Britain’s former Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam, a colorful politician who played a pivotal role in the province’s peace process, died in a hospice south of London on Friday. She was 55.
A popular and outspoken character, Mowlam served in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government for four years from 1997 after recovering from a brain tumor.
“Mo was surely one of the most remarkable and colorful personalities ever to come into politics. Great company, utterly irreverent, full of life and fun,” Blair said in a statement.
“Yet behind that extraordinary front presented to the world was one of the shrewdest political minds I ever encountered.”
Blair shifted her from Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 to a lesser ministerial job.
Before stepping down from politics in 2001, she topped a poll as the public’s choice to succeed him as prime minister.
In the run-up to the Labor party’s 1997 election victory, Mowlam told just her husband and Blair about her condition, only going public when a newspaper commented on her weight gain and haggard appearance.
She had received a new course of radiotherapy treatment in recent months, which affected her balance. Earlier this month she fell and banged her head, never regaining consciousness.
A spokesman said her family said in a statement she died at 8.10 a.m. on Friday.
Political transformer
In government, Mowlam took the high-risk step of visiting hardened pro-British paramilitaries in Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison in the run-up to 1998’s Good Friday Peace agreement.
She persuaded them to back the peace process, aimed at ending 30 years of sectarian strife. Blair said she transformed the politics of the province.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said news of Mowlam’s death would be met with sadness by all who knew her.
“Mo Mowlam worked tirelessly in the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement,” he said. “She was prepared to take risks for the peace process, risks to secure agreement and risks to implement it.”
When talks among the province’s fractious parties got particularly tough, Mowlam used to remove the wig she wore after grueling treatment on her tumor took its toll on her hair, and put it beside her on the table.
“I remember the early meetings leading up to the Good Friday Agreement and the slightly bemused astonishment of all and sundry as, by a mixture of determination, charm and sheer life force, she bowled everyone over,” Blair said.
Mowlam’s plain speaking landed her in trouble at times — as when she suggested, while in opposition, that the British royal family should hand Buckingham Palace over to the public.
But her touchy-feely style also won her many friends, not least among reserved Ulster politicians.
“She was a larger-than-life figure. She was not the stuffy type of traditional Cabinet minister,” Reg Empey, leader of the province’s Ulster Unionist Party, told Sky Television.
Mowlam was born in September 1949 near London and moved to Coventry as a child. Her postal worker father was an alcoholic and Mowlam attributes much of her toughness, as well as her academic success, to this painful fact.
She was elected member of parliament for Redcar, northeast England, in 1987 and married banker Jon Norton in 1996.