A Journey (30 page)

Yet all the way through the process, the good faith of the government, never mind its good government, was in question. In the end I decided people operate at two levels in relation to political leadership. At one level, they vest all their hopes, expectations and, most of all, once in government, their frustrations in the leader. You are the focal point, and therefore the focal point for criticism. At this level you aren’t measured against a reasonable yardstick but against perfection. Unsurprisingly, you fall short.

However, at another level, less visible but real, people indeed take a more mature view and if you are really trying, you get credit for it. Nevertheless, as I say, a great capacity for absorbing abuse was a necessary part of the job.

There was another trait that served me well in Northern Ireland. I don’t really get on my high horse. I am not big on the ‘dignity of office’ stuff. I rested my authority on motivating and persuading people, not frightening them. It’s possible I took this too far, at times, and it may also be true that on occasions a bit of hauteur and bossing, even bullying, would have served me better, but there it is: it’s my nature. In Northern Ireland, it worked. People could be really very insulting without much provocation, yet if you fell out with them over it, the consequences could be unpredictable. So by and large I didn’t.

In those first months after taking office, I was trying to give shape to our strategy. I made the speech at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show on 16 May and deliberately set out to woo and bring onside Unionist opinion. The setting itself was indicative – right in the heart of the Unionist community. Acting on David Trimble’s advice, I made it clear I valued the Union and then, in a passage that caused a lot of sucking through teeth, said that I doubted we would see a united Ireland in the lifetime of anyone present. Since some of those present were in their twenties, it was quite a bold pro-Union statement. It was the weirdest place to give a major speech, in a tent where outside prize bulls jostled with ruddy-faced farmers while the potential future of the land was being made.

Despite the murders of the two police officers (and the IRA sent messages essentially saying it had been unauthorised), we gave the IRA five weeks to renew the ceasefire, which in the past eighteen months had lapsed. This they did on 19 July 1997.

Weeks later the British and Irish governments agreed to establish an Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD). The issue of decommissioning was one very unfortunate legacy from the previous administration which was to become a big ball and chain round our legs in the years to come. Under Unionist pressure, John Major had agreed that a vital precondition of peace and power-sharing was for the IRA not merely to embrace peace but to decommission their weapons. Of course, at one level this is entirely reasonable: if you are for peace, you don’t need weapons; but on another level, it carried an implication for the IRA of surrender, of not merely embracing peace but of apologising for ever having been to war, and it complicated their internal management horribly. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were trying to bring their movement with them. Like all such situations, there was a spectrum of Republican opinion. There were real hardliners. They would stay hardliners. The important thing was not to let them have traction on the middle ground. The prospect of the IRA being forced to destroy their weapons gave them such traction, but there it was; to renege on John Major’s commitment was impossible, so it just had to be managed. The IICD bought us some time and space.

George Mitchell had been doing great work drawing up principles of non-violence and common positions – a commitment to exclusively peaceful means for all parties in government, for example, things that were broad but set a framework for the much bigger negotiation to come – and had been chairing talks before we came to office. Sinn Fein immediately said they would abide by the Mitchell principles, but the IRA refused to give the same commitment. That didn’t exactly reassure Unionists, but we persevered and identified three strands to the negotiation which had begun when John Major was prime minister: how Northern Ireland would be governed under a devolved system of power-sharing; relations between the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (East–West); and relations between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland (North–South).

The talks began in September without David Trimble. Republican dissidents set off a bomb on the second day. On the third day, the Unionist parties other than the DUP, Paisley’s party, entered the talks.

There were further talks the next month and then I went over on 13 October to have my first meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Up to then, no British prime minister had met either of them. It was a big moment. A crucial question was whether or not I shook hands with them (no Unionist leader did until 2007). I decided just to do the thing naturally. So they walked in, we shook hands.

When asked about it afterwards, I said I treated them like any other human being, but later the same day I got a taste of Unionist sentiment. I was invited by Peter Robinson, the DUP deputy leader, to visit a shopping centre in his constituency. I was never sure whether he set me up or not. I’ll assume not.

The place was full of the most respectable elderly grannies doing the shopping. Like something out of a bad dream, however, they suddenly morphed into very angry protesting grannies, shouting, swearing, calling me a traitor and waving rubber gloves in my face. I was perfectly happy to listen to them, but the RUC – with what I thought was a trifle too much eagerness – turned it into a major security incident and physically carried me into a room for my own safety.

Amusingly, I didn’t get what the rubber gloves were about at all. I thought they had just finished doing the washing-up or something. When I told Jonathan, he roared with laughter and said, ‘No, it’s because you should have worn rubber gloves when shaking hands with Gerry Adams.’

The next few months were a complicated trek through a very dense and dangerous jungle, as we tried to get to the uplands where we could see our way to a negotiated deal. Our path was constantly, though fortunately temporarily, barred by unhelpful events. One Loyalist group reinstated their ceasefire. Good. Then another Loyalist group broke theirs and had to be excluded from the talks. Bad. In February 1998 there was a real crisis when the IRA killed two people in Belfast. Sinn Fein were excluded for seventeen days. Then the dissident Republican group the Irish National Liberation Army killed Billy Wright, the Loyalist Volunteer Force leader, inside the Maze prison. More upheaval.

Throughout I was never off the phone to David Trimble and Unionist leaders, desperately holding them in while, not entirely unreasonably, they regarded the continual outbreaks of sporadic violence as somewhat inconsistent with the Mitchell principles.

To assuage Nationalist opinion and under pressure from the Irish, I also ordered an inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings in 1972, when British troops had opened fire on protesters in Belfast, killing a number of people. Nationalists claimed they were peaceful protesters. An inquiry at the time by Lord Widgery, the then Lord Chief Justice, was widely condemned as a whitewash and we agreed to meet the twenty-five-year demand to have another inquiry. It certainly assuaged opinion at the time. It also turned out to be a long-running saga, however, lasting twelve years at a cost of nearly £200 million. Until it reported in 2010, I considered it a classic example of why you should never conduct inquiries into anything unless utterly impossible to resist, or in the most truly exceptional circumstances. They rarely achieve their aim. However, the report when published proved me wrong. It had been worth it: an exhaustive and fair account of what happened.

Somehow or other we staggered into early April when we had decided to try to broker agreement around the three strands that had been the basis of the talks under John Major. We fixed a date for the meeting. The fascinating thing about the Good Friday Agreement is that the way it came about was far more by accident than design. I was due to stay a day to give an agreed deal my endorsement, the detailed work having been done by officials. I ended up staying for four days and nights and engaging intimately in the detail of one of the most extraordinary peace negotiations ever undertaken. At critical points throughout those days the deal was lost; but in the end, and by the squeakiest of squeaks, we got it through. I can truthfully say I have never been involved in anything quite like it. And it did make history.

Talking of ‘history’, there was a hilarious moment when I first arrived. I had heard from David Trimble on the phone the night before that although an immense amount of detailed work by officials had indeed been done, not only was none of it actually agreed, it also looked as if it was very unlikely to be agreed. I decided to be in practical, workmanlike, non-rhetorical mode when I addressed the press outside Hillsborough, the stately home that is the perquisite of the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. ‘Today is not a day for sound bites,’ I began eagerly, oozing impatience to get down to work and irritation with anything flowery or contrived. Then – and heaven only knows where it came from, it just popped into my head – I said, ‘But I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder’, which of course was about as large a bite of sound as you could contemplate. In the corner of my eye I could see Jonathan and Alastair cracking up. I decided to say no more and quickly went back into the building before being taken to the negotiations, held at Castle Buildings at Stormont.

Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland government in the years following partition until the whole system collapsed, is typical of the extraordinary buildings with which Britain told the rest of the world of its own importance. Built in the early twentieth century, it is an imposing edifice with grounds to match and a grandeur that is impressive, stately and strong. Some lunatic, however, had decided that Castle Buildings – the modest annexe – should be where we met. There should be a warrant out for the person who designed it. There were next to no facilities, it was ugly, cramped and, worst of all, had no soul. I am rather sensitive to my surroundings. I love good design, find energy in beauty, particularly of architecture, and I like to work in an environment that pleases the eye and refreshes the soul. Castle Buildings was the antithesis.

However, never mind the damn building, it was clear that we had badly misjudged Unionist readiness to deal. Of course David Trimble was under perpetual pressure from Ian Paisley, who turned up outside Castle Buildings to condemn the whole thing as a monstrous sell-out.

I had also taken the precaution of talking the evening before to John Alderdice, the leader of the cross-community Alliance Party. John was the thoroughly reasonable leader of a thoroughly reasonable party, which meant they stood no chance of winning. Nonetheless, they exercised some swing influence in the centre and John, especially, was a quality politician who knew the Unionist community well. He told me bluntly the thing was a non-starter for David Trimble.

I went up to the room on the fifth floor that was to become my living quarters, my cell, for the next few days. I beetled along the corridor to see George Mitchell, who was in jovial mood but somewhat unnerved me by telling me jauntily that he thought the deal was undoable.

I took the decision then and there to take complete charge of the negotiation. I spoke again to David Trimble, who was in favour of leaving things until after Easter. I started going through the detail of what he needed. The previous night I had familiarised myself with the complexities of the different strands of negotiation. It was like being back at the Bar reading up the next day’s brief. I am lucky in being able to digest a large amount of information quickly, an invaluable training which the law really provides.

One myth about me is that I prefer the broad brush to the detail. In truth, it’s impossible as prime minister to be across the detail of everything, and in addition, too much detail creates an immediate wood/trees problem. But sometimes – at moments of crisis or negotiations like this, or some of those back-breaking European treaties or Budget agreements – the detail is absolutely of first importance. At such times, I would immerse myself in detail.

I did so now, and just as well. David had pages of amendments, and, naturally, one side’s improvement to the text would be the other side’s loss. With not much genuine basis for so doing, I promised David I would deliver what he needed.

I next got hold of Bertie, who had just arrived. Bertie is one of my favourite political leaders. Over time he became a true friend. He was heroic throughout the whole process, smart, cunning in the best sense, strong and, above all, free of the shackles of history. That is not to say he had no sense of history; on the contrary, his family had fought the British, had been part of the Easter Uprising, were Republicans through and through; but he had that elemental quality that defines great politicians: he was a student of history, not its prisoner.

His mother – to whom he was close – had just died, and the previous night he had watched over her body. It was good of him to come at all. Now he had to contend with me telling him that the North–South part – i.e. the all-Ireland part, so dear to his constituents – would have to be rewritten. It was not the news he wanted, but here’s where Bertie showed his mettle and his character.

On 7 April 1998 – and many times later in the years to come – he could have put the traditional past perspective of his country before a living, evolving vision of its future. Instead, he chose repeatedly to put the future first. His support and his ingenuity were recurring mainstays of the progress in the search for peace. His officials were really capable, and they took their cue from him. His presence and mine, his personality and mine, in a way symbolised the new, modern realities which were extinguishing old attitudes. In a sense we personified the opportunity to escape our history, British and Irish, and move on. Nonetheless, he left me in no doubt that rewriting the North–South pact would be a blow to the Nationalist side.