Interview: Adam Ingram - Mo Mowlam and me

Published on Tuesday 2 February 2010 21:08

Stephen McGinty talks to Adam Ingram, half of the Northern Ireland Office 'double act' that helped push the Good Friday Agreement forward, about his relationship with Mo Mowlam – and the poetic licence of TV drama

• Mowlam and Ingram with Tony Blair in 1998

THERE is an extraordinary scene in the recent Channel 4 drama Mo, about the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, when Mo Mowlam barges into the gents' toilets at Hillsborough Castle and berates Adam Ingram while he is handling a more delicate matter.

Mo, played by Julie Walters, is intent on explaining why she appears to allow herself to be belittled by fetching tea for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. "If making me feel small makes the 'Sinners' (ie, Sinn Fein] feel big, that's fine." She then peers over the

urinal and comments on the size of Ingram's penis.

The expenses scandal may have rendered politicians financially naked, but let us allow them a wash-cloth of dignity and inquire of Ingram, the long-standing MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, if the scene is roughly correct. After emitting a long laugh, Ingram gives an answer which the late Tory MP Alan Clark would have recognised as "economical with the actualit".

The answer appears to be a combination of "yes" and "no". Over the past few years while the film was being developed with Channel 4, Mr Ingram met the screenwriter, Neil McKay, and his producer, Lisa Gilchrist, five times and had many more long telephone conversations in an attempt to give them as accurate an impression as possible of the politician to whom he became a close friend. As the script developed, scenes were changed, time-scales compressed and dialogue written and rewritten. So the question of whether Mo Mowlam, who died in 2005, ever followed Adam Ingram into the gents and passed judgment on his manhood has now been lost in a blizzard of memories and white script paper.

At first he explains: "No, I think there is a bit of poetic licence there. I don't remember that happening, and I don't say it happened, but what they were trying to show was just how different she was. And, of course, nothing would stand in her way when she was trying to do something or make a point. I think that is how I read that scene."

He then laughs again and adds: "There are a whole lot of people now intrigued by the scene." Yet before we move on, he adds: "It could have happened."

The idea of Ingram challenging Mowlam over supplicating herself to Sinn Fein is, however, extremely believable. A former junior member of the Orange Lodge in Barlanark, Glasgow, Ingram was a staunch unionist who, when appointed to the Northern Ireland Office as a minister, was seen as a strong foil to Mowlam's Republican tendencies. (When George Galloway wrote in his book I'm Not The Only One that Ingram was a member of an organisation that was "anti-Catholic" and "Protestant-supremacist", the minister tried to obtain an interim interdict to prevent publication. The case was thrown out after the judge described Galloway's words as "fair comment". Asked about it yesterday, Ingram said: "Judges make mistakes – they've sentenced innocent men to death in the past.")

Yet, together Mo Mowlam and Adam Ingram made a strong double act and were among the principal engineers of the Good Friday Agreement, and when the creators of the drama were tracing those who knew her well, Ingram's name was repeatedly mentioned.

The drama focuses on the secretary of state for Northern Ireland's decision to conceal the fact that she had a malignant brain tumour and life expectancy of about three years. While she told the prime minister and the rest of the world that her tumour was benign and treatable, it was, in fact, liable to cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgment. The fact that she was carrying out such an important role caused her doctor, Mark Glaser, considerable distress. When she was replaced in the post by Peter Mandelson in 1999, Dr Glaser was deeply relieved, although Mowlam was personally devastated.

The question the drama seeks to answer is whether Mowlam's behaviour while in office – including her frequent swearing, fondness for hugging people and, according to the drama, flashing her underwear at David Trimble, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party – were signs of the tumour's destructive power and effect on her personality, or her own personal view of how to move intransigent people along the path to peace.

Ingram has no doubt it was the latter, even if he does doubt that his boss did flash her underwear at Trimble. He did, however, say in one interview that she did something much worse, which he now refuses to clarify.

"I'm not going to go into the details. I gave the scriptwriter a very good example of how she would do something like that and she was used to sitting with her legs splayed, and that unnerved people. The point I was making about David Trimble was that he could be very angry, but with good cause; he was in the middle of a very tense set of negotiations and she was attempting to try and throw people offside and get them into a different space.

"That was just one of the things she did; she did other things like calling people 'Babe' and putting her arms around them." Trimble refused to deal with her and conspired with Peter Mandelson to have her replaced.

Today, Ingram is pleased with the finished drama, which he believes is true to Mowlam's unique character. He found himself in tears while watching a special screening at the Bafta offices in London, and he is delighted by Gary Lewis's performance of himself, though the two have not met.

Ingram says: "I've been getting e-mails and phone calls from people pointing out the differences, but what I say is, 'This is a guy interpreting someone he had never met'. I have never met Gary Lewis, so he has no sense of me as a person, and that was correct. He had to put his own interpretation into the script and the words that were there.

"People say, 'You had more hair', and people are trying to see me in him, and what I have been trying to explain is that this movie is about Mo and the trauma she was going through and what she tried to achieve and everyone else was just part of the backcloth … I take more pride in what I think I helped to achieve in Northern Ireland than to be portrayed in a movie, but it's nice for other people getting a flavour of what was happening."

He regrets the current crisis in Northern Ireland, but says: "We are reaching the endgame, and I think both sides are keen to see the changes made while the current government is still in power." He adds that he believes Labour will still be in government after the general election, he argues that both sides in Northern Ireland may fear a Conservative government with less interest in finding solutions.

Ingram, 63, will step down as an MP at the general election and will instead concentrate of a range of company directorships, concentrating on the security industry. After the Northern Ireland office, he transferred to the Ministry of Defence, where he went on to hold the record for the longest-serving minister with six years in the post.

Last year, Ingram took flak for earning more than 115,000 from outside business interests. Yesterday, he dismissed his critics as suffering from envy – "the green-eyed monster" – but he did insist the actual figure he earned was lower than that which had been quoted: "In reality, it was probably a third of that figure." Yet he also claimed the second-lowest expenses of any Scottish MP and understands the public's anger.

Although he retired from the Orange Order before he turned 20, after 18 months as a member, he is still sceptical about the Pope's forthcoming visit to Scotland. "I would not comment on whether it is a good idea that he is coming back, because it will stoke up a different type of controversy. His statement of recent days has kind of provoked a different type of reaction to him. I don't know if it's a good or a bad idea for him to visit. I don't know what is going to happen when he is here.

"But to those millions of Catholics in the United Kingdom, it's a tremendous thing for him to come here, and it is all tribute to this country that we will seek to welcome him as we would any major religious leader. He does speak for many millions across the globe, and it's a matter for them in that church to say if he speaks for them in a responsible way. Will there be demonstrations in the streets by the Protestant groups? I think, by and large, that is a thing of the past. There is still the poison in Scotland, but it is less than what it was."

As the conversation drifts back towards Mo Mowlam, Ingram said there was one televised scene that was almost exactly as it happened. In her final days, he paid her one last visit and spend an hour updating her on the gossip from the Houses of Parliament.

"The nurses outside the room in the hospice were listening in, just to make sure things were OK. I said, 'I don't know if she can hear anything', but they said, 'Don't be surprised, she may be absorbing it.' I just talked for over an hour. It was the first time I had done anything like that in a hospice, but it gave me a great understanding of what hospices do and I've had a commitment towards them ever since. They did look after her in her dying days.

"She has got to be judged on what she achieved and what she had. She made a judgment not to tell people. I didn't know she had a malignant tumour and she made that judgment. I think she was right to make that judgment because if she had told one person she would effectively have told the world. And she would not have been in that post.

"My objective assessment is that Mo was a major catalyst in the change in Northern Ireland. A lot of people know she injected momentum into the process, and when you step back from it and realise that she knew she had a terminal illness – she was in a rush to get things done and that was put to the advantage of the peace process. It kept the momentum going."

• Mo can be viewed online via www.channel4.com/programmes/4oD