The goodwill created by the handling of the Saville Report was something I didn’t want to waste. Peace in Northern Ireland was one of the landmark achievements of the last twenty years, and here we had a chance to build on it.
Before the 2010 election we helped to fill in the missing piece of the devolution jigsaw. In February the Labour government, along with the Irish, had secured the Hillsborough Castle Agreement, which provided for the devolution of policing and justice.
This was still hugely controversial. It was effectively giving a party allied to the IRA, which had murdered many police officers, a say over policing. I knew how hard that would be for many Unionists to swallow. It required a vote in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and our partners in the Ulster Unionist Party were opposed to it. I came under huge pressure to bring them on board, including a phone call from George W. Bush asking me, ‘How are we going to get that cat Empey [a reference to then UUP leader Reg, now Lord, Empey] over the line?’
In all my dealings with Bush, he demonstrated deep understanding of the issues in Northern Ireland and around the world. I always thought people got him wrong, and couldn’t see past the Texan drawl – he was ‘misunderestimated’, as he might have put it in one of his trademark Bushisms. I was on the receiving end of one once. ‘If ever you’re in Texas, Laura and I would love to have you and Samantha to stay,’ he said during one of our phone calls. ‘We can offer hot sheets and a clean meal.’ It’s become a family expression ever since.
Eventually, when the vote came in March, we and the UUP simply agreed to differ: we backed the move and they voted against. It was passed in the Assembly, and policing and justice powers were devolved in April.
Now, in office, I stated that our intention was for a ‘shared future, not a shared-out future’, capturing how we wanted to move from a situation where the two parties in government in Northern Ireland – Sinn Féin and the DUP – would govern for the whole of the Province, rather than each merely trying to secure benefits for its own community.
While all this had been happening, economic trouble had been brewing south of the border. After the collapse of the housing bubble and a banking crisis followed by a deep recession, the Republic of Ireland’s debt had risen from 25 per cent of GDP in 2007 to 90 per cent in 2010. I sent an adviser to Dublin, and he reported back that when he had asked for a three-point plan that the government was going to follow, one person had simply answered, ‘I.M.F.’
I was determined that Britain should help its nearest neighbour, an idea that caused an expected but limited backlash. Arch complainers like Christopher Chope and the other usual suspects said Britain should be looking out for its own national interests. Well, yes, but I was clear that we were. Our economies, banking systems – not to mention our people and history – were intertwined.
The Loans to Ireland Act was quickly passed by Parliament on 15 December 2010. It couldn’t have been more necessary or more urgent: Ireland’s debt peaked at 120 per cent of GDP in 2012. Fortunately, a new Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, acted fast to cut spending, raise taxes and address the banking problems. It was brave, it averted any Greek-style collapse, and it showed that if you take the tough decisions your economy can recover quickly.
Enda was prepared to do things differently with Britain, too. One of our most remarkable moments together was a visit to the Island of Ireland Peace Park and Tyne Cot Cemetery near Ypres, Belgium – the largest Commonwealth war cemetery anywhere in the world. The December wind whipped our hair and clothes as the rows of white headstones around us – most of them unnamed – lay still and silent. For decades there had been shamefully little recognition of the contribution of 200,000 Irish men to that bloody conflict. It didn’t fit the Republican narrative to talk about us fighting side by side for the British crown. But here was an Irish PM, side by side with a British PM, forging a new narrative. (Enda and I got on well, and our relationship would culminate when he became my staunchest supporter during the European negotiations five years later.)
But our efforts were nothing compared to the brave gesture that was the Queen’s breakthrough visit to the Republic in 2011 – the first time a British monarch had set foot in an independent Ireland. The trip culminated in a state banquet at Dublin Castle. It was incredibly moving to witness our monarch speak of forgiveness – not least as her own cousin, Lord Mountbatten, had been murdered by the IRA in 1979. Every carefully chosen word healed another wound of history. It was a lesson in reconciliation from the best. Typically, she downplayed her achievement, and I remember her saying to me something along the lines of ‘All I did was decide it was time for a visit.’
At the banquet I was seated next to the great poet Seamus Heaney. On his other side was Prince Philip. Heaney had once written the lines ‘Be advised my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.’ I wondered how the two of them would get on. The Duke spent the entire dinner telling hilarious and often inappropriate stories, all to peals of laughter. Heaney turned to me at the end of dinner and simply said, ‘Bejaysus, that man’s a card.’
But back in Northern Ireland, the shared future agenda was beginning to hit the buffers.
In late 2012, Belfast City Council voted to stop flying the Union Flag over City Hall 365 days a year, which led to disgraceful attacks on the police by Loyalists, and one Orange parade caused serious rioting in 2013.
In late 2013 the Northern Ireland parties invited former US diplomat Richard Haass to chair talks aimed at resolving these issues, but by 2014 there was stalemate. By the middle of the year we were faced with an additional problem when Sinn Féin refused to accept the UK government’s welfare reforms. Even though welfare was a devolved matter in Northern Ireland it typically mirrored the rest of the UK, and departing from that was putting enormous pressure on an already struggling Stormont budget.
In October 2014 I was left with no option but to ask Theresa Villiers, by now the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, to convene new talks. These were to last for eleven weeks. At a Stormont meeting in December, Enda’s chief of staff gave me frank advice on how to handle the next phase of the talks: ‘Prime Minister, just tell them they’re not getting any more fecking money.’
Talks went on and on until 3 a.m., and resumed at 8 a.m. At one point a group of men turned up in the middle of the night, and when I asked who they were I was told, ‘Ah, that’ll be the IRA to give their view on the deal.’ They blew in talking loudly, wearing football scarves and leather jackets, and disappeared upstairs. Everyone else seemed to be willing to accept this, and so was I if it meant peace and progress.
Due to our relentless focus on counter-terrorism, no longer did we need to worry that a breakdown in talks would automatically lead to a descent into violence, as had happened in decades past. The Police Service of Northern Ireland and our security services deserve a lot of credit for that.
And there had been a further shift. In 2010 we had consciously shut down Sinn Féin’s direct channel to No. 10, requiring the party to work as an equal in the devolved administration. Though its leader Gerry Adams and number two Martin McGuinness didn’t seem to accept this, we said that things had to be done out in the open, fully above board. They couldn’t be marching up Downing Street every five minutes demanding further concessions.
Indeed, when Adams turned up at the talks on Thursday, 11 December for the first time and later declared it ‘the most cack-handed process’ he’d ever known, I replied: ‘How would you know, Gerry? You haven’t been here.’ It was clear that no agreement was even close.
So I left. This was a shock to everyone, so used were they to Blair and Brown hanging around for days. But I wanted to signal that we were in different circumstances, and we would do things differently. Devolution and the preferential financial settlement for Northern Ireland gave them the wherewithal to be involved in active decision-making for the Province rather than the endless negotiation of the past.<
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Walking out worked. The negotiating team reached the Stormont House Agreement just before lunchtime on 23 December. It covered welfare, budgets, flags and parading, as well as agreeing far-reaching new bodies to help Northern Ireland address the legacy of its troubled past.
Implementation, however, stalled just before the 2015 general election, again over the refusal of Sinn Féin to accept welfare reforms. So after the election Theresa embarked on a further talks process. After ten weeks she secured the Fresh Start Agreement, which effectively resolved the welfare issue by Sinn Féin agreeing to accept legislation passed in Westminster rather than in Stormont.
The following months saw a period of relative stability in Stormont politics, with the DUP now led by Arlene Foster and Sinn Féin under the leadership of Martin McGuinness. Sadly, it was not to last. In late 2016 the Northern Ireland Executive became embroiled in a crisis over a renewable heating scheme which led to the effective collapse of power-sharing in January 2017.
At the time of writing, Northern Ireland has been without a government for over two years, despite the painstaking efforts of the UK and Irish governments. Talks are stalled over issues of language, identity and culture. That doesn’t surprise me. Look at most issues in Northern Ireland – renewable heating scandals, welfare rows, whatever – and you’ll usually find the old divisions lurking behind them. Sometimes it feels that every policy dispute is a proxy for the past.
Of course, Brexit has further complicated matters by upsetting part of the balance of the 1998 settlement and unsettling a large section of nationalism. But I believe that the Province can truly flourish. When I was PM I didn’t just see the political Northern Ireland of Hillsborough Castle, I saw everyday, twenty-first-century Northern Ireland. I met entrepreneurs building a tech hub there, Church leaders building bridges there, film-makers using the province as their backdrop and tourists flocking to its beauty spots. I saw just as much passion about the future as there is about the past.
When it came to Wales, my instinct was similar to my view in Scotland: to go with the grain of devolution. The purpose was not to avert independence as such – the Welsh were far less secessionist. It was more about getting politics in Wales away from the constitutional question and onto the bread and butter issues that really mattered.
This, I admit, was linked to our party’s prospects in Wales. We had last had a majority of Welsh MPs in Westminster in 1859. After that it was usually just a handful, and in 1997 and 2001, none at all. Yet I was strongly of the view that it was only when the Welsh devolution settlement was stable and accepted, and the Welsh Assembly had real powers and responsibilities, that the Conservatives could recover there.
In 2005, three new Conservative Welsh MPs were elected – David Jones, David T.C. Davies and Stephen Crabb – and when I was running for the party leadership I met with them. They tried to persuade me that no more powers should be ceded to the Assembly, but I wasn’t swayed. Attitudes had changed since the devolution referendum, and more people were now supporting a stronger Assembly. What’s more, I argued that we should be embracing Welsh national identity, the Welsh language and cultural events, moving into a space traditionally occupied by the left not only for our electoral outlook, but for the health of our Union.
The momentum was with us. We recovered strongly at the Welsh Assembly elections in 2007, the European elections in 2009 and at the 2010 general election, when eight Welsh Conservative MPs were elected, five of them new. But I wanted the recovery to go much further. My strategy was to show that Wales was about more than Cardiff, and more than devolutional wrangling. My visits always focused on businesses, infrastructure, investment and apprenticeships.
When it came to devolution I happily assented to the Welsh Assembly’s vote to hold a referendum on devolving powers to itself in twenty areas, including education, health, environment and housing – powers promised in a 2006 law, but not activated. The referendum took place on 3 March 2011, and there was an overwhelming majority for this further devolution.
The problem was that this was still power without responsibility: the power to spend money, but not the responsibility to raise it.
As in Scotland, a spending competition was unlikely to settle the issue or to help a Conservative revival. It was always likely to favour those parties best able to stoke up national grievances and shout at Westminster, ‘Give us more money.’ So I was keen for fiscal devolution – to give Wales more powers over its own taxation and spending. I commissioned a review, which in turn led in 2015 to the St David’s Day Agreement, which protected funding from central government to Wales, devolved more powers to Cardiff, and allowed for a referendum on income tax devolution.
Looking back, my principal regret is that we didn’t get to this position faster. As is so often the case, I think that comes down to personnel. We started off with Cheryl Gillan as secretary of state for Wales, after she had shadowed the role for five years. Although she was born in Cardiff, I was keen to get an MP from a Welsh constituency into the post, and when the chance arose I chose David Jones, the Member for Clwyd West. He knew the issues well, and was well liked in north Wales. But unfortunately, like lots of north Walians, he didn’t particularly like the devolution settlement. In many ways north Wales looks more to nearby Manchester and Liverpool than to Cardiff. So more powers to the national capital aren’t exactly a priority.
It was only when I appointed Stephen Crabb, the young MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire, to the role in July 2014 that I found someone whose views had developed and who now had the same way of thinking as me. He was fantastic at turning the theory into reality. And we were to see the fruits of his efforts at the 2015 general election, when more Tory MPs were elected in Wales than at any time since 1987.
The majority of the time I spent on the devolved administrations would be devoted to Scotland.
Personally I spent a lot of time in Scotland, and I went on holiday every year to the island of Jura, in the Inner Hebrides. Twenty-seven miles long and five miles wide, Jura is home to just two hundred people. It is famous as the place George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, and as the home of one of Scotland’s best whisky distilleries (a case of Jura whisky was my luxury when I went on Desert Island Discs).
Sam and I had been going there since the mid-1990s and it had become one of my favourite places on earth. There was no telephone and no road. You could only reach the house by boat, or by braving a three-and-a-half-hour walk from Jura’s only road, which ran along the other coast. By the time I became prime minister the gas lamps had been replaced by electricity as a generator whirred away in a shed next to the house, but otherwise it was still the haven of peace that I loved.
But what forced Scotland to the top of the agenda when I came to office was the growing popularity of the Scottish National Party and its support for outright independence.
The SNP had been a steady, angry presence for decades, and had even survived Labour’s landslide in 1997, doubling its number of MPs from three to six. It had also proved Labour’s prediction that ‘devolution will kill nationalism stone dead’ to be completely wrong. Instead, devolution had exposed the fact that Labour had been taking Scotland for granted.
The main Unionist party – we had put ourselves out of the game by opposing devolution, among other things – was thus a weak opponent to the nationalists. This meant that until years later, when the Conservatives once more asserted themselves in Scotland, nationalism became a stronger rather than weaker force. The devolved Parliament provided an ideal platform for the SNP message of grudge and grievance. It allowed them to build the case for independence step by step.
Some Conservatives argued that this showed that devolution had been a terrible error, and that we should do our best to limit it, or even reverse it. In fact, what it showed was the importance of reviving conservatism in Scotland in order to protect the Union. And we couldn’t do that while opposing devolution, which was now th
e status quo.
In early 2007, three hundred years since the Act of Union that brought England and Wales together with Scotland, the SNP emerged as Scotland’s largest party, and governed as a one-party minority government.
By 2011 we were in power at Westminster, and the SNP was heading into another Scottish Parliament election with a manifesto commitment to an independence referendum. If it won a majority, it would claim a democratic mandate to hold that referendum. The UK government would therefore have a decision to make, since the power to hold a referendum was reserved, and so would need agreement from Westminster.
There was the option of making a referendum non-binding, or of denying it altogether. Many people wanted this. After all, a referendum was a massive gamble. The Union we loved could be broken in two. Some would do anything to avoid that – or, more realistically, to put it off until another prime minister’s watch.
While I could understand the desire to avoid a referendum, I thought it would be a much bigger gamble to thwart it. The sense of grievance against a distant, out-of-touch Westminster government would only grow. That would be the fuel the SNP needed to turn an unlikely vote for independence – in 2012 only about 35 per cent of Scots were saying they would vote Yes – into a near-certainty.
On 5 May 2011, the SNP won that majority. Annabel Goldie had been a fearsome Conservative leader in the Scottish Parliament for several years. But, disappointed by the loss of two seats, she resigned.
At that election a thirty-two-year-old local BBC journalist, Ruth Davidson, was elected to Holyrood. A month later she would become leader of the Conservatives in Scotland. It would have been inconceivable ten years earlier that we could be led in Scotland by a young, gay, female Territorial Army signaller. Ruth and I were immediate political soulmates. I was so proud of how much our party had changed, and excited about what we could achieve with Ruth at the helm in Scotland.
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