Mr Powell’s ‘talking cure’

I’m beginning to wonder where I can go this summer to get away from Jonathan Powell. Suddenly Tony Blair’s curly-haired former chief of staff is everywhere, bursting out of newspapers and Radio 4 programmes, relentlessly repeating the message that it’s good to talk to terrorists. Or, to be more specific, that it was jolly good to talk to Messrs Adams and McGuinness of the IRA — which he and Tony did during the heady days of the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ — and that now he thinks it would also be good to talk to the Taleban one day, and even perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. One is tempted to think that if Beelzebub were to make an impromptu appearance on earth, the first thing he would see would be Jonathan Powell walking purposefully towards him, clearing his throat for a chat.

Mr Powell recently observed, in the Guardian, that ‘there seems to be a pattern to the West’s behaviour when we face terrorist campaigns. First we fight them militarily, then we talk to them, then we treat them as statesmen.’ Nothing in his subsequent reasoning leads one to believe that this is ever a traject-ory of which he might conceivably disapprove. When he first met McGuinness, he admits, his scruples were such that he refused to shake his hand: ‘a gesture which I now regret’. With time, scruples were shed: after bantering sessions with Martin and Gerry, and glimpses of them playing with the Blair children in the Downing Street rose garden, he invited them to his post-wedding party as ‘personal friends’. Oh dear. As Adams and McGuinness no doubt twigged early on, there are certain susceptible English public schoolboys for whom the whiff of cordite is a very potent attractant.

The gist of Powell’s talking cure, which he now sees as transferable to trouble spots all over the world, is based on the notion that the settlement reached in Northern Ireland was an unalloyed triumph.