There will always be complaints about how politicians today are pale shadows of the giants of yesteryear, just as people always claim that when they were children no one locked their front doors and we were always in and out of each other's houses.Yet the ascendancy of Tony Blair did seem to represent the ultimate in the depersonalisation of politics. "It took our one and only Mo, of course," he ad libbed, prompting applause that snowballed until the whole of the Winter Gardens rose to its feet, roaring. She was certainly a larger-than-life character; with her passing, and that of Robin Cook, politics seems a duller business. It is not as if British politics is so densely populated by vivid personalities that it can afford a further thinning or homogenisation. She was a one-off, as the Prime Minister observed in his statement on Friday. It was the kind of clich?e had used before, at the 1998 Labour Party conference, when he listed his Government's achievements, ending with the Good Friday Agreement. The effect on the stiff leaders of the Ulster Unionists when she asked if they minded her taking off her wig remains one of the more striking vignettes of the Northern Ireland peace process.
The first part of our conversation was carried on while she stamped up and down, trying to put out a cigarette she had thrown away when I arrived at her Westminster office You could see why people warmed to her. As the eulogies to her have repeated over the past two days, the way she bore her illness with the same sense of high mischief that carried her through life endeared her to many people who expected to resist her charm. I once interviewed Mo Mowlam in a waste-paper basket. Many ask what will become of it when the whole Western edifice here collapses.
Some say it will become insurgent headquarters, others the next parliament. My guess is that whoever runs Iraq once the occupation collapses will turn the whole thing into a theme park Or maybe just a museum. More from Robert Fisk. Somewhere not far from me, someone had launched a mortar at the illuminated fishbowl that has become the symbol of occupation for all Iraqis. On Friday night, this crusader castle was bathed in its usual floodlights. I was looking up at the stars over the city when there was a dull sound and a flash of light from within the Green Zone. They often have to wait four hours to pass through the security checkpoints. Irony of ironies, the tomb of Michel Aflaq, founder of the Baath party that once included both Iraq and Syria, lies inside the Green Zone.
