by Andy McSmith
That record sum for damages was held for less than two years, to be topped when Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, sued the satirical magazine Private Eye. This peculiar case had its origins in the unseemly rush by tabloid journalists to buy up witnesses’ stories, which began even before Sutcliffe had made his first court appearance, after someone in Yorkshire leaked his name. His father, John Sutcliffe, and two sisters, for instance, were bought up by the Daily Mail, with whom they entered into a £5,000 contract for an exclusive interview and relevant photographs. Olivia Reivers, who had survived being attacked by Sutcliffe, was paid £4,000 by the Daily Star. On 30 January 1981, three weeks after Sutcliffe’s arrest, Private Eye alleged: ‘The Daily Mail appears to be leading in the squalid race to “tie-up” the Sutcliffe family. While lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe is in custody, his wife Sonia had made a deal with the Mail worth £250,000’.33 At first, this report, which went on to give other details about press buy-ups, produced no reaction from Sonia Sutcliffe, but had an extraordinary impact in the larger world. It triggered a furious reaction from Doreen Hill, who was in grief over her daughter Jacqueline’s murder (see Chapter 2) and instructed her solicitor to send a complaint to the Press Council. Mrs Hill drew support from a vast number of influential people, including the Queen, whose private secretary wrote to say that ‘Her Majesty . . . certainly shares in the sense of distaste which right-minded people will undoubtedly feel’.34
The Private Eye story was wrong in one important detail – Sonia Sutcliffe had never clinched a deal with the Daily Mail nor any other newspaper – but that went unchallenged until January 1987, when a solicitor’s letter suddenly arrived at Private Eye’s offices, demanding damages. The magazine offered to apologize and make a substantial payment to Sutcliffe’s victims, but Mrs Sutcliffe, who had not been able to return to her teaching job since her husband’s arrest, was worried about her mortgage and wanted to go to court. In the witness stand she came across as a sincere and timid woman caught up in something she did not understand. It took the jury just an hour-and-a-half to reach a verdict in her favour, and award damages of £600,000, about ten times the total compensation paid to all Sutcliffe’s surviving victims. Maureen Long, for instance, who had survived horrible injuries inflicted on her by Sutcliffe, merited £8,500. ‘If this is justice, I’m a banana,’ Private Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop, declared outside the court.35 Other newspapers who had received writs from Mrs Sutcliffe’s lawyers took the hint and settled in a hurry. Even after the Private Eye award had been reduced on appeal to £60,000, Mrs Sutcliffe was the richer by around £270,000. She should have quit while she was on top, but she went on to sue the News of the World over a story alleging that she had attempted a romance with a Greek travel agent who could pass as a Ripper ‘lookalike’. The story was untrue, but the News of the World fielded a formidable legal team who succeeded in bringing forth evidence that Sonia Sutcliffe admired her husband ‘Pete’ for his campaign to clean up the streets; hated the nickname ‘Ripper’; admired Hitler; had lied to Bradford Council to receive benefits when she had a large sum in the bank; and most significantly had accepted money from newspaper journalists. She lost and the legal costs must have drained all her earlier winnings. Although Private Eye could now claim that the thrust, if not the detail, of the original story had been proved right, it did not alter the fact that it had lost many thousands of pounds.
Soon, even the jury’s eye-watering award in that case had been eclipsed in a weirdly obscure case involving an expatriate Russian historian and a former army officer. Lord Aldington, chairman of Sun Alliance insurance, had been a brigadier stationed near the Yugoslav border at the end of the Second World War, when thousands of Russians, Ukrainians and Yugoslavs who had fought on the German side were handed over to the Communists by the British. They faced near certain death. At the behest of a businessman with a grievance against Sun Alliance, Count Nikolai Tolstoy wrote a pamphlet accusing Aldington of having blood on his hands. About 10,000 copies were printed. The libel award was £1.5m, plus £500,000 costs. Tolstoy was then told that if he wished to appeal, he must pay a £124,900 advance to indemnify Aldington’s costs. He declared himself bankrupt and years later won a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that the judgement infringed his right to free speech. Aldington died in 2000, without receiving any damages.
Amid awards like these, the Sun rolled over and paid up without going to court to contest a case brought by the singer Elton John. He was the subject of a tale that Kelvin MacKenzie’s brother, Craig, had brought into the office during the Wapping dispute. It alleged that the rock star had recruited rent boys for long orgies involving drugs and bondage, even specifying the date of one of the sessions. The story was so obviously unsound that the legal department gave the editor a written warning not to run it, but this was ignored. In no time, the Daily Mirror had run a counter story proving that Elton John had been aboard Concorde on the specif ed date. The Sun persisted for twenty-one months, using increasingly dubious tactics in an effort to find something sufficiently incriminating to frighten their target into dropping his lawsuit, but finally gave up in December 1988 on the eve of the scheduled court hearing. That morning’s front page was dominated by an enormous headline saying ‘Sorry Elton’, underneath which was printed the news that the paper had agreed to pay him £1m. Christmas at the Sun’s office party was cheered by a tirade from Kelvin MacKenzie to all his ‘fucking useless’ staff, in honour of the reprimand he had just received from Rupert Murdoch.36
Despite the setbacks in court, the nation’s media moguls and their consumers could look back on a boom decade. For the television viewer, restricted ten years earlier to a diet of three channels, there was the first glimpse of a world to come in which there would be no limit to the number of programmes beamed into the home – though whether or not more would mean better was another question. Although Fleet Street, as a geographical location, had lost the industry that made it special, the newspapers were actually enjoying a rare boom because of the dramatic fall in the cost of producing them. There were new national titles on sale in the newsagents for the first time since the war. In the long run, the computer technology that had given the failing newspaper industry this shot in the arm would threaten its continued existence, but not yet. For the time being, the industry was doing well.
CHAPTER 12
THE BOMB AND THE BALLOT
On the morning of 27 October 1980, prison wardens in Northern Ireland’s notorious H-Block went from cell to cell delivering breakfast, as usual, to the republican and loyalist gunmen held there. Unusually, seven Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners, led by their commander, a hardened republican named Brendan Hughes, refused to eat. It was another development in a battle that been waged since the mid-1970s between IRA prisoners and the British government. The IRA internees demanded to be classed as political prisoners, and specifically to be allowed to wear their own clothes. This might seem a piffling cause for such a tragedy that was about to begin, but the symbolism went to the heart of the Northern Irish conflict. The republicans had never accepted the settlement of 1922 that divided Ireland. The Provisional IRA, the smaller Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and the virtually defunct Official IRA considered themselves to be patriots fighting an army of occupation.
In the late 1970s, this demand had produced the so-called ‘dirty protest’, during which the men refused to wear any clothes at all, remaining in their cells wrapped in blankets. The wardens would not go in to clean the cells while the prisoners were inside, with the result that the walls became smeared in excrement and the men lay covered in maggots, looking almost Christ-like with their long, matted hair. Despite the effect of these images on opinion abroad, the Labour government did not budge and nor did the Conservatives. The best hope for the protestors was the announcement, in July 1979 that the Pope was going to visit Ireland. Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, the Irish primate, who had some sympathy for the blanket protestors, went to Rome to pers
uade the Pope that he should include County Armagh in his itinerary. The Pope’s presence in Northern Ireland might have embarrassed the government into making a concession that would end the blanket protest, but on 27 August 1979, the very day that the cardinal was in the Vatican to plead his case, eighteen soldiers were killed in an IRA ambush. On that same bloodstained day, a bomb ripped apart a small private cruiser off Ireland’s west coast, killing Earl Mountbatten, the seventy-nine-year-old favourite uncle of the Prince of Wales, his daughter’s eighty-three-year-old mother-in-law, his grandson, aged fourteen, and a boat boy, aged fifteen. Thomas McMahon, leader of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, was convicted of the bombing by a special court in Dublin in December, and spent more than seventeen years in prison. Mountbatten had no connection with Ireland, other than to take his holidays there, but Bobby Sands, one of the H-Block prisoners, justified his murder because ‘he knew the problem and did nothing about it. He did nothing except to exploit Ireland and its natural resources’.1 Those bombs also killed any prospect of a papal visit to the north. Instead, speaking to a vast open-air gathering outside Dublin on 29 September, the Pope made an appeal in halting English to the IRA to turn away from violence.
If the prisoners inside H-Block had been more in contact with the outside world, they might have realized that they had picked the wrong time to step up their protest. It was unthinkable that a Conservative government, particularly one led by Margaret Thatcher, was going to be seen to make concessions to the IRA that a Labour government had denied them. Thatcher had lost a highly valued ally to Irish terrorists. On the afternoon of 30 March 1979, Airey Neave, who had so shrewdly managed Thatcher’s leadership campaign and then been appointed spokesman on Northern Ireland, was driving up the exit ramp of the underground car park beneath the House of Commons when the angle of the slope set off a plastic bomb attached beneath the car, killing him. Since that day, no car has been allowed into the Commons car park until its underside has been checked. ‘He was staunch, brave, true, strong, but he was very gentle and kind and loyal,’2 Thatcher said, after visiting Neave’s widow. ‘Some devils got him,’ she added, the same day.3 The ‘devils’ in questions were the INLA.
Margaret Thatcher also had the right of the Conservative Party to take into account. Enoch Powell had left the Conservatives in 1974 to join the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). He was back in the Commons and commanded considerable respect on the Tory right. Thatcher was also somewhat in awe of him. He and the UUP leader Jim Molyneaux argued that Northern Ireland should be treated as integral to the United Kingdom and that its six counties should be governed in the same way as Yorkshire or Strathclyde. A minority within the UUP, including the young David Trimble, believed that Northern Ireland should have special, devolved arrangements. Their rivals for Protestant support, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) led by the fiery Reverend Ian Paisley, were more anti-British in their rhetoric than the UUP and were also de facto devolutionists. Neave’s murder inadvertently strengthened the devolutionists’ position, because he had sympathized with Enoch Powell. His successor, Humphrey Atkins, was a less ideological Tory who was persuaded by civil servants in the Northern Ireland Office that retaining the Irish government’s cooperation in combating republican terrorists should be their first priority, which would be put at risk if the government set about integrating Northern Ireland into the UK.
Atkins therefore called a conference to discuss devolution, which Jim Molyneaux boycotted, perhaps thinking that he could deal with the prime minister over her minister’s head. This was a foolish move, based on a misreading of how pragmatic Thatcher was. Her instincts and sympathies were profoundly Unionist. She identified with the rural Protestants, whose religion and work ethic reminded her of her father. As a minister in Edward Heath’s government, she had dealt directly with the old, Protestant-controlled Stormont government, and thought it worked well, though she reluctantly admitted that it was ‘associated with discrimination against the Catholics.’ But, above all, Airey Neave’s murder, the assassination of Mountbatten and the killing of eighteen soldiers had made her decide that security had to be the first priority in the province, even at the expense of Protestant aspirations. ‘I started from the need for greater security, which was imperative. If this meant limited political concessions to the South, much as I disliked this kind of bargaining I had to contemplate it,’4 she wrote in her memoirs. ‘But the results in terms of security must come through.’ As a first step towards showing that she took security seriously, Mrs Thatcher resolved that nothing must happen while the H-Block prisoners were on hunger strike. There must be no suggestion that her government was ‘bowing to terrorist demands’.
But the H-Block prisoners did not know that. They had no insight into the psychological make-up of the woman in Downing Street. In their isolation, encouraged by one another, they overestimated the impact of their protests. They were sure that the British would shif before anyone died of starvation. After a couple of weeks, as the British refused to move, the seven hunger strikers were transferred to a hospital wing, while Cardinal Ó Fiaich scuttled to Rome, and to London, trying to whip up a political initiative that would save their lives. On 4 December 1980, Atkins made a statement to the Commons that offered no compromise, but out of the public eye, there seemed to be movement. In Hughes’s absence, command of the IRA prisoners in H-Block had devolved to Bobby Sands, who was not on hunger strike. Sands, who was age twenty-seven, had spent almost his entire adult life in prison. There is no evidence that he had ever hurt anybody. He came from a law-abiding working-class family, but joined the IRA at the age of eighteen after Protestant violence had driven his family out of their home. He was twice caught in possession of arms – not a notably successful terrorist, therefore, but much respected by other prisoners. He was allowed to visit Hughes and the others in hospital, bringing a studiously vague thirty-four-page statement he had been given by the Northern Ireland Office. They read into it a hint of a promise of a concession and called off the hunger strike.
But still nothing happened. Hoping for the concession that never came, Sands tried to persuade his fellow prisoners to don prison clothes and re-enter the system. The IRA command outside H-Block supported him, not wanting another failure, but the men were intractable. Reluctantly, Sands devised a new plan, under which one prisoner would go on hunger strike, to be joined by another two weeks later, and then one more each week until the regime buckled. He insisted on going first, though others would have preferred him to continue acting as their negotiator and let someone else go over the top. He began his hunger strike on 1 March 1981.
Coincidentally, on 5 March, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a rural seat with a majority Catholic population, died. The provisional Sinn Fein, the anaemic ‘political wing’ of the IRA, had never contested a parliamentary election and would not have won if it had. The terrorist groups had only minority support even within the Catholic minority, most of whom voted for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which believed in achieving Irish reunification without violence. In 1980, the SDLP was in crisis because it had parted company with its most effective leader, Gerry Fitt, who had been succeeded by the amiable but less impressive John Hume. Provisional Sinn Fein saw a unique opportunity in the emotion generated by the H-Block protests, and decided to nominate Sands. The SDLP agreed not to oppose him. The brother of the dead MP also stood aside, after a visit from Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein’s vice president. As Sands approached death, Catholics in the constituency who had not voted for decades, or who would never normally have given support to the IRA, poured into the polling booths. Sands polled 30,092 votes to become Sinn Fein’s first elected MP. His exuberant supporters thought that the British government could not let him die now. Michael Foot privately visited Margaret Thatcher to urge her to look for a way out, though in public he agreed that the government could not grant political status to the IRA. She told him crossly that he was a ‘push-over’.5 Sands died on 5 May, after starving himself for sixty-s
ix days. Death made him the Provisional IRA’s first martyred hero, though not in the eyes of Margaret Thatcher, who told the Commons that afternoon that ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal; he chose to take his own life’.6 In Derry, police and rioters fought one another for four hours and in Belfast, during similar disturbances, a fourteen-year-old boy was crushed to death.
The next hunger striker, twenty-five-year-old Francis Hughes, sentenced to life for killing a British soldier, died a week later. On 18 May, five British soldiers were killed by an IRA bomb. Two more hunger strikers died on 21 May; another on 9 July, a sixth on 13 July. Each death was answered by riots. On 18 July, Dublin experienced its worst street disturbance in nearly thirty years when 15,000 demonstrators clashed with police outside the British embassy. Each funeral was a spectacular IRA demonstration led by pipes and drums, but still there were no concessions from the British. The protest had achieved its maximum effect on the day Sands died and was producing diminishing returns. Gerry Adams was allowed into H-Block on 28 July, the day before the royal wedding, to try to persuade the men to end the hunger strikes, but they refused, driven by an intense solidarity heightened by the knowledge that two more of their number were already beyond medical help. They died on 30 July and 2 August. The death toll continued until August 20, which coincidentally was the day that Owen Carron, of Sinn Fein, was elected to Parliament in the seat left vacant by Sands’ death. Ten men had starved to death and nothing had been conceded. Two days after the protest was called off, Jim Prior, the new Northern Ireland secretary, allowed the prisoners to wear their own clothes.