Quotes from Mo

Here is a selection of quotes from Mo Mowlam

I hate the bloody things and have to carry two around with me because I kept losing one.On her wigs.

Chuck out the red plush and put up the royals in a Conran

-style People’s Palace.

On the Royal family, August 1994.

You bloody well get on and do it. Otherwise I’ll head-butt you.

To Gerry Adams

Fuck off.

To Ian Paisley in 1997

‘Babe’ - pet name for Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, as revealed in conversations bugged by MI5

My ideology is not weighty. It’s the real life of people that needs changing. I don’t believe in great revolutionary possibilities but evolution, which is why I’m about what I’m about. I’m much more driven by results than by ideology.

In a Guardian interview in 1998

Being a woman has been a big plus in this job because I can get away with things that men can’t.

I can be direct, I can cajole in a way that men can’t and I’m much less stuffy than the people who have gone before me.

I’m not male, I don’t have an accent and I’m of the same class as most of the people I deal with.

But, most of all, I like people and I like talking to them.

To the Mirror in 1999

I think this was the point when my

relationship with Tony began to get rocky.

Recalling her standing ovation at the 1998 Labour conference in her memoirs, Momentum

I was no longer a comrade-in-arms fighting for the same causes.

In fact, I was beginning to feel more like a bag of potatoes that they just wanted to dump somewhere so Peter Mandelson could go to Northern Ireland.

In her memoirs, 2002