A bit of misogynistic bile leaped out from the pages of the Irish edition of an English Sunday newspaper. It was about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Dr Mo Mowlam, and her claim that while 99 per cent of her civil servants are "on side", 1 per cent of them are not giving her their full backing. How right she is. The piece was obviously inspired by the 1 per cent though, like all journalism of this type, the criticisms were completely unattributed. "Mandarins at all levels," it said, "are disillusioned with the freewheeling, overselling style of Mo and her three junior ministers . . . Last week, officials were discreetly gloating as Mo tried to talk her way out of some celebrated cock-ups . . . Eyebrows were also arched when . . . Mo also revealed that she will be shedding her wig by Christmas, prompting some of the mandarins to open a book on whether the luxuriant new growth will be a matching blonde or a deep shade of grey, brought on by the stresses and strains of having to guess who is "on side" and "who is not".
Mo Mowlam wears a wig at the moment because she was diagnosed as having a brain tumour earlier this year, and had to have radiotherapy. The thought of well-paid civil servants sitting around jeering at her baldness and making bets on it is not pleasant. It sounds to me as if she has rocked some boats at Stormont. Certainly, some needed to be rocked. When I applied through the press office there for an interview with her I encountered memorable rudeness. After many unreturned phone-calls someone finally informed me that I couldn't apply for an interview because I wasn't on the list of those applying for interviews.
"How would I get on the list?" I asked the most senior civil servant I could get hold of. "If I were you I wouldn't bother," he said in a way that put me, The Irish Times and, above all, the Secretary of State in our respective places.
I never did get the interview. I owe Ms Mowlam nothing. And her people, I'm told, are not particularly helpful to the Southern media. Still, I'm as interested in her as ever. And if disaffected civil servants can draw attention to her personality, so can I. Her personal qualities are highly relevant to the fate of this island.
She's not a known type, as Peter Brooke or her predecessor as Shadow Secretary for Northern Ireland, Kevin McNamara, were known Tory and Labour types. Like many of the extraordinarily committed Blair ministers, she arrived on the political scene as if from nowhere. All I knew about Mo Mowlam was that she represented Redcar. So I went to Redcar, a sad seaside suburb on the edge of hard-working, industrial Teesside, and I looked around at the place and talked to the people.
And, by the way, a friend of hers whose house she drops into sometimes to put her feet up after a hard day's constituency work remarked that the first thing she'd do was throw the stifling wig off. The disaffected civil servants should try meeting the biggest challenge of their working lives in the discomfort, at the very least, Mo Mowlam has been enduring.
The present passage in Anglo-Irish politics presents a hard challenge to the participant from Westminster who is, in effect, a permanent outsider. What can prepare an English person for Stormont? I could see nothing, as I gathered what sense I could of Mo Mowlam's life, except a habit of political activity, in which she has always had success. She has been in the Labour Party since 1969. She took over the Redcar constituency from an old-style trade-unionist in 1987 in an apparently straightforward, unconspiratorial way. "We just thought she was a wonderful woman," someone who was at the selection convention told me. "She got a huge vote from people who didn't know her."
But as to how she got the nod from head office to present herself to this safe seat - she'd been in the Labour Party since 16, and worked for Tony Benn and been an activist not far away when she was a lecturer in Barnsley. Her background is Labour, too. Her father was a postman and, as it happens, an alcoholic, which made her, as she told the Daily Telegraph - whingeing civil servants please note - "A toughie . . . with a short memory when it comes to anger or shame". But she must have been well got with the then-leadership, though that clearly didn't harm her with the present leader.
The young Marjorie went to school in Coventry, then to college at Durham and in Iowa - that's where the doctorate comes from - and when she won Redcar she bought a house there. It is her office now - her home is in London with the man she married not long ago who is a merchant banker who is also a republican.
The Redcar house looks down on the grey sands, once a place of happiness for badly-fed working-class holidaymakers in cloth caps and cotton frocks. The sittingroom is lined with the reading-matter of Mo Mowlam's working class, who got an educational chance in the 1960s. And - and it seems strange, in this unbookish and utterly English corner of the world - there is an amount of Irish literature on the shelves. I noticed John McGahern and Neil Jordan and The Ginger Man and a PEP pamphlet on Ulster from 1978 in there. She must have had an interest in the place.
Her habit of success followed her into the Commons. She was elected to the Shadow Cabinet in 1992, shadowed women's issues, heritage, city and corporate affairs, and got onto the important Public Accounts Committee. In 1994 - and some day these internal party coups will be documented - she took over from Kevin McNamara on Northern Ireland. Long before Labour came to power she was visiting the place, observing, anonymously, at Drumcree and the Garvaghy Road and so on. She prepared for the Northern job because she wanted it. I don't know of any other pro-consul sent from Westminster of whom this might be said.
Of course, she may fail. But if so it won't be the end of her. She's on Labour's National Executive Committee, she has 33,000 electors to mind, she is the Cabinet representative on the Parliamentary Committee of the Labour Party, she's a TGWU member, and she is a patron of things as diverse as the Women's Engineering Society and Patient Power. She also has a mother, a husband, step-children and friends. Oh - and enemies. I nearly forgot.
Clearly, a part of the Stormont civil service longs to return to the comforting rule of the oldstyle colonial masters, if only because they were usually Tories and were always men. (If there is another enclave of the first world as sexist as Northern Ireland I don't want to hear about it.) But even if she goes, will the old ways ever return? Is it wise to undermine her? Who, after all, is likely to win - the old men, or a woman who says proudly about her youth, "I travelled around. I lived!"?