Tessa Jowell, English social worker and politician, Minister for the Cabinet Office
Tessa Jane Helen Douglas Jowell, Baroness Jowell, (née Palmer; 18 September 1947 – 12 May 2018) was a British Labour politician and life peer who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Dulwich and West Norwood, previously Dulwich, from 1992 to 2015.
She held a number of major government ministerial positions, as well as opposition appointments, during this period. She served as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport from 2001 to 2007 and Minister for the Cabinet Office from 2009 to 2010. A member of both the Blair and Brown Cabinets, she was also Minister for the Olympics (2005–10) and Shadow Minister for the Olympics and Shadow Minister for London until September 2012, resigning after the London Olympic Games.
A Privy Councillor from 1998, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2012. She stood down from the House of Commons at the 2015 general election.
She was nominated for a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours and was raised to the peerage as Baroness Jowell, of Brixton in the London Borough of Lambeth, on 27 October 2015. In September 2015, she was unsuccessful in seeking to be selected as the Labour Party's official candidate in the 2016 London mayoral election, coming second to Sadiq Khan in the contest of six candidates.
Jowell is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh.