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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.

As Peter Mandelson has told The Spectator:

Adams and McGuiness knew exactly who they were dealing with in Jonathan. They were playing with a public schoolboy who seemed to love being played with — and who too often acted as if he enjoyed being beguiled by their charm.

During his all-too-brief-tenure as Northern Ireland Secretary, Mandelson was never as sold on them as Powell was and declined to override the advice of the security professionals, as No 10 often wanted. This is one of the few bits of ‘insider’ gossip that is told as never before — and it says more about Powell than it does about Mandelson.

So when Powell has to go into hospital with an infected foot during another ‘crisis’ in the talks, Adams ‘jokes’ that he hopes it’s not the result of a kneecapping (which were still going on in large numbers at the time). Powell takes this high wit meekly on the chin. But he does not for one moment suppose that he enjoys the reciprocal right to dish it out.

Consider his description of Adams’ assistant,

Siobhan O’Hanlon, now sadly dead, who ferried me around Belfast on a number of occasions. She was tough but straight and entirely reliable. I particularly regretted a joke I made when, late on Thursday afternoon, she drifted into our office, asking if Gerry could have a meeting with Tony. I said Bertie [Ahern] was in but we could get rid of him. She said, ‘Oh, no need,’ and I threw in that I did not mean ‘get rid of him’ in her usual sense. She left with dignity and I felt bad.

But Powell knows full well that O’Hanlon was the fourth member of IRA Active Service Unit at Gibraltar in 1988 that sought to murder soldiers of the Royal Anglians — and was lucky enough not to have been there when her fellow terrorists were shot dead by the SAS. Siobhan O’Hanlon had a hard, fanatic heart and I doubt she lost any sleep over Powell’s quip. But it reveals much about the state of mind of one of Britain’s key negotiators.

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