Feminist politician who helped make London Olympics a reality and a success

Baroness Jowell, who has died aged 70, was the Labour culture secretary who persuaded colleagues to support a London bid for the 2012 Olympics, oversaw preparations for the Games, then helped deliver a ‘‘happy and glorious’’ Olympics as a member of the organising committee.

Until Tessa Jowell took up the Olympic torch, she seemed set to be remembered as a conscientious frontbencher with feminist leanings and a background in social work. Yet the high profile she gained working with Lord Coe, Tony Blair and others to secure the Games had its downside.

Her second husband, David Mills, was a solicitor with controversial clients – notably Silvio Berlusconi – and the effect on her reputation of allegations against him led them to separate in 2006. Later it emerged that, around this time, their phones had been illegally hacked by the News of the World.

She was born Tessa Jane Helen Douglas Palmer, daughter of Kenneth Palmer, a chest consultant, and his wife Rosemary, a radiotherapist. She attended St Margaret’s School, Aberdeen, followed by Aberdeen and Edinburgh universities. She started work as a childcare officer in London in 1969, later becoming a psychiatric social worker.

She married sociologist Roger Jowell in 1970, and next year was elected to Camden council in London. She fought her first parliamentary seat, Ilford North, a Labour marginal, in 1978. The sitting MP had died and James Callaghan’s Labour government was not popular. Then, days after her selection, the tabloids revealed she was living with Mills, who had left his wife. The local party stood by her, its chairman declaring: ‘‘We are electing an MP, not the Archbishop of Canterbury’’, but Jowell lost the by-election, and a general election the following year.

In 1992 she was selected for Dulwich, which she won, and held comfortably until 2015.

She arrived at Westminster pigeonholed as a feminist, not least because of her longstanding friendship with Labour MP Harriet Harman. When Tony Blair’s reinvented ‘‘New’’ Labour swept to power in May 1997, she became minister of state for public health. She pressed for the legal smoking age to be raised to 18 and for action against obesity, commenting: ‘‘I walked 400 yards from one part of Birmingham to another, and the male life expectancy fell seven years.’’

When Blair – for whom she once said she would "jump under a bus" – sent troops into Iraq, she voiced concern that it would alienate women by reinforcing Labour’s ‘‘macho’’ image. She was at the eye of the storm over media coverage of the intervention, and the furore over No 10’s alleged ‘‘sexing-up’’ of the intelligence dossier on which it was based.

As secretary for culture, media and sport in 2003, she rejected a call from a select committee for laws to curb ‘‘unwarranted’’ press intrusion. After the revelations of phone-hacking surfaced years later, she took a far tougher line.

It was in November 1997 that her husband’s connections began causing embarrassment. In 2009 an Italian court sentenced Mills to 41⁄2 years’ imprisonment for accepting a bribe from Berlusconi to commit perjury in corruption trials in 1997 and 1998. His conviction and sentence were later quashed because the statute of limitations had expired.

Jowell could claim that the London Olympics were her idea. After the failure of an earlier application by Manchester, there was little head of steam for a London bid when she floated the idea in 2002. But she convinced her own officials, and then the Cabinet, that London had a chance ‘‘provided there are clear regenerative benefits’’.

She launched the bid in 2004, and the next year London pipped Paris in the International Olympic Commission’s crucial vote. She was appointed Olympics minister in 2006, retaining the brief when demoted by incoming prime minister Gordon Brown in

2007, and when she moved to the Cabinet Office in 2009.

She came under heavy political pressure early on as the cost to the taxpayer of staging the Olympics soared from the £2.47 million quoted in the bid documents to £9.3 billion. But by the time Brown’s government was defeated in 2010, staging the Games enjoyed broad public support.

When the Conservative-led coalition came to power, Jowell became shadow Olympics minister, remaining on the organising committee. Prior to the Games, she was made deputy mayor of the Olympic Village. In September 2012, two days after the close of the Paralympics, she returned to the back benches, having been made a dame.

She served as MP for Dulwich until the

2015 election, standing down with a life peerage in a bid to succeed Boris Johnson as mayor of London. Despite being the early front-runner, she was defeated for the Labour nomination by Sadiq Khan.

On her 70th birthday in September last year, her family announced that she was suffering from brain cancer. In January this year, looking frail and her voice cracking with emotion, she gave her final speech in the House of Lords.

She is survived by Mills, their son and daughter, and three stepchildren. – Telegraph Group