Mo Mowlam

It’s not long since Mo Mowlam was voted ‘the most popular politician in Britain’. She was hugely popular in Ireland too, although in the long run she got on the wrong side of the establishment Unionist parties. This may have led to Mowlam’s final undoing politically, when Tony Blair and his minions in the British Labour Party decided “Mo has to go.” Certainly, as she says in her new book, Momentum, a memoir of her life since 1997, by the summer of 1999 Mo felt “like a bag of potatoes Blair wanted to dump somewhere so Peter could go to Northern Ireland.” In due course, Peter Mandelson succeeded Mowlam as Secretary of State in Northern Ireland.

So was Mo “dumped” when she subsequently ended up in what many described as a “non-job” in the Cabinet Office? She clearly feels that she was, although in the end, Mo Mowlan resigned from the Labour Party.

Either way, as I said in the preface to her last hotpress interview, in 1997, Mo Mowlam’s role in helping to forge the Good Friday Agreement has already assured her of a place in any chronicle of Irish history during the 20th century.

Looking back over her time in Northern Ireland, the key to Mowlam’s success was her straight-talking, no-bullshit, up-close and personal approach to politics. It seemed appropriate in the context, although her book focuses largely on the politics of Northern Ireland and, indeed, the politics of the British Labour Party, to focus here on Mo the person.

The 52-year-old daughter of “Post Office workers Frank and Tina”, from 1983 Mo Mowlam was MP for Redcar in Cleveland, where she still lives with her husband, merchant banker Jon Norton, and his two children from a previous marriage, Freddy and Henrietta. This interview was conducted in Mowlam’s hotel room in Dublin’s Shelbourne-Meridan prior to her appearance on The Late Late Show.

Joe Jackson: Mo, you admit in the book that you once flew in a plane owned by Chris De Burgh! Do you realise your street cred is shot. He’s hardly the coolest person on the planet.

Mo Mowlam: (laughing) But his plane is cool! Bugger Chris De Burgh! I came back and forth between London and Belfast so often that I would never have been able to get the work done if I’d gone regular flights. The previous Secretary of State had used the plane and it was very handy. We rented it from Chris De Burgh for some time.

JJ: But it wasn’t wired to play songs like ‘Lady In Red’ all the way over and back, was it?

MM: No! In fact, there was no music, which is rather depressing. But usually I just read in preparation for my meetings.

JJ: Speaking of music, you brought “sodomites to Stormont” according to Ian Paisley!

MM: Yes, when I brought Elton John to play in the grounds of Stormont, Ian Paisley did say, ‘that wicked woman is now bringing sodomites to Stormont’.

But the real point about Elton John is that he was totally interested in all the issues involved in Northern Ireland, and asked me all about it. I find that many musicians are more interested in politics that most people are. Mick Hucknall is interested. He and I had long political discussions. Same with Elton John. They all ask about what went on in the North, how it started, how it evolved, where it can go from here?

JJ: The last time you talked to hotpress you were just teasing out that notion of having concerts in Stormont, to open up the grounds to people.

MM: And it worked. The year after Elton we had Pavarotti and I think it’s Rod Stewart this year. I may come back for that!

JJ: In your book you list the songs you chose for Desert Island Discs and one of them is ‘Blondes Have More Fun’ by Rod Stewart

MM: And I picked Cole Porter’s, ‘Don’t Fence Me In’!

JJ: Which, along with your choice of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ seems pretty appropriate, given your political career!

MM: I love ‘Working Class Hero’! Though that was considered one of my less politically sound choices by some people in the establishment, who thought it was a little OTT. But I wish I’d chosen Ian Dury because I’ve really gone back to his music of late.

JJ: Do you listen much to music?

MM: I tend not to be in control of the CD player. The kids are. And my husband plays a lot of jazz. But when I get my hands on the CD player I do play, roughly, what I said I listen to on Desert Island Discs.

JJ: Let’s talk about when you were a kid. Your dad was an alcoholic and, in the book, you say the way you responded to that situation was by burying your problems until you really needed to confront them. You were, in a sense, living in denial.

MM: My brother, sister and I all dealt with it the same way. We pushed it to one side and got on with living. But since then we’ve all come back and dealt with it in different ways. You have to face up to how you feel, eventually, but – as a child – running from those feelings is as good a way as any to get through it all.

JJ: Is that what you’d recommend to children in a similar situation now?

MM: I would say, if you’ve got somebody you can talk to, that probably is better to do at the time. But when it is your mum or your dad who is an alcoholic, I don’t think it is that easy to deal with at an early age. Psychiatrists and psychologists would probably disagree, but at that age you just want to get on and live your life, be as normal as possible.

JJ: Or pretend to be?

MM: Or pretend to be. If you need to spend years in counselling, in terms of how best to handle such situations, even at an early age, then for God’s sake do it. But if you don’t then try and get on with your life as well as you can. What’s interesting, when it comes to my own family is that none of us married early, which suggests it may have taken us a while to get settled. If you’ve had a bad childhood you don’t have a wonderful image of marriage.

JJ: You didn’t marry till you were around 45, right?

MM: Yes, but I did have serial relationships before that.

JJ: So you weren’t wary of relationships because of what you had encountered at home between your mum and dad when he was drunk?

MM: I had no trouble with that at all. But then nor did I have any trouble with drink. So I really think the way I got over all that was by going back and revisiting it when I was strong enough. I don’t think I was strong enough as a child. But I was in my 20s. Then I talked a lot about it with my sister and now we’re much more relaxed about it.

JJ: Did you hate your father at any point?

MM: No.

JJ: Not even when you were afraid to bring friends home – never knowing how he’d behave when drunk, if he’d embarrass you?

MM: That made me short-term angry. But I was soon overcome by sadness and sorrow at the fact that he’d wasted his life.

JJ: Did you ever ask yourself why he did?

MM: The only reason I could ever come up with was that he was a little man and he wanted to be a big man, drink with the boys, all that. That, I think, is what started him drinking when he was a teenager. That may have been the only way he could compensate for his height and then it was difficult for him to stop.

JJ: Your mom died relatively recently. Had she come to terms with your dad’s alcoholism?

MM: Yes. She was always much less bitter about it than we were. She understood. And she tried to help him throughout his life. I think the only thing she regretted was that she never had the chance to live her life to the full. She was a very strong, bright woman and I remember her telling me that when she and Auntie Jen were in the army together during the Second World War they both got promotion to sergeants. She didn’t dare accept it in case my father couldn’t cope with the fact that she then would have been higher than him. I think that says a lot about how she missed out to try and help him.

JJ: Would such memories have made you determined not to be held back?

MM: They must have. Because I’m driven and my sister is driven and my brother is. I was Head Girl, Queen’s Guide. Even from an early age, I did it all.

JJ: But at one point didn’t you also fear you might become an alcoholic?

MM: All the text books say the greatest propensity for alcoholism is among the children of alcoholics. So I guess it took up to my early 30s to be sure I wasn’t. And now I drink quite happily and quite freely.

JJ: And it’s helped you on various occasions?

MM: Drinking whisky certainly relaxes me. And it relaxed me the week I had the scan and I didn’t know what was going to be the outcome, whether the tumour was going to be terminal or not. So Jon and I decided not to have great, big, emotional discussions because neither of us could benefit from them. I’ll never forget that first night we went and saw Evita – but then neither of us knew she died from cancer. So that wasn’t the best choice of film to go to see. So probably our whisky intake increased that week to get through the whole thing. But similarly, on difficult days, when the stress was high, I used to go home, have a whisky and go to bed. Whisky was a good leveller just before you wanted to sleep.

JJ: What is Mo Mowlam like when she’s drunk?

MM: The interesting thing is that I haven’t got drunk for about ten years. I think that’s because in Government you never get a bloody chance! But when I do, I get happy and then I fall asleep! Both my husband and I do this. We are not unpleasant drunks! But in politics you really haven’t got the opportunity because the Press, in Britain, are so on your case all the time.

JJ: You said earlier that you had serial relationships before marrying Jon, but when you first met him you were reluctant to get involved because he was already married and you’d had a bad experience with a married man.

MM: It was bad for everybody involved. But I don’t want to go into it because I don’t think that would be fair on him. But, yes, the first time I met Jon, he was married. And the previous relationship was disastrous, so I didn’t want to repeat that. So all of me said, ‘Don’t go there again.’

JJ: And it was only when it became clear that he and his wife were already parting that you changed your mind?

MM: Yes. I invited the whole family to Redcar for the weekend with no idea that their marriage was falling apart. He explained when they were there that this was the last formal thing they were doing. And he insisted she came with him because he didn’t think I’d let him come up if she wasn’t with him.

JJ: And you fell in love!

MM: I did!

JJ: And as you tell the tale in the book, having Jon as a partner, particularly during traumatic times such as dealing with that brain tumour, was a blessing.

MM: He was brilliant. And he is a real friend as well as a lover. And it was a blessing.

JJ: But Mo you call the man a banker-wanker!

MM: I know! He is a merchant banker and I always called him a wanker so banker-wanker seems so right! It’s like East End slang!

JJ: You say, in the book, that you got the best of both worlds in that you didn’t have to go through the pain of childbirth and you inherited two kids “ready made”!

MM: Yes. because I never wanted children. People ask me have I missed not having children. The honest answer is, ‘No, I haven’t’. I felt that even before I, as a step-mom, had Freddy and H. I never had the yearning for children.

JJ: Never?

MM: Maybe when I hit 40, or 45. But by then I “had” H and Fred! But having children never was a priority in my life. I was more interested in travelling. I went to America, I went to Latin America, to Cuba. That interested me more, earlier in life, than having a permanent relationship. Or children. But with regards to H and Freddy, Jon came with two kids attached and he made it very clear from the beginning that the kids were important to him. He said, ‘When you marry me you marry me and my kids’. But that wasn’t a problem for me. I was quite happy to take him and the kids. And I always made it very clear to the children that I was not their mother. I was Jon’s wife.

JJ: Accepting a new partner can be problematic for many kids. Were they in any way resistant to you?

MM: No. Right in the beginning they used to come to Redcar and I think they got to know me as a friend. We never had difficulties.

JJ: So you were blessed in that sense, too.

MM: Yes. I was lucky to find Jon and lucky the relationship is so wonderful. And I am lucky that the kids are such a wonderful addition to it all. H is now 18 and she’s just back from Latin America and it’s just fantastic having her and her friends around sitting, chatting, at the table, saying what they think about things in the world. They give me different perspectives. It’s fantastic.

JJ: You saw no great need to actually marry John but did so for two reasons.

MM: Yes, one was for a very good friend, Betty Boothroyd. She only invited married partners to formal events so we didn’t want to miss all the good parties! And, secondly, we did it for the kids. Because I was away so much I just needed to give them a sign that I was, in fact, there permanently for them.

JJ: In Momentum, you explain that the claustrophobic experience of donning the mask before radiotherapy is worse than, say, your hair falling out.

MM: It’s scary. It really is. Because you are enclosed in a mask. Then your body is enclosed. Then you’re put into this long tunnel, this enormous machine. When I wrote to women about this, I gave them the best two pieces of advice I got when I had radiotherapy. One, was to go with something in your mind, a problem to think about and, if not that, a holiday. And a sweet to suck. And another hint was on hair fallout. I had a very good hairdresser who said ‘go and buy a wig before you lose your hair. I’ll cut the wig to what your hair is now and then when it starts falling out and you go through the depression of picking up bits of hair every morning on your pillow, cut it all off’. Cutting it all off was difficult but it gave you something to do. It made you feel, ‘I am going to do this, I’m in control here’ which is important.

JJ: Rather than feeling you are a helpless victim of your illness?

MM: Yeah. Small things like that are actually huge in this context. To be able to say, ‘I can choose...’ is important.

JJ: Who was it who accused you of lacking the “intellectual rigour” to do your job?

MM: I don’t know who said that. If I did I’d tell you. But I think a lot of those comments were so vicious. That I was intellectually inferior, my health hadn’t come back. And then to say that when I went to a Trade Union Conference I was…

JJ: The suggestion was that you basically shagged the entire executive of that Trade Union, one by one.

MM: Yes. Isn’t that nasty?

JJ: As you say in the book, it’s the kind of sexist, misogynistic slur which proves that such tendencies are still alive and well in the British Labour Party.

MM: They are there. Linda P. Potter, a columnist in the Daily Mail, said, when I was fat, that I looked like the back end of a Geordie truck.

JJ: But you then became a pin-up of Geordie truckers!

MM: Yes, life has its little compensations! And another thing was that people began to get angry for me, which was wonderful. But I didn’t read all those comments because I’m sure they would have gotten to me, if I had. But my husband read everything and he’d say, “There was a lot of shit in the Mail this morning, it was appalling”.

JJ: Did he ever feel like responding?

MM: Never, until two weeks ago. People say my book is a bitter, nasty book but the only person I really have a go at – I feel – is Bob McCartney because I can find no redeeming value in anything he’s ever said or done. But two weeks ago, Jenny McCartney, writing in the Telegraph, had a real go at me about the book and Jon wrote back and said he read Jenny’s piece with interest but it was sad she didn’t have the guts to say it was her father I was writing about. And he put in this last sentence, ‘But can I say, I am married to Mo Mowlam’. And that’s the first time he’s been driven to that. But those attacks do hurt Jon’s kids, especially H.

JJ: Don’t you ever feel like responding?

MM: What can you do? If you say you didn’t have sex with the entire executive of a Trade Union then they’ll go to town on that, too. Better just to remain quiet.

JJ: There was a smear campaign against you. Did Tony Blair OK that?

MM: I don’t think he did.

JJ: A decisive moment was when you got a standing ovation at the Labour Party conference which fed into the perception that you were more popular than he was.

MM: He wasn’t put out by the response. But the people around him were disturbed by the idea that somebody else was more popular than their boy.

JJ: Madeleine Albright did say about you that you were too popular for your own good.

MM: I think there is an element of truth to all that but, as I say in the book, I think you encounter that in the media and business too. But it definitely is there in politics. As Madeleine and I used to say, we’ve cracked the glass ceiling but we haven’t broken it. We still have a long way to go.

JJ: Was all of this part of the reason you finally said, in effect, ‘To hell with politics’?

MM: The impact it had was that it made it impossible to do my job. My position was becoming untenable because it was being undermined. Like somebody who said to me in Northern Ireland, ‘I’m going to talk to the organ grinder not the monkey’. When they say that you think, ‘What the hell is the point in carrying on?’

JJ: Presumably, you were the monkey and Blair the organ grinder?

MM: Yeah. And a politician said that to my face. And that was one of the many factors that made me think if I can’t do my job there is no point in staying. People say I was driven out. I wasn’t. I was driven out of the Cabinet job, after Northern Ireland, so I think that was an element of my decision to resign, but it wasn’t the whole thing. I was fed up with the way government was functioning, fed up with the lack of progress on some policy issues. It was a culmination of things.

JJ: Do you ever regret resigning from politics?

MM: I don’t know yet. It’s too soon to know. I’d about a week off after leaving government and then wrote this book for six months, which was exhausting. And now the promotion of the book is killing me, because I am doing so much. But I do miss the people. I miss the staff, I miss the beauty of the Commons, but I don’t know if I miss the job yet. I could have gone in the House of Lords but it’s not my thing!

JJ: Why?

MM: Joe, I’m ashamed of you for asking that question! Talk about losing street cred!

JJ: One comment that really angered the “establishment” was your admission that you’d used cannabis and that, “unlike Clinton” you inhaled. Indeed that comment – as innocent and inoffensive as it was – became hugely controversial within the ranks of the Labour Party.

MM: It was completely bizarre. They just couldn’t take the fact that I said I’d smoked cannabis. Other Cabinet members said, ‘If you answer honestly, everybody else is going to have to.’ And politicians, of all parties, perceive it as an unpopular thing to say, ‘I smoked cannabis’. I don’t think they have any idea of the amount of spliffs consumed by young people. It is their pint of beer. I think it is just so hypocritical when parents tell their kids not to smoke cannabis when they have a fag in one hand and a pint of beer in the other. And I think it is difficult for the police and social workers because the law is being abused. And in many cases the police turn a blind eye which, of course, undermines the law. So – apart from ten or twelve brave individuals – MPs think, across parties, that the public is not ready for the legalisation of drugs. I think the public is.

JJ: After leaving Northern Ireland, you worked extensively on exploring the whole area of drugs and you now believe that all drugs should be legalised.

MM: Well, you must allow drugs for medicinal use because it is plain daft not to let people in pain use drugs that will help them. I would then also legalise cannabis, tax it, regulate it so you know it’s okay. And I’d use that money to help other addicts, whether they be alcoholics or into heroin or coke. I’d do the same for ecstasy because I don’t think that is addictive. I think the only danger is if you take too many, or you drink too much water. I did two or three visits to Columbia, working with the American administration and so on. 70% of our coke – and America’s – comes from there. And it funds the terrorist movement. And you have to stop the terrorism if you are going to stop cocaine. It was fine with the Clinton administration, we worked well together. But then when George Bush came in – Incidentally, I was very relieved he didn’t take any interest in Ireland because he would have just been very unhelpful.

JJ: Why?

MM: He’d have seen it as a terrorist state and said, ‘If they are terrorists, you bomb them, honey!’ which would be disastrous. You don’t fight terrorism with terrorism. You fight it by talking, by bringing people in from the cold and into the process.

JJ: Is the same kind of thinking required in relation to Columbia?

MM: I talked to the President of Brazil and some of the people from other adjoining countries and they said, ‘Good luck Mo, but if you succeed in Columbia, you’ll have to come here because the drugs barons will just cross these borders’. Because it is all about money. And unless you take the financial incentive out of drugs you will never stop them. Because there is so much money to be made. Three hundred billion is the amount the black market takes on drugs. That is the size of the GDP of a couple of small nations.

JJ: And legalisation is the answer?

MM: I really do believe the public is ready for the legalisation of cannabis, though they are not ready for the legalisation of heroin or coke. But I think unless we do legalise it, regulate it, sell it, tax it and control it, we won’t stop drugs. That’s why I’ve taken a more extreme position recently. I don’t think there is any other way of controlling drugs. When drugs – as with alcohol after prohibition in the States – becomes legalised, it is easier to control.

JJ: What is your response to the imbroglio regarding the Columbia Three?

MM: It was a bloody silly thing to be doing. But you have to understand that they (IRA/Sinn Fein) had come from an extreme military position to talks. And whenever people tell me, ‘You sold out, you’ve been made to look stupid’ – well, I don’t care. I’m told I just ‘pandered to Sinn Fein’. Or to the Loyalists in the Maze. But I believe you have to talk to stop the violence. And you have to get to their mindset, to realise, as I say, that paramilitaries are coming from a very different position. I don’t usually verbalise this because it is too far for people to grasp. But I would say that we shouldn’t have looked for decommissioning. It was too far to push people who had seen themselves as fighting for their cause.

JJ: Is there any one achievement that makes you say, ‘Thank God, I became Secretary of Northern Ireland at that particular point in history, so that I was able to effect that change’?

MM: The situation with regard to the prisoners. Dealing with the prisoners issue was tough. I don’t think many people would have had the guts to do it. And unless I had, we wouldn’t be where we are now. As in implementing the Good Friday Agreement.

JJ: In 2002, as you watch new political scenarios unfold in Northern Ireland, are you hopeful for the future?

MM: I am. Because when I went back for a day to launch the book in Belfast, there was a real change. In the sense that there are lots more nightclubs for the kids, for example. The nature of Belfast at night has really shifted. In fact I walked down Royal Avenue – as I had the day I first arrived in Northern Ireland – and a group of elderly women, from Belfast, came up to me and said it was really fantastic, that they can go out at night now. And one fellow said, “What are you doing here, Mo? We don’t need you anymore.” Which was just fantastic.

JJ: That comment is a wonderful summation of your work in Northern Ireland.

MM: Yes. It’s the best summation I could ask for. And as long as the people stay with the Peace Process, no political party will want to crap on it. Any party that does will pay a price politically. And I think that is good news, don’t you?