physical in that way.
What I’m going to do is work as hard as I can for Labour to win the general election and then … the mayoral process kicks off and I’ve made it very clear that I will be a candidate.
What are your thoughts for future MPs?
Notice people on the way up because you’ll hear from them on the way down.
It’s very easy to mix only with the people who are in the papers, who are the rising stars, but actually everybody here is a representative – they were selected, they were chosen as a representative of their constituency. And there’s endless wisdom available.
***
Dame Tessa Jowell: the full story
Throughout her life, Dame Tessa has been compelled to do her best to help other people, an obligation she says has at times been ‘inconvenient’. Although her parents were not political, their strong values and desire to see the best in people have in her taken the form of a constant niggling drive to help others, from becoming a social worker and mental health campaigner to entering politics as first a councillor and then an MP. It remains to this day, most recently in her decision to stand for Labour’s nomination for London Mayor.
Her first political activism was born of her work with the newly arrived West Indian immigrant community in south London:
I knew how much I could do one to one with people to make them feel more optimistic about their lives, helping with practical things that could make their lives more bearable or even substantially better.
It took me to thinking, ‘I can do a lot one on one but the solutions these people need in their lives are the big solutions that only politics can bring.’ So that’s what focused my mind on standing for Parliament.
[I was] always Labour. I believed that the world was unfair to a lot of people. That’s an absolutely defining sense that you go into politics to deal with what is otherwise the inevitable course of events in the lives of so many people who are born and their life chances are handed out like vouchers. And you can change that.
Dame Tessa’s first election outing, at a by-election in Ilford North in 1978, was an ordeal.
Although the seat had been Labour, the country was on the brink of turning to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party as a solution to the malaise it had become mired in during the 1970s. Essex in particular was ripe for the shift from left to right, as aspirant, young east Londoners moved out to the suburbs in order to better themselves.
The by-election proved a particularly nasty one; politics was becoming polarised and Dame Tessa was attacked by both the far right National Front and, as a pro-choice believer, the anti-abortion lobby:
It was probably the three worst weeks of my life. It was so cold, so dark – it was awful.
I could just see the Labour vote bleeding away. I knew we were losing, and I knew we were losing not just in this by-election but we were losing generally. We were actually losing the country.
Despite being ‘put off’ politics by the by-election experience, Dame Tessa’s now familiar sense of duty led her to stand again at the 1979 general election largely because she felt ‘a sense of obligation’ to the activists in the Ilford North constituency.
The result was the same, but she learned a lesson that would stay with her throughout her time in politics, and helps to explain her steadfast support for Tony Blair’s project to modernise the Labour Party more than a decade later through the mechanism of New Labour. ‘People were not getting a sense of aspiration, of positive optimism about their future, and that’s why I hope always my politics are the politics of aspiration, ambition, possibility and the future,’ she says.
As the Thatcher government roared on, Dame Tessa sat out much of the opposition years, content raising her family and working at the mental health charity Mind, while Labour took a lurch to the left.
And then, as the 1992 election approached, that niggle
What I’m going to do is work as hard as I can for Labour to win the general election and then … the mayoral process kicks off and I’ve made it very clear that I will be a candidate.
What are your thoughts for future MPs?
Notice people on the way up because you’ll hear from them on the way down.
It’s very easy to mix only with the people who are in the papers, who are the rising stars, but actually everybody here is a representative – they were selected, they were chosen as a representative of their constituency. And there’s endless wisdom available.
***
Dame Tessa Jowell: the full story
Throughout her life, Dame Tessa has been compelled to do her best to help other people, an obligation she says has at times been ‘inconvenient’. Although her parents were not political, their strong values and desire to see the best in people have in her taken the form of a constant niggling drive to help others, from becoming a social worker and mental health campaigner to entering politics as first a councillor and then an MP. It remains to this day, most recently in her decision to stand for Labour’s nomination for London Mayor.
Her first political activism was born of her work with the newly arrived West Indian immigrant community in south London:
I knew how much I could do one to one with people to make them feel more optimistic about their lives, helping with practical things that could make their lives more bearable or even substantially better.
It took me to thinking, ‘I can do a lot one on one but the solutions these people need in their lives are the big solutions that only politics can bring.’ So that’s what focused my mind on standing for Parliament.
[I was] always Labour. I believed that the world was unfair to a lot of people. That’s an absolutely defining sense that you go into politics to deal with what is otherwise the inevitable course of events in the lives of so many people who are born and their life chances are handed out like vouchers. And you can change that.
Dame Tessa’s first election outing, at a by-election in Ilford North in 1978, was an ordeal.
Although the seat had been Labour, the country was on the brink of turning to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party as a solution to the malaise it had become mired in during the 1970s. Essex in particular was ripe for the shift from left to right, as aspirant, young east Londoners moved out to the suburbs in order to better themselves.
The by-election proved a particularly nasty one; politics was becoming polarised and Dame Tessa was attacked by both the far right National Front and, as a pro-choice believer, the anti-abortion lobby:
It was probably the three worst weeks of my life. It was so cold, so dark – it was awful.
I could just see the Labour vote bleeding away. I knew we were losing, and I knew we were losing not just in this by-election but we were losing generally. We were actually losing the country.
Despite being ‘put off’ politics by the by-election experience, Dame Tessa’s now familiar sense of duty led her to stand again at the 1979 general election largely because she felt ‘a sense of obligation’ to the activists in the Ilford North constituency.
The result was the same, but she learned a lesson that would stay with her throughout her time in politics, and helps to explain her steadfast support for Tony Blair’s project to modernise the Labour Party more than a decade later through the mechanism of New Labour. ‘People were not getting a sense of aspiration, of positive optimism about their future, and that’s why I hope always my politics are the politics of aspiration, ambition, possibility and the future,’ she says.
As the Thatcher government roared on, Dame Tessa sat out much of the opposition years, content raising her family and working at the mental health charity Mind, while Labour took a lurch to the left.
And then, as the 1992 election approached, that niggle
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