The Friday column: Tessa Jowell
I know that acres of newsprint have already been devoted to Tessa Jowell, and far more will follow (see "Have You Heard" below), but there is one aspect of her personality that has been overlooked in the recent coverage. She is a committed Christian, who was confirmed in adulthood, just over a decade ago, and who believes that good will prevail, in private life as in politics. I happened to talk to her about this when I interviewed her soon after she had organised the memorial service at Westminster Abbey for the British victims of September 11. It didn't take long in her company to see why Tony Blair should have asked Jowell to be responsible for this, and other matters concerning the families of those who died in the World Trade Centre. She is very kind, very considerate - her gentle voice displaying the professional understanding that you might expect from her training as a psychiatric social worker and a family therapist - but I was also struck by her apparent possession of that rarest commodity in modern politics, which is faith, both in God and in government.
"I've always been a believer, even as a child," she told me. "I've always looked for spiritual comfort in my faith. And I suppose the reason I was confirmed as an adult was because of the extent to which I felt there was an intense relationship between what I believed politically, and my Christian faith."
She was not raised in these beliefs: her father was an atheist, her mother, a lapsed church-goer, and neither of them were socialists. Yet at the time I met her - when I was already disillusioned with the Labour Party, having once supported it - her sincerity was convincing. I didn't necessarily agree with her politics, but what became clear is that cynicism is entirely absent from her make-up. "I believe that people are intrinsically good," she said. "I remember when my children were born, there wasn't a single other woman with a new baby in the same hospital as me at the time who didn't want to be a good mother."
Since then, Jowell has intrigued me: this powerful and ambitious politician, with all the astuteness that her chosen career entails, who continues to see the best in people, rather than dwelling on the worst. That she was able to overlook or ignore her husband's complicated, potentially compromising business activities might be seen as evidence of amorality or downright wilfulness; but it might suggest, instead, that her faith in him was, until recently, as strong as ever. If you believe that people are good, then you tend to be less suspicious than other, more cynical operators.
It's irrational, I admit, that I still want to believe in Tessa Jowell's essential integrity, even as the accusations pile up against her; but I do, at a time when, like many people, I see most other politicians as slippery, untrustworthy and treacherous. Thus I find it hard to accept that she simply dumped her husband last weekend because of political expediency; it must have been devastating for her to discover that he was not the man she believed him to be. After all, they were both Labour councillors when they met and, despite his growing wealth, they continued to live in the same unostentatious terrace house in an ordinary north London street.
Doubtless her faith will sustain her in the coming weeks - that, and a streak of steeliness forged during her time at Camden council, when more revolutionary colleagues pelted her with frozen chicken livers and stones while she argued for the importance of keeping public services going amid the rate-capping row. But will the Prime Minister, the other man in Jowell's life, continue to believe in her, as she has believed in him, with unwavering loyalty? They are friends, as well as fellow Christians, but then so was David Blunkett, and that didn't help him when scandal submerged his career.
Whatever happens, I'm sure that many will feel the same way as I do if Tessa Jowell has to go: saddened that someone who seemed to be trying to do the right thing turns out to be in the wrong. Yes, I've lost faith in much of modern politics, but I'd still like someone to believe in.
• If, as Tessa Jowell's story appears to suggest, the personal is political, then what are we to make of Felicity Huffman's appearance at the Oscars? The Desperate Housewives star, who was nominated as best actress for playing a man who wants to be a woman, wore a dramatic Zac Posen dress that revealed her shrinking body, therefore obeying the la-la land equation that growing success comes with losing weight. If she wants to hold on to her position as the only real woman in Hollywood, it's time to ditch that diet.
