We keep being incited to find it heartwarming that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley were known as the Chuckle Brothers. But what were they chuckling about? Their shared success at outwitting the British state. Both, though for opposite reasons, had made their careers out of harassing Britain, and both, in their later years, had acquired money, power and status by doing so. In the case of McGuinness and his gang, Britain greatly underplayed its hand. Having militarily beaten the IRA, successive British governments could have marginalised them, but instead they accepted them as authentic representatives of the Irish people who had to be included in any settlement. The process for doing this systematically disadvantaged the moderates and bigged up the thugs. It created arrangements which virtually guarantee that Sinn Fein and the DUP will permanently carve up (‘share’ is the wrong word) government between them. So Martin and Ian’s collusive chuckles were at the expense, not only of Britain, but also of the non- sectarian people of Northern Ireland.
My only encounter with Martin McGuinness was on BBC Question Time in 2001. En route to Belfast, I bumped into David Trimble, who was also on the panel. He advised that McGuinness was a good television performer but could be stirred to injudicious anger. In the greenroom beforehand, McGuinness exercised his famous charm on all of us, surrounded by grim-faced heavies. On air, everything went pleasantly until a question about Afghanistan prompted someone from the floor to ask how McGuinness justified people being shot in the back of the head. Trimble said there was a new book about that — by Liam Clarke — and left it there. Instead of ignoring Trimble, McGuinness foolishly rose to the bait and said the book was all lies. I had read the book, and this gave me the cue to quote a sentence from it about how McGuinness had been ‘influential’ in a number of incidents in which dead bodies were found by the roadside. He started screeching ‘Where’s the evidence? Where’s the evidence?’ I went on, through the yells, to speak about his involvement in the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen and the killing of the informer Frank Hegarty, who came back home because McGuinness had assured his mother he would be safe. Martin screeched some more, and looked absolutely murderous, and therefore less charming.
As the lights went down, McGuinness whispered to David Dimbleby, ‘That was libellous,’ so I rushed round to see the editor (the programme airs shortly after it has been recorded) and begged him not to cut it. To the BBC’s credit, it did not, so viewers could see the charmer’s mask slip. Now some people are wearing black ties on television to mark what they call his ‘passing’. There are better people to mourn, some of them killed on the orders of Martin McGuinness. He definitely, as one dignified brother of a terrorist victim at Claudy acknowledged on Tuesday, ‘changed his ways’. He never, however, changed his mind: he saw the ‘armed struggle’ as a necessary phase, not as something of which he should be ashamed.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article is available in the latest issue of The Spectator. Subscribe here.
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