Tributes: Baroness Jowell

Steve Reed Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

For all that Tessa achieved on the national and international stage, she never forgot the local. It was as a local campaigner and politician that I first knew Tessa, when I was leader of the opposition and then of the council in Lambeth, where she was one of our fantastic local MPs. Whether it was the young people, like Solomon and his friends who set up the Brixton Soup Kitchen, or the women—it usually was women, formidable, generous women—who were running the residents associations on the estates she represented, or the parents she worked with to set up the country’s first parent-promoted secondary school, the Elmgreen School in West Norwood, Tessa’s love was with people and the communities they were part of.

Yesterday I spoke with Andy Troke, who for 20 years was Tessa’s organiser in Dulwich and West Norwood. Andy said to me that a very important part of Tessa’s legacy is that there is a little bit of Tessa in thousands of us around south London and around the country. We have been inspired by her vision, her passion, her love and her empathy, and we will take that legacy forward. As fantastic as Sure Start is and as the Olympics were, those people are Tessa’s legacy.

Tessa did me the enormous honour of asking me to chair her mayoral bid—not with enormous success, it has to be said. It is funny how things work out sometimes, because instead of sitting in City Hall, she spent the past two years with her family. Who could begrudge them the precious, treasured moments that they spent together in what turned out to be her last two years?

If I may, I would like to address my final comments to Tessa’s family. Thank you for sharing Tessa with us. Today, we stand with you in love and respect for this remarkable woman.

[Mr Speaker]

Before 2010, the current Secretary of State for Health and Social Care shadowed Tessa Jowell, and Tessa later came to shadow him, so I think it is fitting that the final words in these exchanges should go to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.