Baroness Jowell
Culture Secretary who helped to secure the 2012 Olympics for Britain and make the Games 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 in London on September 17 1947, the daughter of Kenneth Palmer, a chest consultant, and his wife Rosemary, a radiotherapist. From St Margaret’s School, Aberdeen she read Psychology and Sociology at Aberdeen University, then took a diploma in Social Administration at Edinburgh University.
She started work as a child care officer in Lambeth in 1969, and after further training at Goldsmiths’ College became a psychiatric social worker at the Maudsley Hospital. Next she was assistant director of Mind. In 1986 she became director of Community Care Birmingham’s special action project, and a visiting fellow at the Policy Studies Institute and later the King’s Fund. From 1990 to 1992 she ran the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s community care programme.
She married the sociologist Roger Jowell in 1970, and next year was elected to Camden council. For her last two years on the council, 1984-86, she chaired the Association of Metropolitan Authorities’ social services committee.
Tessa Jowell fought her first seat, Ilford North, a Labour marginal, in 1978. The sitting MP had died and James Callaghan’s government was not popular. The intervention of the constituency’s former Conservative MP as an independent raised Labour’s hopes, but days after Tessa Jowell’s selection the tabloids revealed that 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 the Conservative Vivian Bendall won the by-election by 5,497 votes. In 1979 she lost even more heavily.
For the 1992 election she was selected for Dulwich, where the Conservative Gerald Bowden had a majority of just 180. She took the seat by 2,056 votes and – after boundary changes – held it comfortably until 2015.
She arrived at Westminster pigeonholed as a feminist, not least because of her long-standing friendship with Harriet Harman. (She was one of the few colleagues to back Ms Harman during the furore over her sending her son to a grammar school).
After Blair’s election as leader in 1994, Tessa Jowell was appointed a whip. Next year, having promoted a Bill guaranteeing the mentally ill “decent housing, income, a chance to work and access to specialist support”, she was made a health spokesperson, campaigning against the closure of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the rundown of Guy’s.
When 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.”
From 1998, when she became a privy councillor, she was also Minister for Women, keeping the portfolio when in 1999 she became Minister of State for Employment.
In 2001 she replaced Chris Smith as Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport. She declared: “I have never met or spoken to Rupert Murdoch”, and questioned Labour’s acceptance of £100,000 from Richard Desmond, publisher of the Daily Express.
When Blair – for whom she once said she would “jump under a bus” – sent troops into Iraq, Tessa Jowell 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 Number 10’s alleged “sexing-up” of the intelligence dossier on which it was based.
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.
At the time, television caused her more concerns. She called for a “viewers’ revolt” over the number of reality shows. She blocked the BBC’S original plans for its digital youth channel BBC3 because they differed little from commercial offerings, and imposed extra conditions on BBC News 24 after it incurred the same criticisms.
Tessa Jowell was responsible for several landmark items of legislation, starting with the Communications Act of 2003 which established the media regulator Ofcom. Two years later came a Licensing Act which lifted most restrictions on pub opening hours but established Alcohol Disorder Zones. And in 2007 she introduced a new governance system for the BBC, the BBC Trust replacing the established board of governors.
Another major measure, the Gambling Act, embroiled her in a long-running controversy over “super-casinos”. First proposed in 2004, ministers saw them as a means of regenerating a run-down inner city or resort, a view contested by the churches and the Daily Mail. An exasperated Tessa Jowell said she had gone in weeks from “the nation’s nanny” to “gangster’s moll”.
The decision on where to site the first super-casino was shunted off to an independent commission which, despite the claims of Blackpool, opted for east Manchester. The plan was finally killed, to the relief of most, by Gordon Brown.
Tessa 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 the incoming Brown to Paymaster General and Minister for London in 2007, and when she moved to the Cabinet Office (regaining a seat in Cabinet) 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 Coalition came to power, Tessa 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 with a DBE.
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.
It was in November 1997 that her husband’s connections began causing embarrassment. Lord Nolan called for an inquiry into the finances of ministers’ family members after Mills’s links with Formula 1 were disclosed when news broke of Bernie Ecclestone’s £1million donation to Labour and F1’s exemption from the ban on tobacco sponsorship.
The year before, the Serious Fraud Office had raided the London premises of a company Mills was involved with as part of an Italian investigation into Silvio Berlusconi’s offshore activities.
Tessa Jowell was investigated by the Cabinet Secretary Gus O’donnell over the allegations surrounding her husband because of a potential conflict of interest. He decided that “it is the Prime Minister, not me, who, constitutionally, is the right and proper person to take a view on matters arising based on the Ministerial Code”, and Blair absolved her of any wrongdoing.
The stories refused to go away, and in March 2006 it was announced that Mills and his wife, who had homes in London and near Shipston-on-stour in Warwickshire, had separated. They did not divorce, hoping they could “restore their relationship over time”; in 2012 Tessa Jowell said they had “reached a state of stability which I never thought possible”.
In 2009 an Italian court sentenced Mills to four and a half years’ imprisonment for accepting a bribe from Berlusconi to commit perjury in corruption trials in 1997 and 1998. Italy’s Appeal Court upheld his conviction and sentence, but in February 2010 the Cassation Court quashed the conviction because the statute of limitations had expired – the “bribe” having been paid a year earlier than the prosecution had alleged.
Mills was ordered to pay €250,000 compensation to the Italian prime minister’s office for “damaging its reputation”. His wife declared: “Although we are separated, I have never doubted his innocence”.
After Labour’s defeat in 2010 Tessa Jowell supported David Miliband’s campaign for the Labour leadership, then remained in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet. Out of Parliament, she lectured at Harvard University’s department of health policy and management.
From her time as Culture Secretary, she worked closely with survivors of the July 2005 bombings – which took place the day after London won the right to stage the Olympics.
On her 70th birthday in September last year, Tessa Jowell’s 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 – a moving appeal for her fellow peers to support an international initiative to share resources, research and new treatments for the disease, winning a standing ovation in a breach of parliamentary protocol.
Her marriage to Roger Jowell was dissolved in 1977. She married David Mills in 1979. He survives her with their son and daughter and three stepchildren.
Tessa Jowell, born September 17 1947, died May 12 2018