262. Uncool

In the early years of Blair’s premiership, his supporters liked to refer to Britain as ‘Cool Britannia’, in a play on the title of the song ‘Rule Britannia’. Last week, we talked about some of the cooler things the Blair government did at this time, including the breakthrough in the Northern Irish peace process, specifically the Good Friday Agreement.

This week, we look at some of the distinctly uncool aspects of its rule and, funnily enough, we’ll focus for much of the episode on Northern Ireland again. This time, though, we’ll talk about what happened to the person who, perhaps more than any other, made sure the Agreement was reached, Mo Mowlam. And her treatment might well be regarded as far from cool.

One of the uncool parts of it was that she was replaced by Peter Mandelson. He’s been in the news again in our time, forced to resign for the third time from a political appointment, this time as ambassador to the US. But the first time he was forced to resign, over a financial scandal which was uncool enough, it was just ten months before he came back into government, taking over from Mowlam, which made it uncooler still.

Just as uncool was the Ecclestone scandal, where Blair tried to help out the boss of Formula 1 racing, who’d made a large contribution to the Labour Party. What made that particularly uncool was that Blair denied that he’d made the decision to help Ecclestone very quickly, before handing back his donation, and the truth only came out thanks to a Freedom of Information request. And though he introduced the Freedom of Information Act, he later kicked himself for doing it, which was even more uncool.

Plenty that wasn’t cool, then, in Cool Britannia.

For the passage on Northern Ireland, and specifically on Mo Mowlam, from the video of Blair's speech to the 1998 Labour Conference, take a look at:

https://www.c-span.org/program/international-telecasts/labour-party-conference/118168

Illustration: A photo taken shortly before the bomb blast in Omagh. It’s uncertain who the photographer was. The remains of the camera were found in the rubble after the bomb exploded. Image currently displayed by the Irish historian Wesley Johnston on his website: http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/omagh/before.html

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License