Vera Baird

Labour Party | Redcar

Channel Four’s "Mo" – superb acting but Mo remains an enigma

1 February 2010

Commenting on last night's TV drama Vera Baird, MP for Redcar, said, "Julie Walters becomes Mo. She walks like her, talks like her and, in the end, cries as if she had suffered all the bitterness of Mo’s situation – an Oscar nomination, if there is one available for a TV production. It was very touching especially the portrait of Jon and her together.

"Mo had a superb political mind as well as the whacky personality with which she broke the ice in Northern Ireland and won everybody’s hearts. I think that aspect of her doesn’t emerge strongly enough and the bitterness towards the end of her life is overdone. In the 2001 election campaign, she came to Redcar, one Sunday, and sat with me for a cup of tea. She had no personal interest left in the election but had spent the previous week following Tony Blair. She didn’t know why he wanted her with him when he had huge popularity of his own, but she was ready to work tirelessly for our re-election. She was still in the hurly burly then but I saw her 2 years later at the launch of Mo Mo Homes, one of her charities, and she seemed to be reconciled to what had occurred and what was to come.

"The film is superb but it throws little new light on a complex personality who played a huge role on the world political stage. The only extra clue is in the scene where she tells her stepdaughter at Hillsborough, that her father’s alcoholism taught her that the worst thing is not being in control. I think that, more than the film depicts, she regained control of her life in the few years before she died."