Labour's Tees Valley Mayoral candidate Jessie Joe Jacobs says 'she was born to do this'

THE many syllabled name of Jessie Joe Jacobs’ grandfather tumbles almost magically from her lips.

“Moses Majekodunmi,” she says, with a smile. “He ended up with a mayoral role in Nigeria after they got independence in 1960. He was a brilliant man by all accounts and had a political role at such a significant time – he went to America and met JFK.”

She only really became aware of her grandfather’s achievements in her teens, of how he started as a doctor but was appointed to run the west of Nigeria in a time of political crisis. She met him once, shortly before he died in 2012 at the age of 95, and it reinforced her desire to seek political change.

On Thursday, she will be on the ballot papers as Labour’s runner in the two horse race to be the mayor of the Tees Valley.

“I feel that I’m born to do this, I’m born to be a leader, and I hope it will be the Tees Valley,” she says. “I’m obsessed by how the North-East is to thrive, how will our people thrive, and knowing that this is in my heritage kind of solidifies that this is what I was meant to do, this is what I was born to do.”

The Stockton side of her family thought that she was born to go into business, as for three generation they’d had stalls on the market – in the early 1880s, they traded in leather beside a bazaar run by Mr Marks before he met Mr Spencer, and in more recent times, Jacobs carpets could have lined the whole of Stockton for the cost of a flat refurbishment in Downing Street.

Moses Majekodunmi, right, with Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, with JF Kennedy in 1961

“We were a family of entrepreneurs but for me, when I was doing my MA (in management) at Durham, when I was 24 I was doing some volunteer work in a soup kitchen and I met a girl who had been sexually exploited.

“She was in a care home and had been groomed for prostitution by an older drug dealer and she was spending her nights on the street.

“She changed a lot of things for me. Until that point life was about getting a good job and being successful.”

Because of the encounter, she gave her dissertation the grand title of “venture creation within the voluntary sector”, and investigated how to create a self-sustaining charity that employs specialists to get young women off the street.

Then she put her blueprint into action. “I had a three year business plan, and for the first year I was working in Debenhams in Stockton and House of Fraser in Darlington selling perfume,” she says. “I’d been offered an introduction into the world of investment banking, and the entrepreneurial people in my family asked why I was not going to London, but I felt early on this is what I wanted to do, to set up and work for a charity.”

A Way Out has won awards for its work helping women and families on Teesside, but after 11 years Jessie decided to move on. The charity does vital work tackling the symptoms on the streets but she wanted to tackle the root causes, and that meant politics.

She became a researcher for the Sedgefield MP Phil Wilson and then led the regional campaign to stay in the EU.

“The London people sent us to where Nissan was because they said they’d want to remain, so we did a street stall in Washington,” she says. “Every shop was boarded up, there was so much poverty, and leave was presented as an opportunity for change. When you’ve got nothing and that is your daily reality, then you are going to fight tooth and nail for something different, and I respect that.”

The role of mayor naturally appealed to someone who is pressing for change. “I’ve wanted to be the mayor before the role was invented as I’ve always believed that the North-East needed ambassadors and champions,” she says.

“I think people in my own party didn’t see the potential of regional mayors, because you can use the platform to drive forward agendas in any way you wish, although I didn’t know it would be used in the way it has been.”

Her criticism of Ben Houchen, the first Conservative mayor elected in 2017, is that he has gone for the big projects rather than concentrating on the fundamentals.

Jessie Joe Jacobs launches her high tech campaign to be Tees Valley mayor

“The big shiny things are great for a headline, but the reality is that everything has got worse in the Tees Valley in the last four years: employment, economic growth, business density. There are indicators – crime is rising, heroin use is increasing – that things are going wrong, but they won’t hit straightaway. It’s like the sheen on the bodywork is really nice, but if they don’t fix the engine, the car will go wrong.”

Her policies revolve around technology, tourism, transport, high streets and heritage.

“I’ve visited endless places, Liverpool, Leeds, Bilbao, Dundee, Belfast, places that were once written off to see how they are now thriving again,” she says. “You can spend millions and millions on huge regeneration projects and they will not change a place. The successful ingredients in all those places was creativity and innovation and letting the people lead.”

Her vision is to create tourist attractions, like a steel sculpture park beside the Redcar blast furnace, and a virtual reality themepark in Hartlepool which would also bring to life Darlington’s Head of Steam, as well as jobs.

“I’ve been asking what would be our Sage, in Gateshead, or our Guggenheim in Bilbao – the landmark that catalyses all those other things around it,” she says. “We’ve got real innovation in our tech sector with virtual reality, and I’ve been speaking to developers who can recreate the first railway passenger journey – you’ll be able to see it, feel it, you’ll even have the smoke…”

The images and ideas cascade enthusiastically from Ms Jacob’s lips, be she talking about saving the high streets, restoring bus services or creating new jobs, as rapidly as the syllables of her grandfather’s name. The only time in the interview that she stops short is when asked what became of the girl who inspired her to start A Way Out.

She swallowed hard, and said simply: “She died.

“I’ve been to more funerals than I have graduations, and that was the political turning point for me. I didn’t want my life to be about making money, I wanted it to be about changing people’s lives.”

Leadership is in her genes and the politics of change courses through her veins.

See a video of Jessie Joe Jacobs outlining her key three pledges on www.thenorthernecho.co.uk