Mo Mowlam: Some Woman and a half
Mo Mowlam's presence was regarded as crucial to the success of the talks. She may be out of the limelight but she hasn't gone away.
Nothing in Mo Mowlam's stint at the head of the Northern Ireland Office became her so well, as the long night of April 9th inside Castle Buildings—or so says one admirer. There is a sour alternative version, but then on Mo, the alternative is always sour. Dr. Marjorie Mowlam stirs emotion, looses prejudice. “Well, you wouldn't bring her home to tea, would you”, as one senior unionist famously remarked. “The woman's not house-trained.”
He was referring to the Secretary of State's liking for eating off other people's plates, a chip here, a sausage there. Even the fact that she prefers to be known by her nickname helped convince already sniffy Northern Office civil servants, that this was a boss whose behaviour would test their loyalty. Her lack of inhibition has been a constant trial to them. The disloyalty of a series of leaks has tried her in return.
“Ah, but you should have seen her, bald and barefoot, working those corridors. That's a woman and a half.” One vividly recalled moment from the bleak early hours of the talks' last morning, has her leaving a room, slamming the door behind her on Irish officials and Sinn Féiners, then alone in the corridor sagging momentarily with what passers-by at first took for wretchedness. “Not at all, it was pure vexation. The Shinners were treating her like a perfidious Brit, and she's not that.”
The admirers argue that since the Agreement Mo Mowlam's contribution has been downplayed. “Amazing, eh? The big boys appear in the last couple of days and she gets written out of the script”, says one. Another went back to that long night's trek:
“All this guff about Blair's vital role! But it was Mo that negotiated face to face. Blair sat in an office by himself, king of the manor, and she brought him the demands. He'd box them or tick them, and she'd bring them back.”
More detached observers remark that to see any secretary of state as subservient, is no more than a proper understanding of prime ministerial status. Unionist complaints about her prior to the agreement became almost comical—their dogged determination to separate her line from that of Downing Street just another example, some thought, of denial on their part.
Properly understood, Mo is a striking personality but is no more than Blair's messenger. Her personality may have boosted the message or blurred it, depending on the recipient's view. It has always been the message according to Blair.
Strait-laced and sexist northern political circles find it difficult to see past the habits of whipping off the wig, feet on the table and the spicy language. When Mo snapped “wanker”, as her then head of information services left a meeting, a change in personnel clearly beckoned. Her blitheness infuriates the stuffy, occasionally unnerves the well-disposed and endears her to many. “Hallo my darlings,” she carols to the press pack, “aren't you looking lovely today?” First names follow, women in the pack frequently singled out for early attention. Hard and easy questions alike elicit the same chirpy head to one side pose, the same direct gaze. Sir Patrick Mayhew's disdainful drawl and the years of Conservative chill seem a distant memory.
Outside the Maze prison on the windy day in January when she visited Loyalist convicts, the Secretary of State behaved as usual. While some admirers wondered if this was a major error of judgement and her rashness might rebound, Mo was beaming at waiting journalists. She posed briskly against an unremarkable wall, determined not to provide shots with bars or cell-doors visible, then walked back towards the prison gym, a sudden breeze lifting her shirt over an expanse of tummy. One hand tugged the shirt back in place, the fluty little girl voice sang out “Do you want to come back inside, then?” From anyone else it would have been excruciating.
“All mouth,” a political figure scoffs, “bloody rackety woman can't settle. She's a liability.” The judgement is unusual only because the speaker is nationalist. Most of Mo's bad press comes from unionists who think her devotion to the union as slight as her decorum.
An Ulster Unionist member of the NI Forum solemnly asked another, in a debate on the Parades Commission last autumn, if he would not consider it “significant, that Dr. Mowlam told me and some of my colleagues that she never felt any particular pride in being British. That indeed she never felt British at all when representing the Labour party at the inter-governmental conferences? Does the member believe that her lack of pride in her own country suits perfectly for her responsibility to [sic] diminish our British culture in Northern Ireland?”
The Reverend Ian Paisley was more brisk, describing Mo's response to a Belfast visit by European Commission president Jacques Santer: “She said ‘I am not going to make a speech. All I am going to say is that I was told to tell you that we want Objective One status'. She waved her hand and then went on to talk gibberish and make jokes.”
The jokiness and informality is high-risk. The Mowlam touch warmed the people of Garvaghy Road before she became Secretary of State. Some insist she told them bluntly that once in office, she would ensure no Orange march bothered them again. “She sat over there, eating chips she brought in with her, sharing them with all the kids and she talked a mile a minute. She should never have promised us anything so concrete,” a rueful and moderate local spokesperson recalled. Office imposed inevitable strains. When the RUC moved in ahead of the marchers to clear protestors off the Road, the residents' association was still waiting for their promised personal warning call from Mo. She made a public apology later. It went down badly.
Tony Blair's drive on Northern Ireland is indisputable: a Mowlam factor is hard to deny. Most indicators suggest it befits the Unionist's bogey image. “She held the thing together,” says a fan. “She took amazing decisions like going into the jail, that was pure Mo, even though Blair okayed it. And she talked to people others wouldn't.” While republicans were publicly voicing concern that London and Dublin had allowed unionists to squeeze powerful cross-border bodies off the agenda, and that David Trimble clearly had his own line to Tony Blair, a senior Sinn Féin figure admitted in private that Mo often called him direct. Nothing major, he insisted, courtesy calls: checking, he suggested, to make sure the SF leadership had been notified properly by officials.
Some officials have their own suspicions. A functionary in one administrative branch of the security services chose an occasion, when minor reforms had just been announced, to comment that “much worse” was in store. “The Secretary of State told us herself that she had waited a long time to be in government, and she was certainly going to govern. She was practically smacking her lips. We're of the opinion this is change for political reasons.”
As critics, both unionist and nationalist, have noticed, the agreement leaves considerable leeway for a Secretary of State as head of British administration. It would include the pushing through of measures on employment equality, ‘normalisation of security arrangements,' the establishment of a commission on policing and a review ‘with an independent element' of the criminal justice system. “I don't know about Blair's stomach for all of that but Mo's heart is in it,” says one close observer. What no one knows is how that weighs with Tony Blair, or how long he will choose to leave Labour's most popular woman in Belfast. How do you follow Mo?