Tributes: Baroness Jowell

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Tessa was the mother of Sure Start, and also Britain’s first Public Health Minister. She started some amazing things, including the teenage pregnancy strategy, which worked, and Sure Start itself, into which she threw so much of herself—literally. I was lucky enough to follow her into the Public Health job and to see some of the amazing work she had done. The things that were most valuable in Sure Start—not only the warmth, the empathy, and the focus on families and whole communities, but the ambition, the aspiration, and that wider support and emotion—were also all the things that we valued about Tessa and her life. What she saw in her own family, with David, Jessie and Matthew—all her family, for whom we now feel so much—was what she worked so hard to provide for other families throughout the country.

I know that when we think about Tessa and the Olympics, we are supposed to think about her steely determination in getting the games to happen. We are supposed to think about her amazing values of inclusion and diversity, which she infused throughout the Olympics, whether in the amazing Danny Boyle opening ceremony that she commissioned, the games makers she championed, or the sending of the torch all around the country. All that is true, but I cannot help but keep remembering a meeting before the London Olympics in which she briefed us in some detail, and with great frankness, about her plans to distribute condoms throughout the Olympic village. She said, “Well, there are going to be all these athletes with their beautiful bodies, and when they finish their races they’re going to have a lot of sex, and we have a responsibility to keep them safe!” That, in the end, along with the twinkle in her eye, was Tessa. She was completely down to earth and practical; she had no qualms or squeamishness about all aspects of people’s lives. That was what made her so remarkable—that down-to-earth quality and also the great visions that she had. We know that she leaves a huge legacy not just around cancer, not just around the Olympics, not just around Sure Start, and not just in the hearts of all those who met her and were inspired by her, but for all those who did not meet her but whose lives were changed for the better by the work that she did.