A Journey (28 page)

On the first visit in 1997, the day after Diana’s funeral, I was shown up to see the Queen in the drawing room, which was exactly as Queen Victoria had left it. I was just about to sit down in a rather inviting-looking chair when a strangled cry from the footman and a set of queenly eyebrows raised in horror made me desist. It was explained that it had been Victoria’s chair and that since her day no one had ever sat in it.

There were just the two of us, and after all that had happened, of course the papers were full of ‘Blair tells Queen’, etc. No matter how sensible people are or how high their position – and the Queen was very sensible and her position very high – it wasn’t going to be easy. Indeed, one of the perpetual embarrassments at Balmoral used to be the Sunday papers laid out on the drawing-room table as you had pre-lunch drinks. Inevitably there would be some screaming headline about me or her, sometimes both of us, which would lie there prominent yet unmentionable. Over time, as the media looked to cause trouble, and without having much scruple about how they did it, there would usually be some ‘story’ timed for those very weekends about me insulting Her Majesty; or missing the Highland Games, the Saturday event to which the prime minister is invited (which I fear we did); or going to the Games, where one time the camera caught Cherie yawning . . .

To reiterate, I barely knew the Queen at this point. Had it all happened some years later, I would have been at ease and found it perfectly fine, to be frank. At this encounter, with the recent events still raw and the relationship in its infancy, I felt nervous. She did too. I talked, perhaps less sensitively than I should have, about the need to learn lessons. I worried afterwards she would think I was lecturing her or being presumptuous, and at points during the conversation she assumed a certain hauteur; but in the end she herself said lessons must be learned and I could see her own wisdom at work, reflecting, considering and adjusting.

It was a surreal end to a surreal week. Tragic, fascinating, unforgettable.

For myself, I had come through with general approbation. A poll showed the absurd rating of 93 per cent approval. I had, at least, the sense to know it was unreal; and also the realisation that earth-shattering though in one way the death of Princess Diana was, the tests of achievement for a prime minister and a government were rather different.

SIX

PEACE IN NORTHERN IRELAND

C
hurchill was a leader who never saw a problem without enthusiastically, often adventurously, charging forward in search of the solution; but on Northern Ireland he was bleak. Writing in 1922, with an elegant simplicity that came to define the British political establishment’s view of Ireland, he stated that ‘The whole map of Europe has changed . . . but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’

There had been centuries of hatred in which religion and disputed territory were mixed in an evil chemistry, followed by a failed attempt at devolution in the nineteenth century, followed by the partition of North and South in the 1920s, followed by the civil rights uprising of the 1960s that sparked a bitter and brutal conflict lasting decades. Numerous attempts at peace were made with an inconsistent focus but a resolutely consistent outcome: repeated failure. In a sense Churchill can be forgiven his unusual and uncharacteristic defeatism.

When I told John Prescott prior to the 1997 election that I was determined to give peace a go in Northern Ireland, he snorted with derision. The attempt by John Major to put together a peace process had just collapsed in renewed terrorism, but Major had rightly divined that there was indeed a chance for peace. He had begun clandestine negotiations with the IRA and had started to put together some of the elements that could go to make up an agreement. He had brought in Senator George Mitchell from the USA, an immensely shrewd and capable wise oldish bird, to help bring people into early negotiations, and a ceasefire had been put together. Though it had not held, it was clear something was stirring in the undergrowth of the Republican movement.

It was about time. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the entire tragedy was that anyone ever seriously thought there was going to be a winner: that the IRA believed that a nation as proud as Britain could be bombed out of Northern Ireland, where a majority regarded themselves as citizens of the United Kingdom; that the British government ever believed Irish nationalism was containable without paradigm change in the treatment of Irish Catholics; that the Unionists ever believed that on an island where a majority supported a united Ireland and were Catholic nationalists, they could ever refuse to share power with them.

What happened in those circumstances is in essence what happens in countless such disputes: the unreasonable drives out reason, by the use of unreason. The way this happens is very simple: those who do not hate, who want peace, who are prepared to countenance ‘forgive and forget’ (or at least ‘forget’) become slowly whittled down in number, seeming unrealistic, even unpatriotic to other members of their group. What starts as an unreasonable minority ends up consuming the reasonable in its snares and delusions.

Terrorism causes chaos and death, but also hatred of the perpetrators among the group targeted by them; human nature being what it is, the victim group regards the perpetrator group, not just the perpetrators, as responsible; the perpetrator group becomes the victim, and so the ghastly spiral continues. Then ‘the authorities’ intervene, and such intervention is also bloody. Once the soldiers and the police feel the force of terrorism, they too become first victims, then perpetrators themselves. People often forget that British soldiers were originally dispatched to Northern Ireland in the 1960s not to take on the Nationalists, but to protect them.

The hatred had become entrenched and horribly vicious over the centuries. Old victories were celebrated with contemporary relevance, and the savagery of one side’s actions in history was remembered as defining their present and future character. During one of the interminable sessions in Downing Street, I remember David Trimble, then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, waiting in the Cabinet Room as I saw Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein in the den. When Gerry and I ended our meeting and came through to the Cabinet Room, David was leafing through a book from the shelves. It was a biography of Cromwell, which he took great delight in flourishing under Gerry’s nose. To the Brits, Cromwell is an important historical figure; to the Irish he was a bigot and a butcher. I recall one meeting I had with Gerry and Martin McGuinness at Chequers. Cromwell’s daughter had married the owner of Chequers, and the place is stuffed with Cromwell memorabilia. Showing Martin round, we came across Cromwell’s death mask. ‘So you see,’ I said, ‘he really is dead.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ he replied.

A culture had grown up around the dispute. The Unionists didn’t simply have a political disagreement with the Nationalists, nor simply a religious difference; they had different music, a different way of speaking, a different attitude, a different nature. Naturally there was the Protestant/Catholic divide, and that too had cultural as well as religious connotations, but any theological dispute had long since been subsumed in the tribal one. Ulstermen (and it was all very male) were men of few words, literal, strongly spoken but polite, with a humour all their own and a tendency, not always unfounded, to distrust the world. The Irish were gregarious, flamboyant, of many colourful words, preferring to talk in generalities rather than particulars, with a keen sense not only of their status as victims but also of the wider world being more in tune with them than with their victimisers.

On one visit to Northern Ireland, I saw a remarkable demonstration of how the culture of opposition is enforced. Sinn Fein had invited the Palestinians to town. As I landed to stay overnight, I saw the Palestinian flag displayed along the Republican roads of Belfast, to welcome their guests. Next day I drove through the town to leave, and I saw arrayed along Unionist enclaves the white-and-blue flags of Israel. How they had got them, and how they had put them up overnight, I’ll never know, but the moment those Palestinian flags went up, Unionist solidarity with Israel was total.

Ireland was also in my blood. My mother was from Donegal. Though living in the South, her family were Protestant farmers – fiercely Protestant. Her father had been a Grand Master of one of the Orange lodges. An extraordinary example of the enduring nature of sectarianism was to be found in my maternal grandmother. She was a lovely woman, but was very much of her time and tribe, and in those days bigotry was unfortunately accepted as the norm. Later in life she had Alzheimer’s, but one day as I visited her at her sickbed she had a startling moment of lucidity. I had just begun to date Cherie. Obviously my grandmother had no knowledge of this, and indeed she did not really recognise me any more. As I patted her hand, she suddenly grabbed mine, opened her eyes wide and said: ‘Whatever else you do, son, never marry a Catholic.’ Everything else had disappeared from her mind, but left at the bottom was the residue of sectarian aversion.

We used to go to Ireland each year for our holidays to visit Mum’s relatives. I loved those holidays. We would usually go to the Sandhouse Hotel at the resort of Rossnowlagh, near Ballyshannon. At that beach I learned to swim in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. I had my first go at chasing girls, aged about eleven. I was taught my first chords on the guitar. I drank my first Guinness.

The relatives were slightly strange, truth be told. There was Aunt Mabel, with one tooth. For some bizarre reason I associate her with Fox’s Glacier Mints, but heaven knows why. Then there was the even odder Great-Aunt Lizzie, who lived in a house at the top of the hill and was a miser. She wasn’t just tight-fisted, she was an authentic miser who was apparently rich beyond the dreams of avarice but kept it all hoarded away. A large part of the extended family’s time and energy was engaged in devising ways to part Great-Aunt Lizzie from her fabulous wealth. The chances of doing so while she was alive were plainly remote, but the family had high hopes of the will and testament. Great-Aunt Lizzie was regularly visited to be checked out for signs of imminent demise.

I remember Mum taking my brother and me to see her. She had expressed a desire to see ‘the boys’, which Mum took as a good sign. I had never met her, but her fame was huge and I was overcome with excitement at meeting a real-life miser. Just as we went in the house, Mum said to us both: ‘Now look, Aunt Lizzie’s house smells a bit.’ She paused. ‘Actually, a lot. YOU ARE NOT TO COMMENT ON IT. What’s more,’ she went on, ‘Aunt Lizzie is giving us tea. If there are cakes, you eat them. YOU EAT THEM,’ she repeated.

‘That’s all right, Mum, I like cakes,’ I said.

She shot me a look. ‘Hmm,’ she said.

To this day, I mean honestly to this day, I can get neither the pong nor the cake out of my mind. The smell was a sickly, sweet, rancid odour that overwhelmed the senses, illuminating the true meaning of the word decay. The cake was obviously a relic of Great-Aunt Lizzie’s last generous tea gathering, or possibly the one before. The combination of the smell and the cake made my stomach heave every so often as I sat there, until Great-Aunt Lizzie told my mother I was evidently not a well child. Even now as I write these words, I feel sick.

As we left the house – a little earlier than intended, since Mum began to worry that I really would throw up – I said to her: ‘But surely if she’s a miser, she won’t want to leave her money to anyone’, an opinion that, as my mother remarked after Great-Aunt Lizzie died leaving us precisely nothing, was perceptive beyond my years.

Ireland was not just in my blood, but part of my experience growing up. We had friends there we saw every year. Then in 1969 we suddenly stopped going. It was not safe, Mum decided. The Troubles had begun.

I kept in correspondence with the friends, and their letters told me of how the bitterness was entering the stream of public sentiment. They were Protestant, of course. They described with increasing venom the gradual deterioration of their relations with, and then their view of, their Catholic neighbours, so I had some small but nevertheless direct understanding of the dispute.

Over the years, Britain would wake many mornings to the news of the latest terrorist attack or sectarian killing or a soldier’s death or the further disintegration of community intercourse between Unionists and Nationalists. Ian Paisley – whom my grandmother revered – became a household name. As the 1970s rolled on into the 80s and 90s, the names of the failed peace attempts became imprinted on our consciousness. The reputations of the key players with whom I was to find peace were hammered out on the anvil of sectarian strife in this period: Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, John Hume, David Trimble, John Taylor, Peter Robinson and Paisley himself, naturally. They were part of it all, helped shape it all and created much of its history and its mythology.

Sometimes we forget the brutality of it: the torture; the maiming; the sheer, unadulterated vastness of the hatred. I thought of the hunger strikers often, particularly Bobby Sands, starving himself to death. I think of the pain, the unendurable horror, the blind courage required for such an act of self-destruction, realised not in a moment but over days and weeks of agony. People did things to each other and to themselves that now we can only look on with a sense of astonishment. For decades, such barbaric atavism defined Northern Ireland.