Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (104 page)

When she came into office, Mrs Thatcher found no expectation among her civil servants that much attention should be paid to the manifesto policy. The memo from the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, which awaited her on her first day, told her that a ‘new initiative’ was widely expected, and that ‘Expectations are also high in Dublin and the United States.’ Mrs Thatcher put her wiggly line of doubt under the words ‘new initiative’ (the phrase invariably referred to some form of power-sharing devolution and/or an ‘Irish dimension’) and ‘Dublin’.
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‘Dublin’, though, was worried by the manifesto’s regional-councils commitment. Although history has officially recorded that the first foreign head of government to visit Mrs Thatcher as prime minister was Helmut Schmidt of Germany, it was actually Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach (prime minister),
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who got in first with a ‘courtesy call’ just before she met Schmidt on 10 May. The discussion, at least on Lynch’s side, went beyond courtesies. The note of the meeting shows that Mrs Thatcher voiced no opinions beyond saying that Northern Ireland presented a problem ‘which did not yield to instant solutions’. Lynch, though, had come with an agenda: ‘Mr Lynch referred to the late Airey Neave’s ideas on Regional Councils.’ These, he said, would lead to ‘discrimination in housing matters … This process could quickly break down the goodwill which had slowly been created.’
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The nationalist SDLP, whom Dublin was trying to encourage, regarded power-sharing as the sine qua non for their participation in Northern Ireland politics.

In the United States, President Jimmy Carter came under pressure from the Irish-American lobby. ‘I am sure that a personal expression of interest by you to Mrs. Thatcher will encourage the new Government to pursue a political solution more vigorously,’ Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote to Carter.
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The President promptly called Mrs Thatcher personally and asked her for a paper setting out the situation in
Northern Ireland. Contrary to O’Neill’s hopes, Mrs Thatcher made the document as cautious on politics and as tough on security as possible. Carter’s administration acquiesced in Congressional efforts to prevent the supply of US Ruger personal-protection weapons to the Royal Ulster Constabulary despite a personal appeal from Mrs Thatcher. Meeting with Carter in December 1979 she told the President that ‘She herself had handled both the gun which the RUC at present used’ and the new gun being requested: ‘There was no doubt that the American Ruger was much better.’ ‘It had never occurred to her that there would be a problem about completing the order,’ she continued, demanding to know whether the President’s difficulty was one of ‘principle or timing’. Carter pleaded the latter, limply ceding leadership to the Congress: ‘The President said that he himself would like to approve the sale but did not wish to be defeated in Congress or to have a major altercation with them.’
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Governor Hugh Carey of New York tried to drag Humphrey Atkins and the Irish Foreign Minister together to meet him to discuss a plan for the future of the province. Mrs Thatcher intervened to prevent this, telling Atkins that he should not see Carey, because ‘Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and she herself would not think of discussing with President Carter, for example, US policy towards his black population.’
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Looking at the matter from a very different point of view, Ian Paisley’s
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sectarian Democratic Unionists also opposed integration with the rest of the United Kingdom. They had adopted various positions on this matter in the past, but after ‘the Big Man’s’ success in topping the poll in the European elections in Northern Ireland in June 1979 Paisley now saw himself as more powerful. Integration would destroy Paisley’s dream of becoming, in constitutional fact, what he wrote to tell Mrs Thatcher he already was – ‘the leader of Ulster’.
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The right sort of devolution could assist it. As for her senior Cabinet colleagues, all those with any experience in the field, with the partial exception of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, were personally committed to some version of power-sharing and a greater role for the Irish Republic. The Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, was chairman of the ministerial group on policy in Northern Ireland. As one of the architects of the Sunningdale Agreement, which, under Ted Heath, had imposed power-sharing upon Northern Ireland in 1973 (and
had failed because of the Ulster Workers’ Strike the following year), he was never going to depart from that mental model. His usual answer to all the ills of Northern Ireland was: ‘When things get bad, have a conference.’
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In short, almost all the players in the drama were against anything resembling the policy orphaned by the death of Neave. The only exceptions to this were the ‘Official’ Unionists, the largest political party in Northern Ireland, formally called the Ulster Unionist Party, led by Jim Molyneaux
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and provided with intellectual rigour by Enoch Powell. They had allies in the Tory Party, of whom by far the most important was Ian Gow. The only other exception was Mrs Thatcher herself, and although she knew what she did not like, she did not really have a coherent policy of her own.

Northern Ireland therefore lacked direction for the first few months of Mrs Thatcher’s time in office. She and the whole government were busy with other things. What changed matters was the assassination on 27 August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten and, on the same day, the murder of eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint, both carried out by the IRA. One obvious effect of these atrocities was to strengthen Mrs Thatcher in her conviction of the need for strong security measures and much greater pressure on the Republic to prevent terrorism. The Republic was ‘harbouring known murderers’,
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she angrily told a meeting of senior ministers the following day, and she wanted to use ‘leverage against the Republic’, including ‘administrative action against Irish immigrants’,
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to get the extradition of suspects to Britain. Fired up by the success of her morale-boosting visit to the province in the wake of the outrages, Mrs Thatcher was full of eagerness to sort out the lack of co-ordination between the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and to make cross-border security co-operation a reality. With typically energetic sympathy, she wrote letters to the families of each of the eighteen murdered soldiers, each one different, and all in her own hand. No prime minister had ever thought of doing this before. It was a custom which she was to maintain. As well as giving comfort to the families, it served to remind Mrs Thatcher, after each death, of the human cost of Ulster’s tragedy.
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A second meeting with Jack Lynch was arranged to coincide with his visit to London for Lord Mountbatten’s funeral. Humphrey Atkins asked Mrs Thatcher to promise the Taoiseach ‘political progress’. ‘I see no possibility of opening up in this way with Mr Lynch,’ she replied. ‘… The most we can contemplate going to is preparation for
effective local government
. The rest sounds too much as if we are treating them [Northern Ireland] as a colony – not as part of the UK.’
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Instead, at the meeting, Mrs Thatcher pressed Lynch to do more about security. Lynch’s reaction was to say that everything was very difficult. He preferred a political solution, agreed between the two governments. Mrs Thatcher, in her turn, was cautious: ‘It would help enormously if people would stop talking about the total unity of Ireland.’
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At a plenary meeting on the same day, matters became heated. Backed by an unusually hawkish Carrington, Mrs Thatcher warned Lynch that ‘she would be unable to restrain public opinion in this country if … she and Mr Lynch were unable to point to anything new [on security] that would be done.’ She ‘asked whether the Irish side were prepared to get down to brass tacks’.
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The Irish delegation were taken aback by her vehemence, and Lynch was slow to reply. George Colley, the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), tried to argue back. According to Dermot Nally,
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then Deputy Secretary to the Department of the Taoiseach, who was present as part of the Irish delegation, ‘One of the ministers made the remark that “You may not like the idea but some people have a quantity of sympathy with the men of violence.” That made her furious. “Are you condoning murder?” She nearly had to be held back. The meeting with Lynch was not a success.’
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Yet the very thing which made Mrs Thatcher so angry – the feebleness of the Irish Republic towards terrorists operating from within its borders – was the factor used to push forward the idea of a political initiative: without more political conciliation, it was argued, there could not be better security. In October, Atkins announced an initiative which involved talks with all the parties in Northern Ireland about possible ways of bringing devolution about. At the same time, senior ministers and officials, privately sceptical of Atkins and his rather half-baked plan, pushed for
something more. Following the favourable publicity given to Pope John Paul II’s appeal, during his acclaimed visit to the Republic at the end of September 1979, for an end to violence and an effort to fill the political vacuum, they sought a bigger political initiative. John Hunt suggested to Mrs Thatcher that Atkins should be bypassed by a working group which would produce a consultation document.
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Within the British administrative machine, there were signs that matters would be settled – chiefly by a combination of the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office – at a higher level. Less attention should be paid to what parties in Northern Ireland wanted, and more to a deal with the Republic.

Atkins’s initiative then confronted Mrs Thatcher with an awkward surprise. The Official Unionists, the more moderate of the Unionist parties, declined to take part in the Atkins discussions, because the Atkins plan was anti-integrationist. This was not, in itself, unexpected, but the precise trigger for their non-cooperation was. Following a meeting with the Unionists’ leader, Ian Gow, always the conduit between the government and the UUP, wrote to Mrs Thatcher:

Earlier this month, Jim Molyneaux told me that when he agreed to deliver the Official Unionist Members of Parliament on our side in the crucial vote at 10 p.m. on Wednesday 28th of March 1979, it was on the understanding that if our party was elected in the General Election which followed, we would set up one or more elected regional councils. If Airey had not given a clear indication that this would be our policy, there is some doubt (to put it at its lowest) whether Jim Molyneaux could have delivered the Ulster Unionist votes … Airey told me nothing of any undertaking which had been given to Molyneaux … and of course Airey was murdered two days later. Nevertheless, it is, of course, correct to say that the policy on which you and Airey had agreed for Ulster had been [given] the broad assent of the Official Unionists.
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Gow then improved the shining hour by enclosing a memo by T. E. Utley arguing that the Atkins strategy was ‘disastrously wrong’ and would fail, and that the retreat from Neave’s policy was a ‘serious mistake’. ‘A devolved Parliament in Ulster … is likely to be dominated by hardline Protestants far more nervous and bitter than Craigavon or Brookeborough [the first and third (Unionist) prime ministers of Northern Ireland], feeling no special link with any British party and determined to rule the Province itself.’
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Mrs Thatcher underlined this sentence approvingly.

Mrs Thatcher – who kept Gow and her civil servants carefully separate in all dealings about Northern Ireland – seems to have sat on this suggestion of a promise from Neave to the Unionists and done nothing about it.
Months later, it came to the notice of officialdom. Kenneth Stowe, who had moved on from being the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary to become permanent under-secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, had fairly frequent, approved private conversations with Enoch Powell. At the end of March 1980, Powell raised the matter of the Neave promise with him. Stowe was ‘absolutely appalled by this’, since he and Atkins had explicitly denied in Northern Ireland that such a promise had been made.
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He made an official record of this talk, which was immediately taken by Atkins and him to Mrs Thatcher. In the note, marked ‘secret and personal’, Stowe said that Powell had asked to see the Prime Minister herself about the breaking of the alleged promise, which, he said, had been made to him personally: ‘I was struck by the stark clarity and precise terms in which Mr Powell referred to his agreement with Mr Neave. I was also struck by the fact that he seemed not to assume that the secretary of state was a party to, or even aware of this agreement, but plainly indicated that the PM was, hence his decision that he must go to see her.’
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Stowe and Atkins then went to see Mrs Thatcher and Gow, and she declared that she had known nothing about it at the time.
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Gow, too, had not known of it. Willie Whitelaw was also consulted. He likewise denied all knowledge of the ‘deal’ by anyone in his ministerial group, and warned that any attempt to act upon it would have terrible consequences ‘if the minority were totally disillusioned at apparent British duplicity’.
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Apparent British duplicity towards the
majority
seems to have been regarded less seriously.

In any event, Mrs Thatcher herself then met Enoch Powell, with Ian Gow, on 1 May. Powell advanced his criticisms of the Atkins proposals, because they were a step towards devolution, but, oddly, made no mention of the Neave promise. In the absence of Neave himself, and therefore of any proof, Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues decided that there was nothing to be done and that they should press on with the Atkins plan regardless. They were inclined to do so not only by the general institutional push for devolution, but by the belief in some official circles that Ian Paisley might, after all, prove to be a constructive force from their point of view, and more inclined to a deal than his granite rhetoric suggested. Much damage was done to the relationship between Official Unionism and Mrs Thatcher’s government. From then on, trust was undermined, and Unionists tended to conclude either that Mrs Thatcher herself was deceiving them or – more often, because many of them admired her personally for her robust attitude to terrorism – that she was not fully master in her own house. Traditional conspiracy theories about the Foreign Office sprang up again. As Utley had predicted, moderate Unionism was sidelined, and Paisleyism, which prospered whenever ‘sell-out’ and ‘betrayal’ were suspected,
continued to grow. From the point of view of those who wanted an ‘Irish dimension’ to the problem of Northern Ireland, the fact that Mrs Thatcher seemed to have had no knowledge of the Neave ‘promise’ was crucial. If she had done so, they believed, she would never have authorized the conversations between British officials and the Taoiseach’s office which, in the long run, were to prove so important.
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