Getting an interview with Mo Mowlam is a bit like securing a private audience with the Pope, but there the difference ends. One doesn't imagine His Holiness kicking off his shoes and curling his feet underneath him on the armchair as he becomes absorbed in the discussion. Nor does the Pontiff, as far as we know, engage in the robust language occasionally used by the Northern Secretary.
Mowlam is famously relaxed and informal. Her "touchy-feely" approach makes a stark contrast with the remote and patrician, though not entirely humourless, demeanour of her predecessor, Patrick Mayhew. Many people find her refreshing, and the New Lab our grassroots revere her almost to the point of idolatry. Some Ulster Unionist sources say they find her a bit hard to take: rather quaintly, they wish she was more "ladylike".
Lady Mowlam? I just can't see it. Perhaps the real problem for the Ulster Unionists is that, like themselves, she is very direct and doesn't take any nonsense. This applies to civil servants as well: she must be the first cabinet minister to have told a senior mandarin he was anally retentive.
Parliament Buildings at Stormont is a forbidding place. The statue of Dubliner and one-time hurling enthusiast Sir Edward Carson outside fails to create a feel-good factor. Albert Speer would not have been ashamed to design this fortress-parliament on a hill with its forbidding corridors full of hard stone and sharp corners.
Mowlam's office, though, is warm and welcoming. When I remark on the quality and comfort of the furniture, she reveals that she purloined it from her security minister, Adam Ingram. Lynn Barber of the Observer wrote recently that in the course of an interview she suddenly realised Mowlam "dislikes me quite a lot, and that her friendliness entails considerable forbearance on her part".
You have to watch your step: this is a tough operator who won't be taken for granted by the media or anyone else, but unlike a lot of politicians, she has things to say and doesn't pull her punches.
It had been a slack week for other stories and the media were full of the crisis over the Maze Prison. The Northern Secretary was surprisingly calm, as though she had taken to heart Kipling's lines about keeping your head "when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you". She has to run Northern Ire land after all, and it would be a bad sign if the guv'nor was cracking up over a crisis which was still at six points on the Richter scale.
Her response to the demands of the loyalist prisoners is sober, and she made it clear that at least for the moment the gates are staying shut. "In the present climate, when we are still trying to stabilise the talks for next Monday, the one thing that wouldn't be helpful is to talk about releasing prisoners."
Speaking before yesterday's meeting at the Maze was announced, she made clear she could not yield to loyalist warnings about staying away from the talks. "I desperately want the talks to work, but the difficulty is that I can't [give in] every time somebody says `Do this, that or the other because we'll walk', I won't get anybody sitting round the table talking. They'll all be threatening, in preparation for walking."
Many people, not just hardline unionists and loyalists, felt the circumstances of the Billy Wright shooting were odd at the very least. Suddenly stern, Mowlam rejects allegations of collusion on the part of the authorities to eliminate an opponent of the peace process. The political parties would have the opportunity to put their allegations before the RUC investigation and to the Narey inquiry.
"And I hope they do, but I can say categorically now, and I'm very pleased to have the chance to do so, that to suggest there was collusion between politicians and people within the prison to have Billy Wright taken out is [she pauses for extra emphasis] ludicrous."
She says she "tends not to be" a conspiracy theorist. "The Cock-up Theory of History tends to be my view of many problems that have happened. If you get up into conspiracies you can see them everywhere."
It was claimed changes she made in prison policy caused the latest crisis, and this had led to calls for her resignation. "I fought back and said that I didn't think it was a resigning issue because I hadn't in fact changed the policy at the Maze."
Lately it seems hardly a day goes by without some unionist politician calling on her to step down. Though amused by the suggestion that this is the surest guarantee of her survival, she doesn't find the constant abuse heaped upon her one bit funny.
"I've taken a fair bit of abuse from across the board in the last eight months. Go back to Garvaghy, and it was the other side that said I was hopeless, despicable and should go, and now it's the unionists. I consider it comes with the job. I don't like it. I think it's unnecessary, I think it's rude.
"I don't mind honest, straight debate about policy, I don't object to discussions where people think I'm wrong. I'm quite happy, if people think I'm wrong, that they think I should go. But the level of personal abuse that I've taken in the last eight months is unnecessary."
If she had to take a certain level of abuse as the price of political progress, then she would do so. I asked if there was a limit to how much she would take. She chuckled: "You'll have to ask me that when it happens, I don't feel so at the moment."
I put it to her there were suggestions Tony Blair might be a "softer touch" for the unionists than herself and that there was a difference of approach between the Prime Minister and his Northern Secretary.
"I don't think so, I think we are at one. We talk very regularly, and the amount of effort and energy he's put in has been amazing. When he offered me the job he said he was committed to this issue and was going to make it central and do all he could. I didn't believe he'd do as much as he has and I have to say that when he thinks he can help, as Prime Minister, to move it forward by a phone call, by a meeting, by talking through options, he's always there."
Contrary to reports after a group of Irish journalists met Blair recently, she insists her boss has a "frighteningly" good grasp of detail on the issue. She acknowledges that the nature of cross-Border institutions is "one of the hardest issues" in the talks. I point out that David Trimble had expressed an interest in having cross-Border arrangements placed within the context of a council representing the two islands.
"It was a constructive idea," says Mowlam. "If it helps facilitate movement and acceptance of institutions or councils or bodies, whatever we want to call them, then if it's helpful and people can live with it across the board, let's go for it."
ASKED if she is concerned that nationalists, who want a united Ireland sooner or later, will look askance at a weak cross-Border body, she replies: "That's the crucial question: are the unionists able to agree to something which is sufficient for the nationalists to accept?"
She is also aware of the need for a balanced approach to the issue of policing. "If the talks hold and we get a settlement and we get to a point where normality is returning to Northern Ireland, then we have a police force treble the size of a comparable police force elsewhere in the UK or in Europe."
However, no sudden or drastic moves are envisaged: "The majority of police I talk to say, `Just reassure me that you're not going to cut me tomorrow with no pension, no compensation of some kind and I'm going to be out on my back at 47 with no hope' and I say to them: `I'm not going to do any of those three'."
Some believe it was an act of madness for her to accept such a difficult position, but she is glad she took it. "I don't think I'm mad, I wanted the job. I was relieved, because I was worried on the Friday night and Saturday morning I hadn't had any call and I hadn't got it, so you can tell that I did actually want it and I in no way regret having taken it. It's been a learning experience, it's been an honour, it's been humbling, it's been tough, but I'm pleased I've got it."
A benign tumour was diagnosed last January, and after a month's radiotherapy she lost her hair. She now wears a wig on television but at other times a scarf. During the interview she removed the scarf, revealing a crop of healthy-looking brown hair steadily growing back.
By the time the new government came in, her health was fine. She says she is working at peak efficiency now, putting in 18 hours a day. Any suggestion from her critics that she can't meet the physical demands of the job bring out the feisty side of Mo Mowlam: "It pisses me off."