Mo Mowlam sealed her fate by wanting to continue her role inNorthern Ireland and later refusing the health portfolio, she tellsFrank Millar, London Editor
The location for our interview, Mo's back garden, seems to say it all. Gone the walled splendour of the private grounds at the queen's official residence in Northern Ireland. A faded memory, now, the elegant dining rooms and famous house parties. A bitter one too, plainly, about the security detail suddenly withdrawn from the woman who credits herself with splitting the republican movement.
Mo Mowlam has lived dangerously. Early in New Labour's first term the polls found her more popular than Tony Blair. By its end she was gone - out of office, out of parliament - exiled to write a vengeful tale of a vicious whispering campaign, orchestrated by Number 10, to destroy her political reputation, secure her demise, and, finally, replace her with Peter Mandelson.
For all the inevitable focus on back-stabbing and rivalry at the Court of King Tony, Mo insists her real mission is to tell people what happened during her momentous time in Northern Ireland. And she achieves this with a highly accessible book likely to appeal to those more interested in the broad sweep of history than the detail of unionist, nationalist or republican theology.
Her place in the history books is secure. Not even her most determined detractors can deny Mo Mowlam's vital role in the events leading to the Belfast Agreement. Indeed some insiders argue her most crucial contribution came during the dying days of the Major government, when few in nationalist Ireland dared believe - even as they hoped - that an incoming Labour government would prioritise Northern Ireland after 18 years in opposition.
By April 1998 however - as Mowlam readily acknowledges - the process was being driven by the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern. If she wasn't entirely "out of the loop" her book makes clear she wasn't exactly in it either. Wouldn't the high-point of the agreement have seemed a sensible point at which to depart? And shouldn't she have obliged Mr Blair, in any event, by going when he clearly felt the need of an alternative Secretary of State who might better reassure a bitterly divided unionist community?
"First point: I didn't feel excluded from the talks. Many people said I was, and I was in the final stages, but I quite understand it because if they had me they would have had to have had an Irish minister, then when you get to four or five it doesn't make an easy negotiation. So I had no trouble with that. And what I did, which I think was important, was to walk round constantly reassuring people that they weren't the only ones not in the loop". But on the second point: doesn't experience show that prime ministers need different Secretaries of State for different purposes at different times?
"Yes, but I don't think the period I was in had yet finished. We were moving on but the unionists were still having trouble and I think that I understood them well enough that we could have made progress."
Whatever about the unionists - wasn't it madness for Mo (and Frank Dobson) to effectively scupper Mr Blair's subsequent reshuffle by signalling they wanted to stay put? A civil servant at the time remarked: "You only do that once to your prime minister and get away with it." Isn't it true to say that Mo, in effect, sealed her own fate? "You can say it like that if you want, yes I suppose you can. I sealed my own fate by wanting to continue at a job I thought I could do more at and I thought I had done a fair bit at it already. I sealed my fate by not, if that is how you perceive it, going to Health. But I didn't feel that having done a really hard job in Northern Ireland that I wanted to go into an equally hard job in London. It was a nightmare, an enormous bureaucracy. I didn't want to go from one exhausting job to another." The book recalls the famous "Movation" upstaging Tony Blair's Labour Party conference speech as the point at which Number 10 might have started to turn against her, thinking her too big for her boots.
Is it possible she did overestimate or overreach herself? "In what way?" she demands back. Well - perhaps in the sense that she had decided she should be Foreign Secretary and that no other post would do? Mo insists not: "I said I was interested in Foreign but I recognised I had to do something else first. I didn't think I could just jump into Foreign, that would have been political naiveté in the first order which I do not suffer from." She says she would have taken Defence, "which would have been a marginally easier time than health". And she dismisses as "bullshit" suggestions that her subsequent spell at the Cabinet Office was "a barren time". However, she also realised that many others had their eye on the Foreign Office and began to think she wouldn't get it even if she hung around.
By her own account, at least one occasion found Mo - while still Secretary of State for Northern Ireland - in discussion with a former minister and a journalist about who might replace the prime minister. There were also recurring rumours (which must have reached the ears of Number 10) that she could be critical of Mr Blair during dinner parties in Belfast.
Does she think she might have crossed the line between her celebrated openness and indiscretion? Emphatically not, she replies, because the conversation in question was private and "not for public consumption". As for those dinner parties at Stormont: "I didn't brief against the prime minister. There was a lot of criticism about him.
"Occasionally I defended, other times I didn't bother. That was what happened." Getting to the bottom of this alienation between Mowlam and Blair is not easy. Many people might find it extraordinary that she turned down what would have been a promotion to Health (and from a prime minister whose henchmen she thought plotting to finish-her-off). Indeed, given her famed emotional literacy and that touchy-feely style, the health post might have seemed made for her. It surely isn't true she turned it down because she thought Gordon Brown (who she suggests Mr Blair might have to shuffle out of the Treasury) would have denied her the necessary resources? Mo concedes she did on occasion question whether the Treasury would be willing to meet the funding requirements of the NHS, and has revisited her assessment of the Chancellor in light of the recent budget: "It was a very good budget and I think he has done a very good job. That wasn't my criticism of Gordon - it was the problems with him and Tony which I think didn't help government." Then she comes back to it: "The overwhelming reason was I didn't want to go from the frying pan into the fire, which is how it was seen."
But does this not bring us to the question of her illness and whether she was, in truth, fully fit. Aren't all cabinet jobs difficult and demanding, I ask, as she makes as if to throw her glass of water over me. Having asserted for the umpteenth time that her health is fine, Mo continues: "They are all difficult but I think Health and Northern Ireland are two of the hardest. That's my view and I didn't want to go from one difficult one into another difficult one. Apart from anything else I wanted to give my brain a rest."
Momentum by Mo Mowlam is published by Hodder and Stoughton - price £20.