THERE WERE CRIES of “shame” from the opposition benches in the House of Commons today as the Brexit Secretary invoked the memory of Mo Mowlam as he argued in support of the revised Brexit deal.
“Today is the time for this House to come together and move forward. Someone who previously did that… was the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Mo Mowlam,” Stephen Barclay said as he began his address this morning.
A shout of “how dare you” could be heard from the Labour benches.
Speaker John Bercow had to intervene to ask for calm. Barclay went on to remark that Mowlam had called her autobiography Momentum and to tell MPs that the UK needed the same momentum today, as he brought forward the main motion.
Mowlam, who died in 2005, was best known for her time as Northern Ireland secretary under Tony Blair in the late 1990s and for her work building community links around the time of the Good Friday Agreement.
She was extremely popular in the wider Labour party.
“Deeply offensive of the Brexit Sec to use the memory of Mo Mowlem (sic) in the chamber to urge us to vote to leave the EU,” Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry wrote on Twitter.
“Mo was a passionate European who believed it was in all our interests to stick together. She would never have stopped fighting for us to #Remain.”
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