My Story

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AT A time when there are such high levels of cynicism about politicians it is difficult to appreciate the extraordinary public appeal of Mo Mowlam, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1997 to 1999. She regularly topped surveys of popular politicians, and her empathy, frankness and irreverence endeared her across the ranks of the Labour Party and beyond. When the Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed his party’s conference in September 1998 and spoke of “ our one and only Mo” he was interrupted as delegates gave her a standing ovation.
A paradox of Mo Mowlam’s career is that the qualities that made her so popular contributed in part to her failings as a minister. She could be too broad-brush in her analysis of complex situations and impatient when faced with detail. Her record raises questions about how and whether the British system can take advantage of a minister with her skills, and also accommodate one with her weaknesses.



Throughout her period in Northern Ireland, she proved brave and dogged and, when necessary, pugnacious. These were the qualities that she displayed all her life. She needed them to emerge successfully from a troubled childhood into academia and serious politics, to get a seat in the North East, where women MPs were then a comparative rarity, and to play a key role in male-dominated Northern Ireland politics. She needed them even more at the beginning of 1997 when it seemed 50-50 whether she would end the year dead from her brain tumour or as a member of the Cabinet.

Her mission in Northern Ireland was to restore the IRA ceasefire and bring Sinn Fein into talks about the Province’s political future. She succeeded in both, something which escaped her predecessors, including William (later Lord) Whitelaw in the ill-fated Sunningdale conference in 1973. Above all, she was largely responsible for creating in the Province a feeling of genuine hope that had been missing for generations.

The common feeling about the Six Counties had been summed up in an essay Mowlam remembered being set at school: “The Northern Ireland situation is insoluble: discuss.” She never revealed what had been her conclusion then.

At Stormont she gave no sign that she thought the problems were insoluble. Her optimism and unquenchable gregariousness helped for a time to overcome many inbred suspicions. Her constant activity was the more remarkable because throughout the period she was suffering from the after-effects of the brain tumour which had proved benign but needed months of radiotherapy. One result was a great gain in weight and another was losing almost all her hair. She had concealed her condition until she was described in the Daily Mail as looking like “an only slightly feminine Geordie trucker”. Mowlam, with great insouciance, revealed her condition and bought an off-the-peg wig which she was known to slap on the table at official meetings when it became unbearably hot.

Christened Marjorie, ever since her schooldays she had been known as “Mo”. To retain this diminutive would have seemed juvenile in most people, but with her it seemed somehow appropriate. It was short and sporty, with a suggestion of urgency. It was easy to imagine it originating on the netball and hockey grounds where Mowlam once vented her aggressiveness. Later it did not seem out of place when it was used across the Cabinet table. In Northern Ireland the name gave an impression of informality and cheerfulness, neither of which had been much in evidence at Stormont before, and both were useful when the emphasis was on a fresh start under a new government.

Marjorie Mowlam was born in Watford in 1949, and both of her parents worked for the Post Office. She described them as “classic lower-middle class” and considered this an advantage, believing it was the easiest class from which to achieve classlessness. What was a disadvantage, however, was her father’s alcoholism and rages in the home. This dominated her childhood and had the effect of making her school the centre of her life.

Her family moved to Coventry when she was 11. There, at Coundon Court comprehensive school, she achieved everything she set herself in order to compensate for her home life: head girl, Queen’s Guide, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award winner and netball star. She progressed easily to Durham University, chosen in part because it was far from her home.

At Durham she studied social anthropology and continued her netball, rowed in the women’s eight and disturbed the authorities by covering her walls entirely in tinfoil with a picture of a half-naked Jimi Hendrix as centrepiece.

She led a vigorous social life and acquired a serious boyfriend. He was reading American literature and his work took him to the United States. As a result, Mowlam decided that her work would take her there too, and they both obtained doctorates (her dissertation was on referendums) at Iowa University. But the association did not last, and they split up. She went on to Florida State University to teach political science and returned to Britain, to Newcastle University, where she lectured in politics from 1979 to 1983.

At Newcastle she became active in the Labour Party, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, later chairing Labour’s Tyne Bridge party and helping to organise Neil Kinnock’s successful campaign for the party leadership in 1983. Most of her energies went into the search for a seat rather than her academic duties and, significantly, she moved to an administrative post at Barnsley Northern College, an institution for mature students who lacked academic qualifications. This was a step down professionally, but it did her no harm in seeking a seat.

The 1987 general election campaign was about to start, and she had almost given up hope of finding any seat, let alone a winnable one, when James Tinn, the MP for Redcar, announced he would not be standing again. A last-minute selection conference was summoned, Mowlam edged on to the shortlist of four and emerged with a safe Labour seat in her hands.

The whips soon recognised her promise. Less than a year after entering the House she was appointed a junior spokesman on Northern Ireland — the first of the 1987 newcomers to reach the front bench. The next step was promotion to shadow trade and industry under Gordon Brown, with responsibility for City and corporate affairs. She and Brown did not get on. The dour and hard-working Brown took a dim view of what he regarded as her free-wheeling approach and lack of self-discipline. A long-term effect of this tension was that she always supported Blair as Prime Minister in his feuds with Brown.

Elected to the Shadow Cabinet in 1992, she became the chief spokesman on women and the Citizen’s Charter. Three years later she was elected to Labour’s national executive committee. She showed her ability to please the party activists by calling, just before the elections, for the sale of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and for the Queen to move to a modern house with a Conran kitchen. Later she suggested that Britain become a republic. In party terms, she seemed assured of a bright future.

She was a skilled networker in Westminster and percipient — or lucky — in her closeness to and public backing of Kinnock, John Smith and Blair, the winners in Labour’s leadership elections in 1983, 1992 and 1994 respectively. Each man promoted her career. She took a leading role in Blair’s victory against John Prescott and Margaret Beckett in 1994, and when it was decided that a fresh figure was needed as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary — the long-term occupant, Kevin McNamara, was regarded as too “green” for the Orange tendency — she was given the post and headed the team of which she had been a minor member six years before.

Some commentators expressed surprise at the appointment of a woman (the first one) to such a post rather than one more mainstream like health or education. At the time Blair had little idea of how involved as Prime Minister he would become with Northern Ireland. He asked her to support John Major’s efforts to get the Unionists and nationalists together.

When Blair formed his first Cabinet after the 1997 election, it was not inevitable that she would be confirmed as Northern Ireland Secretary. Few knew that she had only just finished her course of radiotherapy, and Blair would surely have shifted her to a less arduous post if she had asked. But by the time she went to see him at No 10 she had made her decision. After spending nearly three years working on the Province, she wanted no other job. Besides, by then she knew that Northern Ireland was about to become mainstream.

On May 2, even before the last count in the last constituency had been completed, she went straight from Whitehall to Belfast. As she introduced herself in the still sunny streets, shaking hands and exchanging kisses with wellwishers, it was obvious that there was a new style as well as a new name in place. Her immediate Conservative predecessors were usually tall, patrician and stern-faced. One critical observer of Mowlam’s style said: “If you haven’t been kissed by Mo in Northern Ireland, you must have been running hard in the opposite direction.”

Mowlam arrived at Stormont with little political baggage. She was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. She had always proclaimed herself an atheist, and while neither side publicly considered this a good thing, each thought privately that it was better than if she had belonged to the other. In the Commons she had criticised the Prevention of Terrorism Act and welcomed the freeing of the Guildford Four, but so had most of her party.

Any hope of even a partial decommissioning of IRA weapons soon disappeared, as did any prospect of an early peace agreement. At times it seemed Mowlam’s only aim was to keep the talks going at whatever cost. To do this, in January 1998 she went on a famous mission into the heart of the high-security Maze prison and persuaded convicted loyalist terrorists not to carry out their threat to wreck the negotiations. At Stormont, and later at Lancaster House, she succeeded at least in avoiding any spectacular breakdown. In the first few months she was just what the Province needed.

To persuade Unionists and Sinn Fein to sit down together was an achievement. Her recognition of Sinn Fein’s significance did not mean she felt easy with its leaders despite the Unionist belief that she was leaning towards the nationalist side. But talks without Sinn Fein would, she knew, be useless.

She occasionally made errors, often as the result of her off-the-cuff pronouncements. Once she announced that, if necessary, the peace negotiations could go ahead without the Unionists. Within hours this had to be retracted. She caused irritation again when she insisted that residents’ groups opposed to Orange parades were independent organisations, when it was widely believed that in fact the IRA had infiltrated them.

Within a few months David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists and Ian Paisley’s DUP had lost confidence in her. They thought that she was pro-nationalist and were not impressed with her hugs and earthiness, and hated her coarseness (she once told Paisley to “f*** off” in company). They worked through Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, or dealt with Blair directly. In turn, the Nationalists also insisted on dealing with No 10 directly. Much of the detailed work was left to Mowlam’s capable deputy Paul Murphy, later himself Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

During the tense negotiations culminating in the historic Good Friday agreement in 1998 the key players on the British side were Blair, Powell and Blair’s principal private secretary, John Holmes. Mowlam, rather, was an effective public face for the British side and shared in the aura of success that immediately followed the settlement.

Increasingly the politics of Northern Ireland were being decided in No 10 and she resented being bypassed. For his part, Blair was frustrated that so much of his time was being taken up with Northern Ireland. What to do with Mowlam became a major preoccupation of Blair’s team. He offered her the party’s candidacy for the London mayoral election (the eventual winner, Ken Livingstone, said she would have won). She refused that, and also the offer of Health.

She was playing for higher stakes and told Blair that she wanted to be Foreign Secretary, but would take Defence as a stagingpost. Blair was perhaps as concerned for her health as for her likely impact on the defence chiefs and diplomatic corps at King Charles Street. She seemed to be confusing her public popularity with her political clout and may not have realised how rapidly her political star was waning.

In October 1998 she had to settle for Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Peter Mandelson replaced her in Northern Ireland. She knew that this was a dead end; she had dismissed the post as “Minister for the Today programme”. She missed the high profile and drama of Northern Ireland, and Cabinet Office officials were soon made aware of her lack of interest in the new post. After a few weeks she returned to Blair and said that she would after all stand in London. It was too late; a candidate was in place.

She was deeply hurt by whispers that the return of her illness was affecting her stamina and concentration as a minister. She blamed rivals and announced her intention to leave politics at the next election. It was an unhappy conclusion to her career, and she retired from the Commons in 2001, aged only 52.

Mo Mowlam did not enjoy a distinguished career as a retired politician. There was talk of a major international post but nothing materialised. She had an understandable though hard-nosed concern to boost her income.

She published her autobiography Momentum in 2002, for a reputed advance of ÂŁ350,000, linked to a television series and newspaper serialisation. She kept herself in the public eye by touring with a one-woman show An Audience with Mo Mowlam in which she answered questions from audiences. There was also after-dinner speaking and even an agony-aunt column for Zoo, a magazine for young men. Over time she became more leftwing in her views and criticised Blair over the Iraq war.

She and her husband John Norton, whom she married in 1995, retired to a farmhouse in Kent. At the time of her death they were working on a book about drugs policy, arguing for the legalisation of the drugs trade. It was an appropriate finale for one who regarded herself as a child of the Sixties.



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