Mo Mowlam alongside her giant portrait which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The ex-MP jokingly described the painting by war artist John Keane as "crap". She then corrected herself to say "he got me very well". Her jibe summed up her refreshing approach to life and politics.
Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth
Former Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam, who played a leading role in the province's peace process, died in a hospice south of London today at the age of 55.
"Mo Mowlam passed away today at 8.10 a.m.," said a spokesman for her family.Mowlam, a popular and outspoken character, served in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government for four years from 1997 after recovering from a brain tumour.Before stepping down from politics in 2001, she topped a poll as the public's choice to succeed Blair as prime minister.Blair shifted her from Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 to a lesser ministerial job. Her latter period in government was marred by a series of anonymous briefings against her.
In the run-up to the Labour party's 1997 election victory, Mowlam told only her husband and Blair about her condition, only going public when a newspaper began commenting on her weight gain and haggard appearance.
Once in government, she took the high-risk step of visiting hardened pro-British paramilitaries in the province's notorious Maze prison in the run-up to 1998's Good Friday Peace agreement in Northern Ireland.She persuaded them to back the peace process, aimed at ending 30 years of sectarian strife.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said news of Mowlam's death would be met with sadness by all who knew her."Mo Mowlam worked tirelessly in the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement," he said. "As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland she was prepared to take risks for the peace process, risks to secure agreement and risks to implement it."
Reg Empey, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, told Sky Television: "She was a larger than life figure. She was not the stuffy type of traditional Cabinet minister."
source - http://today.reuters.co.uk/news
A proconsul with a style all of her own
Moya St Leger reviews Momentum by Mo Mowlam
MO MOWLAM gave up smoking in 1996. Her account of her life from this point through her time as secretary of state for Northern Ireland to the present day is written in such an unpretentious, chatty way, one could be forgiven for forgetting she was undeniably the most effective Northern Ireland secretary in the history of that troubled statelet.
Mowlam talks openly about her tumour. At no point does she complain or indulge in self-pity, so the person who begins to emerge after a couple of chapters is one hell of a gutsy lady.The courage and tenacity she displayed during her illness was to stand her in good stead later in Northern Ireland.Mowlam is not a gifted writer, but writing is not her calling.
Even if her prose falls short of sparkling, the Northern Ireland peace process is sufficiently momentous historically to need recording in her authentic voice.Describing her political frustrations, the delays engineered by civil servants at the Northern Ireland Office, and the intransigence of the usual suspects in the ongoing pantomime that is Northern Ireland politics, she never becomes morose.Despite all the obstacles Mowlam achieved the impossible -- the setting up of crucial discussions which brought parties into one room who had never before sat together at the same table.Mowlam's cheerful anecdotal style tends to sell her achievements short. No other Northern Ireland secretary would have been willing to meet the prisoners in the Kesh, or go in person to sit down with the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition -- taking with her a Chinese takeaway.Her sympathies become apparent, and her impatience with Ian Paisley is not masked by humour: "helpful as ever, Ian Paisley addressed a rally in Portadown".
The manner of her demise was disgraceful but she does allow herself a little space to express her dislike of Peter Mandelson: "it was clear that Peter was up "to his old tricks". Replacing the golden Mo with Mandelson was, in the eyes of ordinary members of the Labour party, the biggest single political mistake Tony Blair has made to date. The dismal failure of Mandelson as her successor was predictable.Mowlam cared about Northern Ireland.
She did not need to write this book to earn an honoured place in Anglo-Irish history.
source - http://www.irishdemocrat.co.uk/reviews/mowlam-biog/
Better the Mo we know
She's a fine woman who could have made it to Downing Street. But in her autobiography, Momentum, Mo Mowlam sells herself short
Sunday May 5, 2002
The Observer
Momentum - Mo Mowlam
The fundamental - and fundamentally vicious - rules of autobiography apply. Ex-politicians who write their memoirs have no future favours left to dispense or secrets to impart: so they can be slagged off with impunity. Ex-Labour ministers who sell their extracts to the Daily Mail are still worse placed: nobody - a green-eyed £350,000 later - loves them.Lord Hattersley, of course, complains about a lack of socialist ideology. Feminists complain about an unseemly truckling (to males) in pursuit of base ambition. Blair loyalists gripe at the monstrous ingratitude of it all. The Torygraph, seeing a saint fallen on hard times, puts on its sharkskin bovver boots.
Suddenly, nobody loves Mo Mowlam. She gets the worst drubbing of her career.Is that fair? Well - ahem - not exactly lacking in fairness. Some ex-luminaries, like Michael Heseltine, are brilliant at speaking but pretty leaden at stringing sentences together on paper. Some, like Salman Rushdie, can produce wonderful prose, but only unwonderful drone in front of an audience. Mowlam - stuck with a word processor and no-one to hug - is even more direly placed.
The Mo we know, the folk heroine of the Good Friday agreement, the doughty battler against brain tumours, is great at touching and feeling and empathy: but, on this evidence at least, she'd be hard pushed to pen a decent travel brochure.'The opportunity to live in a castle (Hillsborough) that is the Queen's official residence was a great experience and one I will never forget.' When Prince Charles and Kiri Te Kanawa come to stay, we have 'an enjoyable and relaxed dinner... and we all three chat about everything under the sun'. Chitter-chatter. So summer turns to autumn. Leaves fall. Christmas comes with cards for Charles and Camilla.
Then spring brings renewal and the great wheel of banality spins again as Mo keeps 'moving forward'. Mo-mentum, geddit? She pursues it with panting enthusiasm. Somebody seems to have put her off moving back.Nor is the politics on offer much more inspiring. The Mail, of course, was switched on by her tales of cold-hearted double dealing at the heart of New Labour; but this turns out to be thin, egocentric stuff.
Her relationship with Alastair Campbell has 'ups and downs' - though not enough of them to help her to spell his name properly.She wants to stay longer in Northern Ireland (so she can go on moving forward) but Tony, keen on movement himself, wants to use her as a star reshuffle asset. Health? Education? Mayor of London? Such succulent offers are quaintly brushed aside because Mo fancies herself as the new Geoff Hoon, or even Jack Straw. She settles instead for a chair in the Cabinet Office co-ordinating things like drugs policy and going on fact-finding trips to Jamaica. Is this a 'non-job'? Has Tony, envious of her popularity, shafted her? Have the 'young, arrogant set in Downing Street' been guilty of sexism as well as duplicity?It is all, alas, rather pathetic as well as self-serving. What, pray, is sexist about offering a hugely popular minister (in Belfast, where coming elections aren't won) the helm of the vital NHS - or Education, Education, Education? Why, if Tony is such a beast, is he constantly tossing bargain offers Mo's way? Why doesn't she see that Hillsborough - for any London government - is a middle-range posting which wins few votes and only develops real momentum when the PM himself is on site, sweating for peace?
There are some nice moments in Mowlam's notebook. I like Ian Paisley complaining to her husband that the Secretary of State is drinking too much of the 'devil's buttermilk' (otherwise whiskey). I particularly like the story of the night hubby stayed alone in their London safe house, to be woken at dawn, stark naked, by seven coppers waving shields and automatic rifles. And who are you, sir? 'I live here.' Can you prove that, sir? Here's a passport. Oh...! It must be a false alarm, sir. Exit sheepish security posse (probably to see if they could spot Osama bin Laden somewhere up the Edgware Road).So the pages turn, sometimes with enjoyment.
No amount of study, however, quite answers the crucial question. We leave Dr Mowlam in semi-retirement, knitting, doing jigsaws, planning to help disabled children in 'Mo-Mo homes'. Was she really the next PM but one? Was she truly such a political force? And the answer, lest we forget, is mostly 'yes'. Mo, through the early 1990s, was dynamite; good at detail, long on charm. She did battle her tumour with rare fortitude. She did win hearts and golden opinions. It's just that Mo on Mo, in her own words, sells this finer, feistier Mo terribly short.That's another fundamental about autobiography. Some people shouldn't even think of writing them.
Peter Preston
source - http://politics.guardian.co.uk/bookshelf/story/0,9061,710497,00.html
