She was my friend. It was one of the great privileges of my life to know Tessa Jowell well, and one I shared with so many. At the dinner table, at the tea party to celebrate her introduction to the House of Lords, at book launches, at Labour conferences, she was always surrounded by friends, making new ones, and bringing together previously unconnected members of her prodigious circle of affection and affinity.

When Hashi Mohamed, the barrister and broadcaster, and I met at a conference in Warwick last November, our very first instinct was to take a selfie and send it to our mutual friend Tessa. She replied delightedly, promising “to plot and plan” with us when she returned from her next round of cancer treatment in Cologne. Even afflicted by a brain tumour, glioblastoma multiforme, she always looked to the future, to the next, to the possible.

Grief breeds aphasia: we cling to platitudes so we can keep talking at all. But we owe it to Tessa to speak of her with precision as well as love; to honour the grit and detail of her achievements as much as the luminous decency that underpinned them.

Tessa Jowell, former Labour cabinet minister, dies aged 70 Read more

I first encountered her as a fellow member of the Millennium Commission, a lottery-distributing fund, and witnessed, in her conduct as chair, the steely pragmatism that coursed through her impeccably amiable manner. She understood the necessity of getting the job done – no small task when the job in question was selling the much-derided Dome. At the time, the task seemed next to impossible. Today, the O2 is one of the most successful entertainment complexes in the country.

For Tessa, progress was never an abstraction to be pursued according to an ideological rule-book. As she observed in her speech to mark the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 attacks: “The danger comes from any belief system which is closed, which provides to its believer the single answer to everything, whose adherents can’t stand outside their system to ask themselves the question, ‘Is what I am doing in the cause I believe in actually right?’”

Fastidious in manners, she was resolutely tough in her practicality. In this spirit of dedication, she reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s Nell in the short story Moral Disorder: “She would turn into a woman others came to for advice. She would be called in emergencies. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality …”

In the implementation of public health policy, the creation of Sure Start, the establishment of Ofcom, or the coordination of the government’s support for those bereaved or harmed by the 7/7 bombings, she always grasped that good intentions, though essential, were not enough; that the better angels of our nature do not take flight without persistence, collaboration and robust leadership.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in her ministerial stewardship of London’s campaign for the 2012 Olympics, of the fiendishly complex preparations and infrastructural work, and of the Games themselves. She was deeply affected by the cruel proximity of the announcement of the London bid’s success in 2005, and the terrorist attack upon the same city the very next day.

That juxtaposition exemplified for her the fundamental dichotomy of human behaviour and the obstacles that confront those who believe in the common good and the pursuit of decency. If we shun despair – as we ought to – we must undertake a permanent struggle against entropy, indifference and bigotry. “The decency and civility which normally prevail,” she remarked, “are not a solid impermeable layer.”

So, too, she embodied hope rather than naivety. When she phoned friends last year to tell them about her illness, she was full of both optimism and realism, determined to seek whatever treatment she could find, to deploy her voice and political skills to improve the lot of other cancer patients, and, above all, to relish her time with her adored family – not least the grandchild, Ottie, she had helped to deliver weeks before her diagnosis.



The notion of cancer as a “battle” is both absurd and morally contemptible, implying, as it does, that the illness is a test of character or virtue. That said, Tessa did declare war upon cancer as a scourge upon humanity, with remarkable consequences. She and her daughter, Jess Mills, founded the organisation Adaptive Collaborative Treatments (ACT), dedicated to more flexible care, greater access to experimental trials and enhanced global cooperation.

As she put it in her speech in the House of Lords in January: “For what would every cancer patient want? To know that the best, the latest science was being used – wherever in the world it was developed, whoever began it.” In the same speech – which inspired a standing ovation – she observed that “while doctors look at the big picture, we can all be part of the human-sized picture”.

Play Video 4:30 Tessa Jowell: former Labour MP delivers moving speech on brain cancer diagnosis – video

This was not only a statement of fact; it was an injunction to action. No politician I have known better understood the relationship between the individual and society, the connective tissue that binds them, and how remorselessly it must be nurtured.

In the case of cancer treatment, we all face a straightforward choice. One of the world’s leading biomedical scientists told me last week that the disease as we presently understand it can be eradicated within 10 or 20 years – if there is the political will to fund the research and, more to the point, the radical new treatments that are already forthcoming. There is astonishing wealth in this country, waiting to be taxed to fund this and other forms of health and social care in our transforming society. The time is coming when we must ask: do we seriously value our property more than our fellow human beings?

Such are the tough questions posed by mortality. One of Tessa’s favourite quotations was from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Now that she has made the crossing, let this be her message of consolation, and her challenge to the rest of us.