One of the surprises about the political career of Mo Mowlam, who died aged 55 on Friday, is that she won an international reputation as Labour's Northern Ireland Secretary despite fiercely resisting being sent there. When offered the job by Tony Blair in 1997 she bitterly resented her “exile” as she saw it away from the powerful core of the New Labour government.

The irony was that because of the perceived success of the Good Friday peace agreement, signed in 1998, she became a popular heroine and achieved a degree of fame which gave her a brief period of unrivalled political authority within the government. It was something she probably would never have achieved in one of the important economic posts she originally would have preferred.