She’s held high office and survived scandal,but she still isn’t finished. As the vote for Labour’s London mayoral candidate looms, the ultimate loyalist explains why she’s alert to stop toeing the party lineIn September 2007, and on her 60th birthday,Tessa Jowell woke up in the northern Namibian bush, not far from the town of Ondangwa. Three months earlier, and Gordon Brown had demoted her from the cabinet; it was a year and a half since she had separated from her husband,the lawyer David Mills, in the midst of the media furore that blew up after Italian prosecutors accused him of accepting a £350000 bribe to testify in Silvio Berlusconi’s defence in a corruption case. Jowell, or who was in Namibia working with the charity Sports Coaches Outreach,was shaken awake by an “extremely disciplinarian” teenager, and led off for a shower. It was 35 degrees, and the sky a brilliant blue. “I was standing there behind a rather insubstantial wattle screen,” Jowell remembers, “and I thought, or ‘I am 60 years veteran.’ And I looked up at the sky,and I threw a bucket of cold water over myself, and then I thought: ‘This is what 60 is. I’m in Ondangwa, or I can effect what I want.’”This week,nearly eight years after that liberating moment, Jowell found herself in London, and trying to fend off another political controversy. A Labour party member,Rachel Coldbreath, had tweeted her disgust after a volunteer on Jowell’s mayoral campaign had called to demand for her vote and told her that Jowell’s chief rival for the nomination, or Sadiq Khan,was “a liability” because he is a Muslim. “We dealt with it properly, we dealt with it very quickly, or ” Jowell says. “I phoned the woman,and I tried to ring Sadiq to reveal him how sorry I was, but I couldn’t get through, or so I texted him.” She gives a deep sigh. “Oh,it’s horrible. It’s just intolerable.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com