Obituary: Mo Mowlam was Northern Secretary for only 2½ years, but such was the impact of her personality that she is still well remembered in the North, writes Fionnuala O'Connor
Mo Mowlam, who died yesterday at the age of 55, infused the peace process with her own enthusiasm. As secretary of state for Northern Ireland at a time of great hope and as much suspicion, she was a larger-than- life personality in a pivotal position.
Through months of violence and hard negotiation, she badgered and joked behind closed doors and cheered on an apprehensive people, mainly by suggesting that she believed in a better future.
She held the job for only 2½ years, from May 1997 to October 1999, but such was the impact of her personality that she is still well remembered in the North.
The qualities which won the hearts of Labour's rank and file in Britain and got her into trouble with her party leadership - plain speaking to the point of rudeness, a sense of fun which could be exhibitionist and a refusal to stand on ceremony - offended some in the North but helped others step away from traditional positions.
Appointed by Tony Blair to Belfast on the arrival in power of New Labour, it was her brief to bring the IRA's political wing, among others, into negotiations with a wide agenda. The IRA ceasefire had collapsed the previous year, and the new Northern Secretary immediately made it clear that its restoration was a priority.
Unionist politicians were shocked by the developing process and they saw it personified in Mowlam, with her informality, bad language and what they regarded as indecent haste to embrace the IRA. That she hugged people indiscriminately only increased the offence.
Any woman representing the British government at that point could have discomfited leading unionists, already on the defensive and accustomed to a largely male political scene. Mo Mowlam behaved like no other woman in the public eye.
When, during meetings, she removed the wig she had been wearing since radiotherapy or referred to "my little tumour", it went down as badly as her nickname of "Trimble Wimble" for the Ulster Unionist leader.
Cancer patients, however, praised her unselfconsciousness and openness about treatment.
Loyalist paramilitary spokesmen who wanted talks, women's groups and others who felt frozen out of politics saw her as a new broom.
The effort she put into visiting trauma centres for victims of violence and her talent for relating to people on the street meant many Protestants, including middle-class unionists, warmed to her. She organised concerts by Elton John and others in the grounds of Stormont and talked up Belfast as a venue for public events: frivolous nonsense to some but attractive to others as determination to be done with Troubles gloom.
When a narrow majority of unionists voted for the Belfast Agreement, after great effort to steady nerves and inject vision led by Tony Blair, many also credited Mowlam's tireless optimism.
Marjorie 'Mo' Mowlam was born in Watford on September 18th, 1949, and nearly died of pneumonia three months later.
She was always open about her untidy private life, her late and happy marriage and her difficult early life as one of three children with an overworked heroic mother and a much-loved alcoholic father. The family was invariably short of money.
They moved to Coventry where she attended Coundon Court comprehensive school before going on to study at Durham and Iowa universities.
She was elected MP for Redcar in 1987 at the age of 38 after lecturing in political science in Wisconsin, Florida and Newcastle. She became shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland in 1994 and, after Labour won the 1997 general election, was appointed Northern Secretary.
After the patrician tones of Sir Patrick Mayhew, her Conservative predecessor, the Mowlam style unnerved some in both Stormont and Hillsborough. Her insistence that staff should call her Mo was one thing. Making her own phone calls and arranging impromptu meetings upset sticklers. Even some who liked her from the outset thought she often made her heavy work schedule unmanageable.
She tried hard to relax. In her 2002 memoir, Momentum, she was open about the thrill of living in Hillsborough Castle, Queen Elizabeth's official residence in Northern Ireland.
She filled it with family and friends at weekends, once posing a total of 18 including her husband, step-children, mother and cabinet colleague Chris Smith for a jolly photograph on the queen's bed.
Hillsborough staff more used to dinners for "the Anglo-Irish elite, the Ulster Tatler crowd", in her words, became accustomed to the cast of The Rocky Horror Show singing round the piano in the main sitting-room and children go-kart racing in the corridors. Mowlam did ban the go-karts in the queen's bedroom.
When it emerged, via a leaked tape of a phone call, that the secretary of state had addressed Martin McGuinness as "Babe," it caused outrage.
Mowlam explained to a Belfast Telegraph interviewer: "Well, I call people honey, sweetheart, babe, darlin'. I call Sir Ronnie [ Flanagan, last RUC chief constable] babe."
In January 1997, a few months before she was appointed Northern Secretary in May, she was found to be suffering from a brain tumour. She went public about her illness in April, explaining that she had put on weight and lost her hair as a result of radiotherapy treatment and steroids. In November, she announced that she had won her battle against the tumour, saying she was "very well" and "fully back to health".
Her early statements as Northern secretary were deemed pro-nationalist. But having allegedly promised Garvaghy Road residents in Portadown that she would never sanction another Drumcree Orange march, or would personally inform them if the decision went against them, she was harshly criticised by nationalists when police cleared the road for a parade in 1997.
Despite these tensions, the IRA ceasefire was restored shortly afterwards.
Mowlam was strongly criticised, but also praised, for her decision in January 1998 to go into the H Blocks of the Maze prison and meet loyalists serving sentences for many murders. It was a moment when the painfully slow negotiations which eventually produced the Belfast Agreement seemed doomed.
Days earlier three INLA prisoners had climbed over a roof to kill the notorious loyalist leader Billy Wright. Loyalist paramilitaries immediately killed two Catholics, and unionist politicians demanded the resignations of Mowlam and prison officials.
UDA prisoners, Johnny Adair and Michael Stone prominent among them, threatened to withdraw their always conditional support for the peace process, and pull their tiny fringe party out of negotiations.
Mr Trimble, dependent on the fringe parties for support in the talks, visited the jail without much controversy. Mowlam cleared her visit with Blair, but her meeting with Adair, Stone and others, during which she told them the release of prisoners would be part of negotiations, brought a storm of protest.
Alliance leader John Alderdice (now Lord) said she had "sacrificed the democratic principle." Others praised her courage. The UDA decided their representatives should stay in the talks. There were more killings, but the crisis passed.
She drew further criticism when she let drop during an argument with Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly that he was being bugged by intelligence services. It was one of several occasions when impetuosity became indiscipline, if not culpable self-indulgence.
Yet US senator George Mitchell, who chaired the pre-Belfast Agreement negotiations, said of her: "She is blunt and outspoken and she swears a lot. She is also intelligent, decisive, daring and unpretentious. The combination is irresistible. The people love her, though many politicians do not."
For some talks participants, Mowlam's finest and most selfless contribution came in the negotiations that produced the Belfast Agreement, particularly in the exhausting final hours.
In the stifling Castle Buildings she dispensed with her shoes and the wig. "She gets written out of the script," an admirer said shortly afterwards, "but you should have seen her, bald and barefoot, working those corridors. Blair sat in an office, king of the manor, and she brought him the demands. He'd box them or tick them and she'd bring them back."
Mowlam's rapid political rise and high-profile middle period dipped abruptly into a bruising last phase. Early closeness to Blair was long gone by the time he replaced her as Northern secretary with Peter Mandelson and she developed a conviction that she had been undermined for Mandelson's benefit.
Some suggested she was doomed from the moment in the midst of the leader's speech at the 1998 party conference, when Blair paid her a compliment for her role in Northern Ireland and delegates gave her a standing ovation - lasting longer than his own.
She left Northern Ireland and became cabinet office minister i1999 and soon afterwards announced her intention to retire from parliament, relinquishing her seat at the 2001 election.
The seesaw of adulation and hostility may have clouded her judgment: it was a mistake to publicly reject several senior jobs after Belfast.
The cabinet office job went badly. "I was being so briefed against that the job I was wanting to do became untenable," she said.
Plainly slowed by illness and medication, she travelled back to Northern Ireland regularly to support fundraising for integrated education, an early and lasting enthusiasm.
The book she wrote after leaving parliament denounced Blair's presidential style and disowned what New Labour had become. A barnstorming narrative, the book spliced the personal and political.
She is survived by her husband, Jon Norton, a banker and father of two, whom she married in 1995.