Authors: Rosa Prince
Having persuaded a reluctant Prime Minister and Cabinet to go ahead with the bid, Dame Tessa established from the International Olympic Committee that London was in with a chance and in 2005 accompanied Mr Blair, David Beckham, the England football captain, and a group of local schoolchildren to Singapore where the vote would take place:
We absolutely went for broke on the bid, we got David Beckham and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven because there I was having my picture taken with David Beckham with his arms round me, and all these young people from east London. And then the next day London was bombed.
Coming the day after the excitement of Singapore, the 7/7 Tube and bus attacks on London, in which fifty-two died along with the four suicide bombers, was a shocking experience for the capital, and one that could have soured the public’s perception of the games.
As well as ensuring that the Olympics remained on track, Dame Tessa took on responsibility for helping the families of the victims of 7/7, as she had of those killed on 9/11.
She remains close to many of them and, as the tenth anniversary of the 7 July attacks approaches this summer, has been asked to deliver the memorial lecture – an honour she describes as ‘very touching’:
I hardly know where to start with either 9/11 or 7/7. There are so many things that are important to make the pain of the loss in those circumstances even possible to endure, and one of them is to have a memorial, a place to go, which is why memorials are so important.
Dame Tessa was, of course, in the Cabinet that led the country into war in Iraq in 2003.
One of Mr Blair’s most unwavering supporters, she describes how he leaned on her during the difficult weeks when the country was implacably opposed to an invasion that the Prime Minister was just as determined would take place:
It was tough and tense and I remember just before one of the key Cabinet meetings, I’d gone to India to conclude a trade agreement on film production. I’d arrived on Tuesday and I got a call saying, ‘The Prime Minister would really like you to come back and be in Cabinet,’ so I was there for under twenty-four hours.
At times, Dame Tessa has been accused of being too slavish to Mr Blair – a charge she rejects. She dismisses her famous remark that she would throw herself under a bus for him as a joke. ‘I don’t like the term loyalist,’ she says. ‘Loyalty is strength not weakness. I have never been blindly or unthinkingly loyal but I have a very clear view about the relationship between leadership and solidarity when you’re running a government.’
If 2005 was a year of highs and lows, 2006 would prove to be an unmitigated misery as Dame Tessa’s lawyer husband David Mills was caught up in a scandal involving the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Fearing for her career, Mr Mills insisted that they separate until the furore died down. They reconciled some years later, leading to allegations that they had never been apart.
Despite the roughing up she had been through, Dame Tessa was never tempted to stand down, particularly given the by-now absorbing work on the Olympic Games, which proceeded on a cross-party basis as she found herself working with figures to her political left and right in the form of London mayors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, as well as Sebastian Coe, the Tory peer and former Olympic athlete, and other sports stars.
She says:
It’s very hard to do justice to the sense of loyalty and commitment and solidarity that there was in the team who were leading the Olympics, who came from all sorts of backgrounds but who then were united by this sense of vision of what we could do.
For years it was like a secret. You couldn’t tell anyone else because if you told them they wouldn’t believe you. That was incredibly important to me.
We all had this sense of 100 per cent commitment to what we were doing together, to each other, and what this was going to be like in practice. That was a really wonderful experience of working with world-class people in that way.
When Mr Blair resigned in favour of Gordon Brown, Dame Tessa seriously considered stepping down herself, but was persuaded not to by the new Prime Minister. She was surprised, having never seen herself in the Brown camp, and did not particularly relish serving under him:
It was generous of Gordon. When Tony stood down I might have said, ‘Now’s the time for me to go,’ and I sort of did think that in a way. But Gordon was very insistent that he wanted me to stay.
I said I wanted to think about this and I rang Tony and said, ‘He wants me to do this.’
Tony said, ‘I think if the Prime Minister asks you to do something, you have to do it.’ So I said yes.
I was so focused on the Olympics and the apprenticeships and health and safety in the Olympic park and making sure we brought value to the local boroughs. It was an executive job writ large. And that was really where my focus was.
I didn’t like the politics as much and I also had this great sense of sadness and in the early stages [I was] feeling quite angry with Gordon because Gordon was a brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer but he just wasn’t temperamentally suited to being Prime Minister. Most of what went wrong in that time was because of Gordon’s frustration that he couldn’t do it.
When Labour lost the 2010 general election, Dame Tessa’s association with the Olympics meant she had a softer landing into the ‘horror’ of opposition than most:
I was in a very lucky position in the first two years in opposition because I was on the Olympic board and in a way the tables were turned because I had run the Olympics on a cross-party basis and with my counterparts now the secretary of state and minister, they did exactly the same.
I was still involved in big decisions, so it was a gradual let-down to the horror of opposition.
I think actually for all of us who were lucky enough to be in government, this has been a very hard five years. There’s not a single day you wouldn’t trade for a day in government.
After the long years of hard work, she puts the games’ opening ceremony as the high point of her political career:
Afterwards, at about three in the morning … we were all just reading each other all the texts we had had, and then staggering back to the village where I was a deputy mayor in heels that were far too high. That was an extraordinary moment, actually.
But you see, it wasn’t just one night. Because we can be like that as a city. We discover something of the soul, the personality, of London.
It didn’t happen and then never happen again. That is all the time how you capture the potential of London.
Which brings her to her decision to stand as a candidate to represent Labour at the 2016 London mayoral election…
Having resigned from the shadow Cabinet two days after the Olympics in order to allow Labour’s leader Ed Miliband to bed in a younger team, she decided the following year it was time to step down from Parliament as well.
But, within three months, that niggling sense of the need to help people, to serve, started up again.
She is currently the front runner for the job and as a precursor to her own bid is playing a leading role in campaigning for the party in the capital.
Despite having important and interesting matters on the horizon, Dame Tessa has been surprised at how reluctant she is to leave the Commons, however:
One of the many things I’ve loved about this place has been the rhythm of the week. You can arrive at any time of the week and almost know what day it is.
To have been here for twenty-three years is a privilege beyond anything I imagined would happen to me when I came back to London from Aberdeen. I loved being a Member of Parliament, loved it.
***
Born in London; raised in London and Aberdeen; attended the University of Edinburgh and Goldsmiths College, London; became a psychiatric social worker and head of the charity Mind.
1978: Unsuccessfully fights Ilford North at by-election, losing Labour seat to Conservatives
1979: Unsuccessfully fights Ilford North at general election
1992: Elected MP for Dulwich
1994: Becomes shadow Health Minister
1997: Becomes Health Minister
1999: Becomes Employment Minister
2001: Re-elected as MP for Dulwich & West Norwood; becomes Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
2002: Proposes London bid for 2012 Olympic Games
2005: London awarded Olympic Games in Singapore; leads response to help victims of 7/7 terror attacks, which happened the next day
2006: Separates from lawyer husband David Mills after he is caught up in a scandal involving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
2007: Becomes Cabinet Office minister with responsibility for the Olympics
2010: Becomes shadow Olympics Minister
2012: Made a Dame of the British Empire; becomes deputy mayor of the Olympic Village; returns to back benches; confirms reconciliation with her husband
2013: Announces she will stand down at 2015 general election
2014: Announces she will run to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London in 2016
Dame Tessa Jowell is now married to second husband David Mills and has a daughter, Jess, thirty-four, and a son, Matthew, thirty-one.
Ian Swales,
sixty-one, was Liberal Democrat MP for Redcar (2010–15).
‘The place is gradually being taken over by career politicians, most of whom went to just two universities, and they dominate all three main parties.’
***
I said to my wife with a few weeks to go: ‘You don’t really want me to get in, do you?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Why are you doing all this work then?’
‘Well, because it’s a game, isn’t it.’
My family are big on games. It was a game we played and it was a game we wanted to win. I heard subsequently that she talked to my oldest son and they decided I should lose by 2,000.
Actually that was the plan, to really carve into the margin, make our seat a marginal then hand over to somebody younger. We really, really worked hard – and won by 5,000. It was the biggest swing between the main parties since the Second World War in a general election. Remarkable result, really. And that’s how I ended up here.
I think Parliament’s more individualistic than I expected. There’s less teamwork of the type you would expect to see in business, for example, which is where most of my background is.
I always say, ‘No, I don’t have a future here.’ I’m the wrong gender, the wrong sexuality, the wrong colour, the wrong age. That’s a joke. It’s just a comment about the political correctness really. You can see by some of these Cabinet appointments. Women still talk about glass ceilings – it’s clearly the opposite.
In Westminster, some of the votes we have had to do. The Syria vote was one where I agonised most. I was one of those who rebelled. It would have only taken seven people to have voted differently and we would have been in Syria … [The] Middle East [is] so difficult, but I still think that was the right decision and I think most observers think it was the right decision.
And then of course the constituency work, getting the steelworks back running is an obvious highlight.
A personal low would be when I got up to speak [at PMQs, and] because I’m a Lib Dem, got howled down by Labour.
The Speaker told me to sit down while he got order. Then when I got up again, I got through a sentence, they were howling, so I repeated it and he told me to shut up and sit down. I felt actually not that bad in myself, I just felt it was such a bad reflection on Parliament.
There are two types of MP: there are those that retire at the election they turn pension age, like me; and there are those that stay here until forever, and I’m one of the former. It was never my intention to take on a full-time, full-on job again at this stage.
I am at an age where I’m retiring. If you lose your seat in your forties I can understand why you probably feel [a pang]. But I have already got five grandkids, I’ve got plenty to do. I’m not going to miss it in an ‘I need a job’ sense. I’ve got lots of holidays planned. I already know I’m going to be spending all of November in Australia.
To new MPs I would say: ‘Don’t forget who elected you.’ You do see some who get seduced by the Westminster bubble.
***
Mr Swales was a happily married family man living in Redcar and working for the chemical company ICI when he became ‘seduced’ by the group known as the ‘Gang of Four’ who formed the SDP in 1981.
He joined the party and soon became happily involved in activism, as much on the social side as anything else, before life moved on and his career took him to Brussels.
He says:
I had voted Liberal before then, probably on the basis of a ‘neither of the other two’ thing, whereas joining the SDP was a positive decision because I liked what they were saying.
Even now I would describe myself as a social democrat, as my prime political position. I was quite active, I was on the county committee of the SDP and it was a very active area.
I didn’t run for office but, for example, the party after the general election in 1983 was in my house. By the time I got back from Brussels in 1986, the honeymoon was over for the SDP. We did the 1987 election as an alliance with the Liberals and then of course after that the Liberal Democrats were formed.
Although I remained engaged on paper, actually I wasn’t engaged at all at that point in terms of doing things. I was doing a lot of international travel with my job and didn’t have much time for politics. My family were growing up by then, I had three kids, my career was progressing quickly. I always voted for them and I can honestly say that’s true.
Mr Swales did not step up his involvement with the party for more than a decade, when he found himself with time on his hands.
Redcar was a safe Labour seat, and when the call came ten years ago to stand as an MP, he considered it an ‘exercise in democracy’ rather than an act that would lead him to Westminster:
I always had an ambition of retiring when I was fifty and I did in 2003. Of course, when you retire early you have to decide what to do with your time and I thought: ‘I know, I’ll re-engage with politics’ – to be honest, mainly for social reasons, because I always liked the people.
Then in 2004 my local party said: ‘Have you considered running for Parliament?’
I thought about it for a week, then went: ‘Well, why not?’
In a seat where we were in third place, 19,000 behind, it was very much just an exercise in democracy.
In 2005 I got from 19,000 behind to 12,000 behind and up to second place.
In August 2005 my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer so I didn’t do much for another eighteen months. You realise what’s important and not important in life when your partner might be dying.
Fortunately she pulled through and is still with us. So, in early 2007 they said will you do it again, so I said OK – and then had a massive panic in October 2007 when it looked like Gordon Brown might call an election at very short notice, when we were poorly prepared, and I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t have got in at that point.
The party recognised this was a seat that with determined campaigning and me as the candidate, there was an outside chance we might do it.
I still didn’t think we might win until a week to go. I was still 12,000 behind remember.
I feel that my election in 2010 has shaken the roots a little bit, in that when is a seat safe? They assumed Redcar was a safe Labour seat until I won it.
If you’re a safe seat you get ignored. Labour in the north-east do take you for granted, there’s no doubt about it. Having lived in the area for thirty-odd years I was really keen to shake that and give them a fright.
Not having seriously expected to win until the very end of the campaign, election night 2010 proved to be an extraordinary occasion.
My daughter was at the count and my wife rang her up and said, ‘How’s it going?’ And she said, ‘Scary. He’s doing quite well.’
When I got there I was a thousand ahead and pretty quickly it became 3,000. It was pretty clear all the time I was there that I was going to win. That was an incredible feeling.
[We] went off and had champagne. At 7.30 in the morning my house still had people in it. [I] didn’t go to bed.
We’d already planned a party for the Friday night – win or lose, on the booze was our plan – so you can only imagine what that was like.
I also found out that night and subsequently that a huge lot of people won money on us. One guy who was there celebrating won £4,000 on me winning, so the bookmakers must have paid out quite a lot.
To be honest, it was actually a very humbling feeling to know that not only had I got 19,000 people voting for me – I only got 7,000 or 8,000 the last time – but that many people had decided they wanted things to change that badly.
That was the Friday night and then literally on the Saturday morning I’m on the train to London and straight into ‘Who runs the country?’
It was a positive feeling [but] this was where my wife would have different feelings. About two weeks after I was elected somebody said to her, ‘Your husband’s been elected as an MP, how do you feel about it?’
And she said, ‘Bereaved.’
We were a very close couple, we got married young and we spent a lot of time together because I was working part time, hardly at all by that time, and the two of us had worked really closely on the campaign, and suddenly I’m off.
After the euphoria … you soon felt that sense of responsibility that people had put a massive amount of faith in you and you couldn’t let them down.
It took me six months to settle in. Firstly I didn’t expect to get elected, secondly I didn’t expect to be involved in discussions about the government.
Because I hadn’t been involved in politics before, the process of politics, even the ways of debates, plus all the amazing procedures and traditions here [were] quite tough to get my head round.
I didn’t feel I was joining a team, even though I brought some pretty (I thought) good experience to the group. But it’s not really been called on when I thought it would have been more.
It’s a collection of individuals who all do the job differently, maybe the Lib Dems more so than other parties, who take pride in that independence. That was probably slightly surprising.
Soon after being elected, Mr Swales was appointed to the prestigious Public Accounts Committee, which watches over the government’s handling of the nation’s finances. It was here he took part in the committee’s memorable skewering of the bosses of Amazon, Google and Starbucks over their creative approaches to paying taxes.
He is also proud of his role in drilling into G4S, the Olympic security firm, over the amount of money it was paid from the public purse for the contract, a persistence that unearthed some of the ‘smoking gun’ evidence that ultimately helped accelerate the departure of chief executive Nick Buckles:
In Westminster the main thing I have done is for over four years I was on the Public Accounts Committee, the only accountant on the Accounts committee and the only Lib Dem as well. I feel we have made enormous headway there.
We have done great work and probably the most lasting work will be changing the climate on tax avoidance – Amazon, Google and Starbucks [being] the most visible and the most well known.
[But] probably my most unique contribution in the PAC was actually the G4S scandal around the Olympics and the cost, the contracting behind it.
They basically ripped off the taxpayer in my view. The ripples of that … in effect led to the resignation of the chief executive. I don’t say that with any great pride by the way, but it shows you how big the scandal was.
Mr Swales’s experience of being in the Commons’ chamber has been mixed. While he enjoyed taking part in key votes, he is less impressed by the set-piece weekly joust that is PMQs, particularly after being told by John Bercow, the Speaker, to shut up during a particularly rowdy session when he was ‘howled’ at by Labour MPs. He thinks Mr Bercow ‘probably’ owes him an apology, but goes on:
I don’t particularly blame him. I just think it’s a function of PMQs and the misbehaviour of so many MPs.
Can you blame one person for all of that? Not really. He’s only one in a room of 400 or 500 people. I look now and it’s quite notable that the Liberal Democrats are sitting there quite sensibly listening to the questions and the answers and there’s orchestrated yelling from various places from the Tory and Labour Party.
I find some of the tribal squabbling that goes on just pathetic and childish. PMQs does the political process no good. The public’s opinion of us is forged by things like that. It completely undermines the respect and appreciation of what MPs do. I don’t think it does anybody any good.
However, you do get wit sometimes.
I don’t see it in terms of low points. It’s such a vivid, fantastic experience that even things you might describe as lows I just reflect on and always count myself privileged to be here experiencing whatever it is.
Although he had been asked a few times to join the government on the lowest rung of the ladder, as a parliamentary private secretary, it is only now, as he is on the cusp of leaving, that Mr Swales has accepted.
A vacancy unexpectedly created by a colleague’s mini-rebellion led Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to invite him to serve as his PPS.
He says he wouldn’t have done it for anyone else – and although he insists it was a better use of his time to have been involved in committees and challenging the executive than in joining the government, he appears somewhat bruised by the failure of the leadership to make more of his talents:
To be honest I would have said no to anybody else but I get on well with Vince. It’s another couple of months of experience.
I’ve heard people say a mixture of all of that [serving on committees, speaking in the House and holding ministers to account] is better than the restrictions of being a junior minister.
When you add to that the freedom on occasion to vote how you want to, which I have done a few times, particularly I opposed the bedroom tax because I knew it would be bad for my constituents.
Right now I’m doing it for the experience and to help and because I will enjoy it, but I wouldn’t have wanted to do it right the way through.
One of the functions of a parliamentary system is there are only so many hours in the day. If you become a minister, something has got to give. For a lot of them what gives is bound to be the constituency and I wouldn’t have wanted to do that.