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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Great Hatred, Little Room

Paying the price of peace

Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential.

Powell states that he does not touch the matter because he was not in the room at the time; and in any case, like Alastair Campbell, he does not ‘do God’. Powell’s squeamishness is perfectly understandable, but this shared spiritual experience constituted a critical part of getting Paisley into a comfort zone in which the DUP chieftain could do the deal. Because Powell was so focused on getting results, he had little time to enjoy the assorted gothicities of his Provincial interlocutors. Certainly, far more light is shed on the DUP’s evolution in the recently revised editions of two outstanding biographies — Frank Millar on David Trimble and Ed Moloney on Ian Paisley.

The real utility of this volume is to afford a unique insight into the mentality of the top men at No 10. It is hugely revealing on how Adams and McGuinness played to British perceptions of their own vulnerability, after the fashion of a classic protection racket: ‘Pay us or else we can’t guarantee what some of our gang might do….’ Powell sometimes acknowledged that the Sinn Fein/IRA leaders were ‘chisellers’ and that they couldn’t go back ‘to war’. And he recognises that ‘the movement’ could, miraculously, turn off the violence when it wanted to (as when all punishment beatings ceased during the Clinton visit to Northern Ireland of 1995).

But he and Blair nonetheless opted to pay up — even after the Omagh bomb of 1998 and the changed international climate post-9/11. As Charles Guthrie, who was Chief of the Defence Staff for the first three years of Blair’s premiership tells The Spectator after reading the book, ‘Blair and Powell were so obsessed with getting peace that they would pay almost any price to obtain it’.

During the course of this dialogue, the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff developed a sustained, grudging respect for the capabilities and sensibilities of the republican movement which they accorded to no other party. But it was also born out in part of a certain fascination for and frisson in dealing with the ‘rough trade’. Powell came to regard the republican leadership as ‘friends’ and even invited them to his recent wedding.

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