She mesmerised us with her persuasiveness, caring too much to waste time being tribal
To the millions who witnessed Tessa Jowell’s final campaign for fellow cancer sufferers it was obvious that she was heroically brave. This morning there will be plenty of testimonials to some of her other virtues: her kindness, her warmth, her empathy; and rightly so.
But I can tell you that Tessa was also possessed, in abundance, of the supreme political gift: an uncanny power of persuasion.
She would beam her effulgent and irresistible smile. She would fix you with her china blue gaze; and at the same time she would lightly tap or prod you or make physical contact so brief you hardly noticed, and you suddenly found yourself psychologically conditioned to agree with whatever she was about to say .... And then, as if discharging some deep and intimate confidence, she would whisper something like: “You know, Tony really is a genius” or “£9.3billion is cheap for the Olympics” and whatever your political beliefs – or whatever the facts – you would find yourself wanting to nod in assent.
No one has been more effective in reaching out, literally and figuratively, to those from other parties; and I saw her use her gifts first in the interests of Labour and then of the whole country. After Blair became leader of the opposition we heard reports of huge numbers joining New Labour, and one evening in 1995 I went down to darkest Dulwich where Tessa, then the MP, was spreading the gospel. I found a packed room where nice sensible people were being mesmerised by the sweetness of her middle-of-the-road-ism.
She was signing up everyone: doctors, lawyers, bankers, the former ambassador to Bogotá and the beauty editor of the Sunday Express. Mildly shaken, I foresaw a revolution, and two years later it came about in Blair’s landslide victory.
He made her culture secretary and she was indispensable to London’s success in securing the 2012 Olympics. She charmed the sometimes venal hierarchs of the National Olympic committees. She winkled cash from a dubious Gordon Brown; and with her signature generosity she made sure at every stage to involve the Tory opposition, so that by the time of the Games themselves, when the Conservatives were back in power, they had become a great national project in which any attempt at party political point scoring would have been simple bad manners.
Of course there were cock-ups; you just didn’t notice them because Tessa cared too passionately about the country’s success to waste time on partisanship. She could be steely and efficient in the chair at meetings. I remember her once ticking me off for rolling my eyes at a colleague.
She also believed in having fun, and I can hear her laughter as we cooked things up together on the Olympic Board. Without her we would never have built the Arcelormittal Orbit, now proving its detractors wrong with its moneymaking intestinal slide.
Tessa did huge amounts for London, for sport, for women in politics, for cancer patients and for the country as a whole. Above all she showed how much you can achieve in politics without being remotely tribal.