Politics
Mo Mowlam's fall from grace
Published 10 January 2000
How could a minister who brought a party conference to its feet seem close to leaving office barely a year later? Steve Richards tracks the decline of a heroine
It seems hard to believe now, but it was less than 18 months ago that, during Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party conference, a passing reference to Mo Mowlam, then the Northern Ireland secretary, brought the entire hall to its feet. After Mowlam, initially embarrassed, had stood and waved her arms aloft in acknowledgement, Blair ruefully observed: "That must have been the first time a speaker got a standing ovation in the middle of a speech and it was not even for the person making the speech."
From this soaring high, Mowlam seemed, as 1999 drew to a close, to have reached a near terminal low. She felt compelled to issue a public statement denying that she was depressed by her new job at the Cabinet Office. On LWT's Jonathan Dimbleby programme, she had to deny suggestions that, because she had signed a lucrative publishing deal for her memoirs, her political career was drawing to a close. It seemed extraordinary that, the previous year, people had been talking about her as a future Labour leader.
Yet in some senses the speed of her political downfall was illusory. Even in autumn 1998, when she was still unquestionably the heroine of the party and the object of media adoration, the view in Downing Street was already more wary. "She allowed that adulation at that party conference," said a Blair aide, "to go too much to her head. She had always been stroppier with her officials than her public image suggests. She became even worse after the conference."
More crucially, she had already lost the respect of the Ulster Unionists. Unionist suspicion of her went back to her days as shadow Northern Ireland minister, from 1994. The Unionists could never get used to dealing with a woman, let alone one of Mowlam's tactile spontaneity. Mowlam herself said, in an interview with me for the NS in November 1997, that some Unionists felt uneasy when she embraced them. "I think they believe I go around hugging terrorists as well. All I can say is that I have never knowingly hugged a terrorist in my life." Such jokes did not go down well in the upper echelons of the Unionist party.
Trimble and his colleague had a more substantial complaint. From the beginning they suspected that she had nationalist sympathies. For a time in opposition, she had worked happily under Kevin McNamara, whom Blair sacked as the party's Northern Ireland spokesman for being too close to the nationalists. More specifically they were infuriated by what they saw as her symbolic embrace of the Republican cause by visits to the Gervaghy Road soon after the 1997 election. "They regarded the people who she saw on such trips not as ordinary residents, but part of the IRA with a clear and violent agenda," according to a Trimble ally. One Trimble aide calculates that "David had concluded he could not work with her by the autumn of 1997, if not before".
At that stage, however, she still had the Prime Minister's confidence. From the day after the election, when she did a memorable walkabout in the centre of Belfast, she re-energised the peace process, renewed the fading embers of optimism among many ordinary voters and encouraged nationalist leaders to make a political journey as profound as Trimble's. "Tony," said one Mowlam ally, "used to phone Mo virtually every Sunday to discuss the situation and for much of the time he was asking her what was happening, not the other way around." (Indeed, the determination to record this story and not, as one of her allies put it, to be airbrushed out of the history of Northern Ireland, is one of her reasons for writing a book.)
But from early in 1998, Trimble would do business only with Blair. The stakes were so high that the Prime Minister could hardly refuse and the sensitivities and egos involved were such that he had to deal with all the other parties on the same basis. This infuriated senior officials in Downing Street, including Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who despaired of the amount of prime ministerial time being taken up by Northern Ireland. He was one of those in Downing Street arguing that Mowlam should be moved to another job early last summer.
The anger among Blair's entourage was exacerbated by Mowlam's elevation in some quarters to near-monarchical status. She felt strong enough to stage two acts of defiance which would have killed off less powerful ministers.
The first came when the Blairites raised the prospect with some senior journalists that Mowlam would be the ideal candidate to defeat Ken Livingstone as Labour's candidate for mayor of London. (Blair himself, it should be stressed, was not involved at this stage. Whenever his aides raised the "Ken" issue, Blair would say "let's leave London".) Mowlam was appalled. "She would have had to give up a cabinet post, take on Ken, resign her seat in the Commons and then possibly lose the contest to become mayor," said an ally. "She was not interested for a second."
So, as the newspapers duly speculated, Mowlam moved fast. She attended a book launch for an updated biography of Livingstone in March and, in front of the press, embraced the aspirant left-wing candidate. "I knew from that moment," recalls Livingstone, "that the only person who could definitely beat me in a ballot of party members would not be standing." It was an unmistakable statement, but her cheek infuriated the Blairites, some of whom would probably have preferred it if she had indeed hugged a terrorist.
Her second, even bolder move was over her cabinet job. Last July, during the grim, grey week when Blair and Mowlam joined the other parties in Belfast for intensive and ultimately fruitless talks on the peace process, the two had a brief exchange about her future. But Blair had already decided that it was time to replace her with someone the Unionists could do business with, and had also very provisionally decided that it should be Peter Mandelson.
Then, a few days after the collapse of the Belfast talks, Mowlam went public. In the middle of the Eddisbury by-election campaign, she declared: "I haven't had my fill of Northern Ireland . . . I want to make sure I do everything I can to make the process work. I hope I am allowed to stay on long enough to do that." It looked spontaneous, but it was a brilliant piece of political calculation. In the short term, it worked. An exhausted Blair postponed his cabinet reshuffle.
In an NS interview at the end of September, she again made it clear, though in more diplomatic terms, that she wanted to stay on. By now, however, Blair's patience had run out. And exactly a year after her conference triumph came a clear sign that the skids were finally under her.
Her speech to the 1999 party conference was scheduled immediately after lunch. She spoke to a half-empty hall. Party officials insist that this was not a calculated snub. Mowlam's friends do not believe that for one moment. "Another big standing ovation might have made it difficult again for Blair to move her," says one.
In October, he not only moved her but put her in the Cabinet Office, rather than the Department of Health, a job she would have much preferred. True, some of Blair's senior advisers wanted her there for positive reasons. Noting that whenever she appeared on party political broadcasts, membership applications soared, they argued that in a cabinet weak on charisma, she was one of the few effective media performers. But the Blairite entourage also believed that, at health, where the Prime Minister wanted radical and complex changes, Mowlam's appetite for policy detail would prove inadequate. So the job went to Alan Milburn. "Mowlam has the popular touch of Bill Clinton," said one Blair aide dismissively, "but lacks his ability to immerse himself in policy detail."
He added that she is on trial; if she fails, she won't get another chance merely on the grounds that she is Mo.
Ominously for Blair - and, arguably, for her - she was not able to hide her misery during the closing weeks of 1999. After years of service in Northern Ireland she missed out on what now seems a triumphant climax by a few weeks, and she is no fan of Mandelson, who is now getting the rave reviews. Her mother died last month. She suffered a bad bout of flu. The job itself is ill-defined. She even gave the impression to one very senior journalist over a meal that she would resign over Christmas.
But this is not the end of the story. She is talented enough to make something of her current job, which does contain specific responsibilities, such as policies aimed at tackling poverty and drug abuse. Nor was her lofty assessment of her own political worth last summer far off the mark. She continues to have a huge following among Labour party activists and the wider electorate, more so than any other cabinet member. She is a true Blairite, but one who appears more human and engaged than the cautious, sound-bite machines that new Labour tends to produce. If there was a leadership contest sometime after the next election she would still have a following; and she would get votes from left as well as right.
Blair knows that she matters. Although occasionally exasperated by her, he retains more affection and respect for her skills and courage than some of his aides. At the end of last year he offered her a residence at Admiralty House, of practical use now that her husband is without work and, as at least one Mowlam ally recognises, symbolically important as a recognition that she needed a demonstration of goodwill.
Some influential Blairites believe she could be in her last job in government. It is at least as likely that she will be the only woman from Blair's first cabinet to survive into a second term.
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