Mr John Bowis, OBE, MEP

‘It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen’

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table 1872, ch 10 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

I have had the privilege of knowing John Bowis for over a decade, first as a health minister for 3 years, then as transport minister for just under a year, then working with me for something over a year in the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, and finally as a Member of the European Parliament.

At school, he was very interested in drama, playing in the Mikado with gusto and handing out fearful punishments to all. He subsequently played Gloucester in King Lear, an experience that gave him insight into having disability, people with disability and tackling its surrounding stigma. This has remained a lifelong preoccupation in his work. It may be that this early dramatic interest not only led him to become a member of the Board of the National Theatre, but also into his political career.

Some of us have wondered why John was and is a member of the Tory Party, when he seems much more left wing than some. I can now reveal all. At Oxford in the 1960s, John decided to take an empirical approach to politics and he joined all the political parties to see what they were like. He found that the Liberals had lots of ideas but little likelihood of any opportunity to implement them. The Communists told you what to think. Labour was suffering from a very dominant left wing movement in those days, which displayed much ‘ control freakery’, which he did not like. The Conservative Party did not have a particularly dominant right wing in those days, and in any case had little tendency to control freakery, and so John came to the view that he was more at home in the Conservative Party than the others.

He was and is an excellent constituency MP and positively enjoys listening and solving problems. Indeed I would have known him for longer if I had taken him up on an offer to come for a drink in the Commons to discuss my concerns about mental health services. This occasion arose before he was a health minister, when one of his team had come canvassing to my home (as he was coincidentally my MP) and I had treated the canvasser not only to a cup of tea, but also a brief or not so brief diatribe of current problems in the services. The poor Tory canvasser eventually made his escape, but a few days later I received a kind invitation from John to meet in the Commons to discuss my concerns at greater length, and I will always regret that I didn't take him up on it.

John has always been distinguished by an excellent grasp of local issues, having served on a Community Health Council and on a London Borough Council, where he chaired the education committee in the 1980s at a time of the special education needs debate, about getting children with learning disabilities into normal schools, and also at the time of the Swann Report on improving racial understanding in schools. So one of his drivers has been antidiscrimination and this drives him in politics.

A few weekends ago, he was in Prague, recalling how he had visited the shrine of John Palach, the Czech student who had stood in front of the Russian tanks, and is a lasting symbol of standing up to tyranny.

While in the Department of Health, he was an excellent Minister. He listened and discussed, and was very enthusiastic to see progress. He helped the implementation of Health of the Nation, was enthusiastic about tackling stigma, improving services, developing the Spectrum of Care, arguing for sufficient 24-hour nursed beds for small numbers who need continuing high levels of support for the national strategy for suicide prevention, and for integration of mental health into primary care. He took a vigorous approach to a number of issues. He supported the publication of the findings to a national psychiatric morbidity survey programme, including data on mental health and employment. He supported the moves to tackle the considerable problems around the health and social care divide, and helped initiate many developments, which are now coming to fruition. He was a major asset in the implementation of the care programme approach, which is now routine practice. We all missed him greatly when he was suddenly reshuffled off to Transport. Some months later he lost his seat in the general election, and as they say, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. I quickly found an opportunity to draw him into international mental health work, and John has moved from a national stage to an international stage.

While working with me in the WHO Collaboration Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, he was great company, very thoughtful and a wonderful asset when visiting other countries. On the same principle that it enhances the impact if you can use a GP to teach other GPs, I discovered that using a minister, albeit a former one, greatly enhanced the impact of a meeting with ministers. They knew that John understood the constraints under which they operate, as they seek to do their best to achieve change while protecting their political backs. John's time as transport minister has meant he is a great enthusiast for public transport - indeed, I often now think he would sit comfortably in the Green Party, which doesn't seem to have been one of the Parties on offer in Oxford in the 1960s. This passion for public transport, and indeed for walking, adds greatly to the excitement of visiting a foreign country with him, but occasionally has the unfortunate effect of arriving rather later for meetings than anticipated. John quickly became well networked, not only with government and ministers around the world but also with WHO, the World Psychiatric Association and a number of key non-governmental organisations including the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry.

Although he is an MEP, he still does a huge amount of constituency work. He enjoys helping people find the way through the Kafka-esque bureaucratic maze to help them live freely and effectively. He has always listened, and this means he has a deep understanding of the complexities of mental health services and the problems experienced both by users and by professionals. While an MEP, John is continuing the WHO link on mental health and epilepsy, and continues to work with the Geneva Initiative in Eastern Europe and China. He raises issues on mental health in the European Parliament and is trying to get better facilities for mental health in Bulgarian prisons.

The European Network of Mental Health Policy Makers led by the Finns has worked hard since its inception in the mid 1990s to get mental health on the European agenda, and succeeded in getting mental health on the agenda of successive EU presidencies for a number of years. John Bowis has played a key role in this, giving a key note speech at the first conference in Tampere; subsequently chairing a session at the Belgian conference last year and most recently, the Greek Minister of Health, Costas Stefanis asked him to address the Greek Presidency conference on Stigma and Discrimination in Mental Health and John had helped him to pull in most of the health ministers from across Europe and the accession countries!

But this is just a small part of what he is doing for mental health. He is also main-streaming mental health within the European Parliament itself.

In 2000, John wrote the report of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. This report is entitled ‘Public Health and Consumer Protection aspects of enlargement’ (2000/2081 (INI)). It emphasises the improvements in the abuse of psychiatry, while drawing attention to the need to improve mental health services across primary, secondary and tertiary levels of care, and the need to end the health and social care divide.

Already this year, John has written the Committee of Development and Cooperation Report. It is entitled ‘Commission communication on Health and Poverty reduction in developing Countries’, and it calls attention to the low priority given to mental health in low income countries and its links with poverty, it calls on the Commission and member states to place greater emphasis on mental health, and for more investment in mental health in low income countries.

John is of course a brilliant speaker as many of us know and those of you who haven't heard him before are about to discover, and he speaks with conviction and resonance because above all he listens. It is a privilege to do this citation for him, and he brings great distinction to the College Fellowship.