Mo Mowlam: the People's Peacemaker

The young Mo Mowlam

Born in 1949, Marjorie Mowlam grew up in London and Coventry. At school, she acquired her nickname ‘Mo’ (a shortened form of her surname). She was academically gifted and athletic, playing hockey for her county. As a teenager, Mo often shut herself away in her bedroom, concentrating on her schoolwork. It was her way of escaping from the rows which raged downstairs in her family home, caused by her father’s alcoholism. 

University and the USA

Mo’s hard work paid off, ensuring she became the first in her family to get a place at university. She studied at Durham, where one tutor wrote that everyone agreed she had the qualities to become the UK’s first woman Prime Minister (an honour later claimed by Margaret Thatcher). 
 
After graduating, Mo continued her studies in the USA, then went on to lecture in political science in Wisconsin and Florida. She then returned to England to teach at Newcastle University. 

Labour Party activist

Mo combined her academic interest in politics with an active role in the Labour Party, throwing herself into causes like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and supporting the families of striking coal miners. 
 
She became a Member of Parliament (MP) for Redcar in 1987 and, during Labour’s years in opposition, one of her responsibilities was as a spokesperson on Northern Ireland. 

Government minister with a common touch

When Tony Blair made Mo Mowlam Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, her first priority was to meet the people, not the politicians. She headed straight from the airport to Belfast City Centre, where she mingled with the shoppers, shaking hands and chatting to anyone she met. She brushed aside security concerns, which had made such walkabouts a rarity in Northern Ireland. 
 
Mo was gifted with a directness and an ability to relate to people from all kinds of backgrounds. She learned and remembered everyone’s names, and preferred a hug to a handshake. She sometimes surprised strangers by taking a sip of their drink or a mouthful of their food. Most people were enchanted, although some politicians were less impressed – in particular when she resorted to swearing.

Move to Hillsborough Castle, and diagnosis

As she began her time at Hillsborough Castle, Dr Mowlam’s profile was perhaps higher than that of any other member of the new Cabinet. 

During the 1997 UK election campaign, she was the target of negative press coverage from journalists who noticed that she had suddenly put on a lot of weight. Some put it down to her decision to give up smoking, whilst one columnist wrote that she had started to resemble ‘an only slightly effeminate Geordie trucker’ (a lorry driver from the north-east of England). 

In response, Mo revealed she had been diagnosed with ‘a tumour, which had been found to be non-cancerous’, adding that her radiation treatment was over and she felt fit and well. With characteristic humour, she told one interviewer she ‘quite liked Geordie truckers’. 

This personal statement provoked a wave of sympathy and, in the subsequent election, her majority in her Redcar constituency climbed from 13,000 to almost 22,000. 

Mo's health battle continued throughout her time as a government minister. Having lost much of her hair due to the treatment, she wore a wig, although she frequently removed this during political meetings as she found it annoying.

A fragile peace process

When Labour came to power, the priority was to revive the fragile Northern Ireland peace process, which had been seriously damaged by the breakdown of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire. 

Hopes for peace took a big step forward in 1997 when the IRA restored its truce. But there was still suspicion on all sides, persistent violence from Irish republican and loyalist factions, alongside tension and rioting associated with disputes over controversial Orange Order marches.

Walking the tightrope

As the new Secretary of State, Mo did her best to act as an honest broker. But it was a difficult tightrope to walk. 

In December 1997, a prominent loyalist paramilitary, Billy Wright, was shot dead by an Irish republican gunman whilst being held as a prisoner inside the high security Maze prison near Lisburn. Wright was the leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, a small faction opposed to the peace process. However, the government feared the angry response to his murder could shatter the ceasefires maintained by the bigger mainstream loyalist paramilitary groups. 

Into the Maze prison

In January 1998, in an effort to shore up the loyalist truce, Mo Mowlam decided to speak directly to those with influence. She visited the Maze prison and sat down with prisoners from the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). She also met their counterparts in the IRA. She told the prisoners that, if their organisations maintained their ceasefires, the government would consider releasing them early, in the context of a ‘peaceful and lasting settlement’.
 
Her decision to sit down with paramilitaries convicted of shocking acts of violence inevitably provoked a reaction. One of the prisoners involved in the meeting was Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, whose UDA gang had terrorised areas of North and West Belfast in a campaign of sectarian killings. A cartoon depicted Mo Mowlam offering the paramilitary leader refreshments with the caption ‘More tea, Mad Dog?’. The Conservative spokesman Andrew Mackay argued that the ‘appalling pictures of the Secretary of State sitting down with yobs with tattoos undermined mainstream politicians and undermined her position’.   
 
But Dr Mowlam remained convinced the risk was worth taking. Before her intervention, the UDA prisoners had voted by 60% to withdraw their backing for the peace process. Afterwards, they reversed that decision and the loyalist ceasefire – although flawed – remained largely intact.

Pushing towards peace 

The prison meeting was just part of a wider push towards peace, which reached its climax on Good Friday 1998. 

As Prime Minister, Tony Blair was the UK government’s key negotiator. But Mo Mowlam remained ever present in the talks, urging discontented parties not to abandon the process and even padding from room to room in her stockinged feet, checking that the politicians had enough hot food and drink. She dismissed those who suggested this was too menial a task for a senior government minister, pointing out that hungry people were more likely to be tetchy and negative.
 
The Good Friday Agreement peace deal was completed on 10 April 1998, and later endorsed by the public on both sides of the Irish border in referendums. But its implementation remained far from smooth. 

At Hillsborough Castle and other venues, there were many more rounds of talks on the ‘guns before government’ issue – the insistence by unionists that progress needed to be made on disarming the IRA before they would share power with the IRA’s political allies, Sinn Féin.

Laughter and music

Mo Mowlam's life at Hillsborough Castle

For Mo, Hillsborough Castle and Gardens was not just a venue for hothouse political talks, but also an extraordinary place to call home. When she arrived, her staff lined up to greet her, making her feel ‘like a character from a Dickens novel’. She had never stayed in ‘such posh surroundings’ by herself before, so was determined to make the most of it. 

Besides her husband Jon Norton and his two children Henrietta and Fred, Mo invited many friends to visit Hillsborough Castle. These included celebrities such as comedians Dawn French, Lenny Henry and Eddie Izzard. 

Parties would often last long into the night. Sometimes Richard Coles from the pop group the Communards played the piano. On one occasion, the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, who had been performing in Belfast, were invited back to Hillsborough to keep the music going into the early hours.

Opening Hillsborough Castle and Stormont to the public

As someone who bridled against anything she deemed stuffy, Mo made both Hillsborough Castle and Stormont – Northern Ireland’s main government buildings – as informal and open to the public as possible. She invited children from schools across Northern Ireland to attend a garden party at Hillsborough, with entertainment provided by the comedian Patrick Kielty and the singer Gary Barlow. 

At Stormont, Mo saw the potential for holding major events, persuading her friend Elton John to take to the stage for the first in a series of pop concerts.

The danger of being too popular

Mo Mowlam is replaced as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland

Mo Mowlam was popular not just at home but also in the USA, where she counted President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton as personal friends. However, she became increasingly alienated from the key Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, who preferred to deal directly with Tony Blair. Trimble made no secret of the fact he wanted Mo to be moved. 

Mo resisted the Prime Minister’s attempts to give her a new job. But eventually, in October 1999, she was replaced by Peter Mandelson. 
 
Mo suspected that some in Downing Street were happy to see her moved. She thought back ruefully to a moment in 1998 when Labour Party delegates had given her a standing ovation halfway through Tony Blair’s conference speech. On that occasion, she had been advised that, in politics, being more popular than your boss was a dangerous position to be in. She took another government job as a Cabinet Office Minister, but stepped down as an MP in 2001. 

Mo Mowlam died in a hospice in Canterbury on 19 August 2005, four years after stepping down as an MP.

A TV drama and a revelation about Mo Mowlam's illness

Five years after her death, in 2010, Mo Mowlam’s time in Northern Ireland was dramatized in Mo, an award-winning film starring Julie Walters as the Secretary of State.

During the preparation of the film, the scriptwriters sought Mo’s husband’s permission to talk to her cancer specialist. Dr Mark Glaser revealed he had told Mo at an early stage that her tumour was malignant, and she probably had only three years to live. Against her doctor’s advice, Mo kept the diagnosis secret from the public and the Prime Minister. 

In the event, Mo Mowlam lived with her terminal illness for nine years, three times longer than her doctors had expected; those were the years during which she carved her name in the history of Northern Ireland.

Mo Mowlam's legacy

Bringing people together, though she made it sound so simple, was Mo’s great and transformative achievement that had eluded many others before her. The enduring unity of people from different traditions and backgrounds in Northern Ireland, reflected in a lasting peace – though at times fragile – is a fitting testament to Mo’s vision of her own role and abilities. This was expressed plainly during her very first visit and it remains, perhaps, her abiding legacy.