Ruth Maria Kelly (born 9 May 1968) is a British Labour Party politician, currently Member of Parliament for the Bolton West constituency, though she will stand down as MP at the next general election. She had previously been the Secretary of State for Transport, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Minister for Women and Equality and Secretary of State for Education and Skills, serving under both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and their cabinets.

Kelly was born in Limavady, Northern Ireland. She also lived briefly in the Republic of Ireland before moving to England where she attended Edgarley Hall - the prep school for Millfield School. She was privately educated at Sutton High School. After jumping up a year and sitting O-levels at Sutton High School at the age of 15, she decided to move back to Ireland to look after her ill grandmother. Her grandmother died after six weeks, but Kelly stayed for a year, living with her aunt and taking A-level French. She returned to England where she won a scholarship to the sixth-form of Westminster School to take her A-levels. She went on to The Queen's College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1989, and then to the London School of Economics gaining an MSc in Economics in 1992. She joined the Labour Party in 1990, becoming a member of the party's Bethnal Green & Stepney/Bow constituency branch. She was an economics writer for The Guardian from 1990, before becoming deputy head of the Inflation Report Division of the Bank of England in 1994. She married Derek John Gadd, a local government officer, in 1996, and they have four children.

Kelly's grandfather, Philip Murphy, served as an officer in the Irish Republican Army (Old IRA) during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and was interned in 1922 by the Government of Northern Ireland during the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). Murphy's detention file refers to him as 'quartermaster of the West Fermanagh IRA Battalion'. He went on hunger strike to protest at his detention. He was released unconditionally in June 1924 when internment ended.