Oh, Mo! You've let us all down with this book

The revelation that she is just another politician should not really shock us ? but somehow it does

People always tended to think the best of Mo Mowlam. We wanted to see her as someone who lived on an entirely different plane from the usual run of politicians. Her straight talking and her laughter seemed to mark her out as the kind of person who could rise above the grim machinations of party politics. However, in Mowlam's memoirs, which are currently being serialised, she is revealed as – yes, brace yourself for the shock – only a politician after all.

There are constant sparks of the Mo Mowlam that we thought we loved – from a jolly account of high jinks at Hillsborough Castle to a brave account of her meeting with loyalist prisoners at the Maze. Such tales bear witness to her celebrated individualism. But her accounts of the insider games of politics make for very different, and depressing, reading.

This is where her memoirs sink into the mire of political life. There are tales about the "frosty body language" of Tony and Gordon in cabinet meetings, about Peter's arrogance or Alastair's duplicity, all of which sound as though Mowlam has culled them from the most cynical chatter of weary political hacks. There are reports of conversations with passing journalists and disaffected ministers about whether she should challenge Blair for the leadership. And then there are accounts of careerist wheeling and dealing in which the great offices of state are touted around various ministers to be picked up or to be discarded.

Even Mowlam's account of her growing alienation from the government after she left the Northern Ireland Office takes a rather different route from the one we might have expected to read. She does talk about feeling frozen out, and she does talk about her divergence from the Government's leadership. But her own piqued ambition plays in the story quite as much as Blair's highhandedness.

After being offered one job after another, including health and education, she told Blair that she was holding out for defence, as a route to the Foreign Office. And, surprise, surprise, when he didn't want to go along with her desires, her loyalty began to crack.

Let's hope that the emphasis in the complete book is less on these grey games of ambition and more about Mowlam's energetic efforts to keep the factions in Northern Ireland at the negotiating table. This was her great achievement in politics, and let's try not to forget it. We journalists are the ones who are always castigated for being cynical, but how can we be anything else when even our most admired politicians are so cynical themselves?

This sense of terrible, corrosive cynicism will be the most resonant impact of this book. After all, this isn't the memoir of any old political hack or any old ex-minister. This is the memoir of Saint Mo, the one honest gal in politics, the mother figure who could bring peace to Northern Ireland and the darling not so much of the press but of the public. She was the one person in the New Labour hierarchy whom ordinary people seemed to hold in real affection.

Most of the commentary on the autobiography so far has concentrated on the way it makes us reassess Mo Mowlam herself. The revelation of the fact that she is another politician, with feet of clay, should not really shock us – but somehow it does. Perhaps it was just naive to think that any politician, however outspoken, however brave, could hold really different aspirations and values from her colleagues and still survive into any powerful position. Perhaps it was daft to think that anyone could choose to live their life in that world of clenched ambition and pointed gossip and not be affected by it. But still, that's what many people believed, and those people will be feeling a dead weight of disappointment if they bothered to read these extracts.

Some commentators, especially those who are at all close to Blair and his circle, have therefore moved in for the merely personal destruction of Mo Mowlam. Mowlam is "comically, tragically absurd" or "a prima donna... spoilt, demanding and slightly paranoid" and, above all, "disloyal". By characterising her in this way, such commentators seem to be suggesting that she is entirely untypical of the Government and that her memoirs say far more about her than they do about political life in general.

That may be reassuring to them, and, certainly, Mo Mowlam doesn't come out of her own autobiography very well. On the other hand, on the showing of the passages that we have seen so far, the Government comes out of it even worse. It's easy for political journalists to dismiss the impact that this memoir may have on people's perception of the government, since the revelations that Mowlam retails are really no revelations at all. It is common knowledge, after all, that, say, Blair and Brown don't get on and that secret briefings go on against unpopular ministers.

But when the accusations come from this particular person they take on a whole different flavour. If she details a government in which minister briefs against minister, in which policy takes third place to personality and gossip, then it is a thousand times more damaging in the eyes of many outsiders than if the same characteristics were described by an Andrew Rawnsley or a Geoffrey Robinson.

After all, Mowlam still has a quite different status in the eyes of the public. It is telling that nobody has begun to fill the gap that Mowlam left in political life. People fell not just for her political record, but also for her endearing personality traits – her ability to hug people, to be unselfconscious about her looks, to swear, to admit to smoking dope – which were taken as the sign of a uniquely honest personality. Yes, this was naive, but it also spoke of a real desire to see a different kind of person coming to the fore in political life. When people rose to their feet at that Labour Party conference in 1998, they were celebrating not only the advent of peace in Northern Ireland, but also the idea that somebody who seemed to act so impulsively, with such heartfelt conviction, could rise to the top of politics.

I remember talking to some of Labour's core voters at the conference that year, women earning no more than the minimum wage as cleaners and laundry workers. They were already starting to feel, as early as 1998, that the Labour leadership was drifting away from their priorities. Mo, they kept saying, Mo, Mo, Mo – why aren't there more women around, women like her? It wasn't just that people responded to the touchy-feely aspect of a woman who seemed at ease with ordinary people. It wasn't just – although this is immensely important – that women have been frozen out of power in New Labour, and Mo Mowlam was one of the few women who took on a truly powerful role in government. It was also that some of its core supporters were already beginning to feel that New Labour was drifting away from them, and they were grappling with trying to find a point of contact, a face that responded to them, in the new administration.

The way that people built her up still tells us so much about what is missing in politics today. For all the that she may have revealed herself to have feet of clay, the fact that Mowlam has now felt the need to cover the towers of Westminster with such opprobrium will still resonate with all those people who once admired her. And though she may now be dismissed and pushed to one side, the gap she leaves is a real one.

n.walter@btinternet.com