Recent events in Northern Ireland have raised the profile of Jane Kennedy, the Security Minister. Róisín Ingle writes about a woman whose apparant naïvety belies a toughness.
The recent violence in north Belfast provided Jane Kennedy with the professional highlight of her eight months as Security Minister in Northern Ireland. She says watching the riots from a police Land-Rover - it was petrol-bombed at one point - gave her a new understanding of how officers operate in places like Ardoyne.
"You realise we send police officers out to protect the homes of innocent families and then they come under attack," she says. "It was the best hour I have spent here so far."
The invitation to be a bystander while balls of fire and stones rained overhead came from one of the mobile units of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Earlier, the Minister met police officers and took the opportunity to ask them a few pressing questions about the riots. Such as, why don't you make more arrests during the disturbances? The assembled officers threw their hands up in the air and admonished Kennedy, telling her that she didn't understand the real difficulties they faced.
She is more than happy to relay the irritated reaction of the police force to her gentle interrogation. The trip to Ardoyne made her understand things a little better and she was stunned, as she has been many times since she arrived last June, by how well orchestrated the violence was.
"What kind of creature," the MP for Liverpool, Wavertree, laments, "collects bottles puts acid in the bottles and then hands them to children to throw?"
She arrived in Northern Ireland, the first female security minister and only the third woman to hold a ministerial post at the Northern Ireland Office, last June during a spate of arson attacks on churches.
"For an English woman who had followed the situation from a distance it was a culture shock. I continue to be shocked by the depth of the bitterness and the continuing violence," she says.
Her tendency to articulate this "isn't it awful?" incredulity has irritated some in Northern Ireland politics. Where the former Security Minister Adam Ingram was robust, always getting his retaliation in first, Jane Kennedy is softly spoken and easily shocked.
Detractors say that Kennedy comes across as being "way, way out of her depth" or "lightweight". She "couldn't run a nursery", quipped one unimpressed commentator.
Publicly, Billy Hutchinson of the PUP has been most vocal in his criticism. When Kennedy refused a request from the Protestant community for a permanent security gate on the Ardoyne Road in October he called for her to step down.
"The woman does not understand the problems in Northern Ireland, she should resign and go back to Liverpool," he said. He did not wish to elaborate further for this article.
Sinn Féin's Michelle Gildernew, MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone, thought that with the departure of Adam Ingram, with whom she had a dire political relationship, things couldn't get any worse.
"I had high hopes for a woman getting into such a senior position but I have found Jane Kennedy to be totally ineffectual. I have challenged her to take action on many issues including the intense army activity in my constituency but she has been ineffective," she said.
Kennedy, aged 43, does not appear unduly affected by her critics.
"They are entitled to their opinion but I have gone out of my way to engage with the likes of Billy and to bring my own perception to the situation. The portfolio was already well developed before I came - so I am not coming to it cold - and I am very well briefed by talented officials. But I have also made it my business to go out and have a look to better understand the situation," she says.
Not everyone chooses to denigrate Kennedy, one of the highest profile of Blair's Babes. SDLP sources who have been in close contact with her describe as "high handed" those commentators who have dismissed the Minister after only eight months in the job.
"It is one of the most difficult portfolios to get to grips with, there are very few people who could find their feet in such a short time," said one. "We have found her to be very accessible and a good listener. She may not always heed you but she hears you at least. Those people who are judging her are being very premature".
Jeffrey Donaldson of the UUP says Kennedy should listen more to people on the ground and less to her civil servants, but she is "a very capable politician who has been thrown in at the deep end". And while Ian Paisley jnr of the DUP is a staunch opponent of British government policies, such as the reform of the RUC and the scaling back of security forces, he says criticism of Kennedy is "completely unfair".
"Just because someone is softly spoken doesn't mean that she isn't doing her job properly. She is approachable and frank. You might not always get what you want from Jane Kennedy but you get an honest answer," he said. "What has always been important in the job of security minister here has not been personality but policy. While I might not agree with those policies, if I look at it objectively she is more than capable of doing that job."
That job wasn't exactly top of Kennedy's shopping list of political appointments. When she got the phone call informing her she was to take up her current post, she said thank you very much and "swallowed hard".
"I sobered up very quickly and thought this is a serious job, it wasn't something I ever thought I would be asked to do but it is a tremendous challenge and an opportunity." She says she is well supported at Westminster for her efforts, with fellow MPs "patting me on the back".
Kennedy was elected to parliament in 1992 after she and others had helped rid the Labour Party of the Militant Tendency, a hard left group which had a stranglehold on the party in Liverpool in the 1980s.
Dubbed Jane of Ark, she compiled a 150-page dossier which blew the whistle on the dubious practices of the militants. When one of them was forbidden by the party from standing in the constituency called Liverpool Broadgreen, she was selected and romped to victory with a majority she built on in the two subsequent elections.
At school in Darlington Kennedy was Head Girl.
"I loved school," gushes the eldest of five children, who had a "typically boisterous family life". Her father worked as an engineer at Windscale, a debate the MP follows with interest now.
After dropping out of a chemistry course in Liverpool University, she got married and began working as a care assistant in a young people's home. After becoming involved with public workers union NUPE, she joined the Labour Party making her mark as the scourge of the left.
Becoming an MP turned her life upside down. "You are absent from home three or four days a week, it is difficult to live with, the politician's life takes its toll on the family and sadly my marriage ended up five years later with an amicable divorce," she said. She has two grown up sons from her marriage to Malcolm Kennedy, now a Liverpool councillor, and is currently in another relationship.
She clearly thrives on the cut and thrust of politics, enjoying stints as the opposition whip and, before her move here, an appointment as parliamentary secretary at the Lord Chancellor's Department. She was the first woman and first non-lawyer to be appointed to ministerial rank in the department.
Away from the office Kennedy is a keen walker and horse rider, and she once trained dogs to competition level. The Barbara Woodhouse of the Labour Party takes holidays with her partner in France. (She was once the Deirdre Barlow of the party having, in the past, a fondness for unfeasibly large spectacles.)
To date, Kennedy has failed to make much of an impression on the locals, but her supporters say give her time. The soft voice belies an inner toughness.
"It is a bruising process," she says of politics and her former stomping ground of trade unionism. "The people who put themselves forward are tough, they have to be."