So why did the former minister tell local party members last week that she is standing down at the general election? Could she be clearing the way for a run at the mayoralty in 2016? A poll for the Standard last month gave her a big lead over potential Labour rivals.
“There will be a point in the next 15 months when I decide,” Jowell says. “You have to leave yourself open to possibilities. I’d like to just draw breath.”
It is a big decision. Jowell is 66: if she won the 2016 mayoral race she would be 72 at the end of her first term. But she exudes energy: “I’ve still got many years ahead.”
She reveals that she had been thinking about bowing out for almost a year, planning the next stage of her life.
After a career that took her from social worker to senior jobs at mental health charity Mind and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, standing for Parliament was “an on-balance decision”, she says. “My children were young.”
With Labour’s victory in 1997 came a job as a health minister; from 2001-07 she was Culture Secretary. It was there, in 2002, that she began her journey as the Olympics’ greatest champion: “I made it clear that I didn’t want bigger jobs after we’d won it.” Along with founding the Sure Start programme, it is among her proudest achievements.
But her decade of making London 2012 happen ended with the closing ceremony last year. Now, she says, “I want to expose myself to different experiences and challenges.” In April and June next year she will work with African finance and health ministers at the Harvard School of Public Health’s ministerial development programme. She is also chair of CitySafe, a network of 300 “safe havens” where young people can seek public refuge in difficult situations.
Last year she gave half her £200,000 hacking settlement from the News of the World to the charity: she was hacked in 2006 during her split from husband David Mills, Silvio Berlusconi’s former lawyer (she and Mills are reconciled, though they live apart).
For now, she is busy as an MP; the slavery case in her constituency is absorbing much time. And she reiterates: “I’m not a decided candidate. The main goal is 2015, and first trying to take councils in Harrow, Croydon and Redbridge next year.”
And after that? “I don’t know about going straight from being an MP to being Mayor,” she says. “It’s a question of the skill set.” But she is keen to emphasise her credentials: “I’ve been the executive director of a government department with a large budget and staff. Making big, difficult decisions doesn’t carry fear for me.”
Speculation about Labour’s 2016 candidate was stoked by a meeting this week, a hustings in all but name, with a panel of four potential challengers: ex-ministers Andrew Adonis and David Lammy, Hackney MP Diane Abbott and Jowell (the other mooted runner, shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan, could not attend).
Labour’s candidate will be chosen by primary, something Jowell has long urged to give Londoners the widest choice. Candidates on the party’s Right, like her, also stand to benefit from a selection process freed from the lock of the party’s Left-dominated activists and unions.
Boris Johnson has given clear indications that he will stand down in 2016, with no clear Tory successor. There are already signs of complacency on the Left: “The chances are that Labour will win,” said journalist Polly Toynbee last Sunday.
Jowell vehemently rejects such assumptions: “Labour needs to show it’s hungry and has humility. It will have to earn the right to govern London. There’s nothing pre-ordained about Labour winning in 2016.”
This is a glimpse of Jowell’s steel: she may have a reputation as one of the nicest people in Westminster, but you don’t spend more than a decade in high-level politics without being tough — and staying hungry.
And yet it is her warmth that shines through. In 2001, as she went into the Cabinet meeting after the 9/11 attacks, Alastair Campbell asked her, “you can deal with grief, can’t you?” So she became the link with the bereaved families, and then Minister for Humanitarian Assistance (in addition to her Culture job). It was a role which continued through the 2002 Bali bombings and 7/7.
We sit in her office talking about the latter for a long time: for Jowell, the contrast between the euphoria of London’s Olympic victory in Singapore on July 6, 2005 and the attacks the next day was especially stark.
“We’d been out for a celebratory lunch and were being driven back. My private secretary took a phone call and said, ‘I’d better just mention that there’s been an incident on the Tube — it’s thought to be an electrical fault’.” Minutes later the phone rang again: two more explosions.
“We got back to the hotel and my private secretary had another call and came over and said, ‘This is a terrorist attack on London. We have to go’.”
Jowell and Ken Livingstone were placed under guard and raced to the airport — where a fuel leak kept them waiting on the tarmac for five agonising hours. She arrived home to meetings with emergency workers, survivors and the families of the dead. One of her daughter’s best friend’s mother died in Tavistock Square.
Jowell still talks about it with difficulty: her blue eyes keep filling with tears. “I can’t forget the looks on the faces of the forensics officers coming out of the tunnels where they had been scraping human remains off the walls,” she says. “What you remember is the tenderness and care of everyone who was charged with providing help for people who had suffered unimaginable horror.”
On the first anniversary, she and Livingstone laid flowers at King’s Cross at 8.50am, the time of the first bomb. Her closeness to Livingstone, despite the gulf between their politics, is one example of Jowell’s remarkable ability to build coalitions. She chaired his campaigns in 2008 and 2012: “Ken can be difficult but he was a brilliant mayor.”
Yet she is generous towards Johnson too: “I have tremendous affection for Boris and I understand why he so captures the zeitgeist of London.
“Boris is a Tory and I am Labour: obviously we disagree pretty fundamentally about a number of issues. But I don’t want be in the business of whacking Boris, because he was chosen by the people of London. There were times during the Olympics when Boris was a great ally to me.”
Jowell cautions that we should “never underestimate the extent to which Ken defined the mayoralty” — yet her instinctive bridge-building is a very different approach to the big man mould of either Ken or Boris.
“She would draw together a hell of a team,” says one Labour shadow minister. She tells me: “As Mayor of London I will build a coalition of voters across London.” It’s an innocent slip of tense. Still, I can’t help feeling that after 2015 the capital will not have seen the last of Tessa Jowell.
The political interview: Tessa Jowell is ready for her next challenge
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