We both went to Durham University to read anthropology and, prior to full-time politics, we both worked in education. When I began working for the Labour Party in Liverpool, I was expecting Mo to be joining me there, but it never happened. My path and that of Mo had much in common. We were both the products of a working-class background, advantaged by academic selection. We were both products of the turbulent, but exciting, decade of the Sixties. The country - and Labour's uneasy, but less courageous, backbenchers - will miss them.It is the greatest compliment to Mo Mowlam to say that she would probably have been as astounded as touched by the outpouring of posthumous tributes, and by their warmth and respect.
With her many virtues and flaws, she was a genuine politician for our time - the like of which, alas, we have seen all too rarely.. At a time when politicians were increasingly losing public confidence, she was that rare phenomenon: a politician non-politicians felt instinctively they could trust.As such, her departure is a loss not only to public life but also to the Prime Minister and his Government. Any administration, especially one that is as unused to effective Opposition as this one and as deaf to public criticism, needs articulate critics as well as loyal supporters. With the sudden death of the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, and now that of Ms Mowlam, the Blair Government has lost two of its most authoritative critics Ms Mowlam appealed to the heart; Mr Cook to the head. After she left Parliament, disenchanted with many of the policies pursued by the Prime Minister she had helped to office, she continued to speak and write as trenchantly as she had done while at Westminster And she had no difficulty obtaining a forum.
Before the hagiography has gone too far to be challenged, however, it is probably also true to say that Mr Blair was right to transfer her when he did. The Good Friday Agreement might well have been impossible without the risks she took to convince republican leaders of her good faith. In so doing, however, she lost the confidence of the loyalists. How much of a liability that was - and remained - can be judged by the guarded judgements offered yesterday from senior Unionists, even as the personal appreciation was warm.Her early death is nonetheless a singular loss to British public life. She was a trail-blazer with a modern lifestyle and modern attitudes and whose appointment to the front bench encouraged other women to believe that female politicians were making headway and that they, too, could succeed.