind of disease that once people catch they never recover from. It's in the genes. That said, I think she's an entirely different type of politician from me. Some of that is down to personality, some of it is because we're now in a different generation, and some of it is because we do have different views on things.

I think it's extraordinary that so many people say to her: "Oh, you don't look anything like your mother!" They seem to forget that she had a father as well as a mother. It must be difficult, because people are always referring to her as my little girl - then in she walks at 6ft. It's their idea of some kind of elephantine joke - but you can get a bit bored of elephantine jokes after a while.

Tamsin will be a very good politician. She's very articulate and has a natural ability as a public speaker, which I am very relieved about. I get sick of people who turn up in Westminster and can't make a speech without reading every word from notes. I would be ashamed if she were to do that. In fact, that would upset me more than anything else.

She has to be incredibly organised, as well. You can't have five children, run a home and be a politician unless you are incredibly organised. It's no bad thing - if you only have people in politics who don't have a family to deal with, then you end up with a very specialised view of how policies affect families and communities. It's a relief that she has the views she has about society and the way it ought to work - you can't control the way your children think, but I would have been very upset if they'd not been interested in Labour politics.

I do wish that Tamsin had come to Westminster rather than the Welsh Assembly. I'm not supposed to say that - it's the one thing we really disagree on. This is the power base where she could have made a contribution. She will contribute very well down there, but it is a smaller arena. So I don't like her decision on that - but I do understand it. When you've got small children, you must make concessions for them.

We've both had to fight to get where we are. People always assumed that because my father was the general secretary of the party, it was made easy for me to get into politics. But I think it was the other way round, and that I had to fight harder because people thought I was getting special privileges. It's been the same for her.

Having a name that people recognise is a double-edged sword. But I don't think she's ever been squashed by it or by me. She does her own thing and makes her own decisions. I think that's why we get on.