Dr Mo, New Labour’s shooting star

I may have mentioned it (once or twice!) but 23 years ago I was the proud co-founder and executive editor of a magazine called The Politico.

My co-founder (and editor-in-chief) was Iain Dale, now a well-known broadcaster but in those days managing director of Politicos Bookshop in Westminster.

Our first issue was published in the summer of 2002 and featured, on the cover, a picture of former Labour minister Mo Mowlam. Diagnosed with a brain tumour before the 1997 general election, Mowlam was subsequently appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, overseeing the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

Although popular with the public, she was later demoted to Minister for the Cabinet Office, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before retiring as an MP at the 2001 election. She then wrote her memoirs, which were published in 2002.

Iain had a huge list of contacts and one of them was Paul Routledge, chief political commentator at the Daily Mirror, to whom we entrusted our review of Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the People. In hindsight the title (‘Poor little rich girl’) seems a bit cruel, but it reflected Routledge’s somewhat barbed critique which demonstrated the polarised reaction she still provoked in political circles, if not the wider public.

Sadly, Mo Mowlam died on this day, 20 years ago, so to mark that anniversary here is the review in full:

It was memorably observed by Enoch Powell that all political careers end in failure. Were he still around today the old martinet might revise his judgement to read ‘all political careers end in the bank or between hard covers in reams of self justification’. For the fortunate few it can be both.

Mo Mowlam is one of the lucky ones. Her autobiography Momentum has earned a reputed £350,000 while allowing her to pay off a great many old scores. Channel 4 presumably rewarded her handsomely for the two-part television saga Inside New Labour, despite the unintended irony of the title. Add to that her pension as an MP and minister, compensation for loss of ministerial office and potentially lucrative openings for the party’s most saintly figure of recent times, and Dr Mo is on to a winner, despite being a loser.

The Mo phenomenon is a product of its times. A comprehensive schoolgirl from Coventry, the daughter of an alcoholic father, she went to Durham University, took a PhD in Iowa University, came back from the USA to lecture in industrial relations (not an attractive discipline these days), and then became an administrator at Northern College, Barnsley, the ‘Ruskin of the North’.

But her real ambitions were political and she rose with astonishing speed after being elected MP for the seaside steel town of Redcar. Opposition spokeswoman for Northern Ireland in 1988. Gordon Brown’s emissary on the cocktail circuit for three years before the 1992 election, she was elected to the Shadow Cabinet and rewarded with the Ulster portfolio by a grateful Tony Blair, mindful of her critical role in his leadership campaign.

It was only when she actually had to do the job in government that her qualities were tested, finally to destruction. At first, all went well. The IRA restored its ceasefire and Sinn Fein entered the peace process. Within six months, the process was in crisis after the murder of Loyalist paramilitary leader Billy Wright inside the Maze prison. Dr Mo took her touchy feely, open arms honesty approach into the jail to persuade the Loyalist gunmen not to wreck the best chance for peace in a generation. It was a huge risk and politically it paid off.

She was never so strong again, though her peculiarly physical style of politics was almost certainly what was needed to make a step change in Northern Ireland attitudes. On her first day she was out in Royal Avenue, hugging startled shoppers. She patted gunmen on the knee. So long used to the patrician distance of Patrick Mayhew, the tight arsed Unionists could not quite fathom her. Nor she they, and therein lay her downfall. Initially, she thought Jeffrey Donaldson would be more flexible than David Trimble. Such political naivete in a politician who has been understudying the job in Opposition is, in terms of Ulster, quite terrifying.

Dr Mo compounded that innocence by trusting Peter Mandelson. She felt sorry for the disgraced ex trade secretary. Her sympathy was wasted, although he denies the well sourced stories that he was part of the whispering campaign to get rid of her. So what was he doing, as he told C4, in Number Ten when the peace process hit a fresh crisis? The Prime Minister’s mood, he disclosed, was ‘pretty dire and pretty angry’. With whom? And who benefitted from his wrath? Mandy was angling for Mo’s job, with semi public support from the Unionists who thought she had made too many concessions to the Shinners.

She held out for longer than any other defiant member of the Cabinet could have done, rejecting Health on the way. She wanted Defence, as a stepping stone to the Foreign Office. But, she says, Tony her, ‘I could not have the Foreign Office now. It wasn’t possible.’ Then, luv, or ever. Not with her impromptu brand of decision making. Instead, she was shunted into the Cabiet Office sidings, before quitting politics altogether.

The people love Mo because she beat cancer and was refreshingly candid in the buttoned up world of New Labour. But that isn’t enough. Mo still fails to grasp that the standing ovation she got during Blair’s 1998 conference speech was not the fons et origo of her undoing. Nor the coarse side to her nature. Nor Gordon Brown’s resistance to her undoubted charms. She was never a credible threat to Blair’s leadership. Dr Mowlam was simply a shooting star that ran out of momentum. As uncomplicated, and as profitable, as that.

As we now know, Mo Mowlam didn’t beat cancer because it was revealed several years after her death (which followed a serious fall in 2005) that she had kept the malignant nature of her tumour a secret from her colleagues, even Tony Blair. Either way, her memory lives on, as today’s tributes testify.

PS. As well as the Mirror’s Paul Routledge, contributors to that first issue of The Politico, which was launched with a drinks party at Politicos Bookshop, included Labour MP Chris Mullen, Conservative MPs John Redwood and Julian Lewis, Claire Fox (Academy of Ideas), John Blundell (director-general of the IEA), Lauren Booth (who was then writing a weekly column for the New Statesman), and Katy Guest (deputy diary editor of the Independent and, much later, deputy opinion editor at the Guardian).

It also featured an interview with my favourite political diarist, author and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, which you might be familiar with because I posted it here a few years ago.