What Mo Mowlam did for us

When I heard Mo Mowlam had died I was shot through with a sense of sorrow. I thought, ‘oh fuck it, another good person gone’.
This is not, I must admit, the response I usually have following the death of people I have met only briefly.
But maybe the loss of life is more tragic when it is someone such as Mo, who passed away at the relatively young age of 55.
From the time we were introduced in Stormont in 1997 – for the first of two interviews – she radiated an inspiring appetite for life.
The fact she had, not long before, undergone chemotherapy merely added to her enthusiasm.
What was so inspiring about the woman was the way she jokingly gestured towards the scarf that covered her bald head, as if to say “hardly my style, is it?” Mowlam was not the sort to wear a silk scarf.
Tellingly, as soon as she could, Mo dispensed with the scarf and wig and wore her partly bald head just as proudly.
Mo adored music. More than once, she told me she loved talking to this magazine because records had always played a big part in her life.
This, after all, was a woman who declared that she “loved” Lennon’s 'Working Class Hero', even though it had been described as one of her “less politically sound choices by some people in the establishment” after she picked it on Desert Island Discs.
Mowlam, as with many of her peers, from Tony Blair to Bill Clinton, also acknowledged Bob Dylan as a huge political influence.
Perhaps predictably, Mowlam’s radical and liberal tendencies and, indeed, her role in relation to the Good Friday Agreement, have already been undermined only days after her death.
“Fuck that,” as Mo herself might have said. But she can’t say anything in her own defence anymore.
So, I’ll simply state where I stand on this issue by repeating something I wrote in the preface to our first interview, where I suggested that Mowlam’s role in the Belfast Agreement “has assured her of a place in any chronicle of Irish history during the twentieth century”.
Mowlam herself delivered what now seems to be a fitting epitaph, when she suggested at the end of our last interview, in 2002, that she no longer had a place in Northern Ireland and was proud of that fact.
A few days earlier, having long since resigned from politics, Mowlam had been in Belfast promoting her memoir Momentum. A guy on the street said “what are you doing here Mo? We don’t need you anymore”.
This, Mowlam realised, was a fantastic thing for this man to say. More to the point, Mo not only agreed that this was a wonderful tribute to her work in the North but said it was the best she could have asked for.
Mo also smiled broadly when she recalled that man’s comment and it is this smile, plus his assessment, I will remember most about the woman.