No Such Thing As Society
Page 30
The short term cost to the IRA of this small concession had been immense – the lives lost, the anguish of the prisoners’ families and the effort that had gone into the campaign to publicize their plight. However, its long-term effect on nationalist opinion on the Catholic housing estates, on the supply of funds from American sympathizers and on Sinn Fein’s support, gained at the expense of the SDLP, gave weight to Thatcher’s observation that the ‘unfortunate’ IRA hunger strikers were ‘more use to them dead than alive’.7 The election victory that the dying Bobby Sands scored in Fermanagh and South Tyrone was the start of the dual strategy of the ballot and the bomb. There was fierce opposition at the ensuing Sinn Fein conference, but the main leaders, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Danny Morrison, had overcome their earlier scepticism now that they saw that it was possible to win. Morrison effectively won the argument when he asked the 300 delegates: ‘Is there anyone here who objects to taking power in Ireland with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other?’8 The argument was won and in the 1983 general election Gerry Adams was elected MP for West Belfast. No Sinn Fein MP, then or later, actually took his seat or swore the necessary oath of loyalty.
In case anyone thought that they were not serious about the ‘Armalite’ half of this strategy, the IRA broke with the paramilitaries’ normal practice of not killing each other’s politicians. On 14 November 1981 they assassinated Rev. Robert Bradford, a Methodist minister and Unionist Ulster MP who had been particularly outspoken in calling for the death penalty for terrorists. Three Catholics were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in revenge, bringing the total of deaths from Northern Ireland’s troubles in that year to 117. The IRA also advertised its presence on the British mainland once more, in July 1982, by setting off a bomb in Hyde Park as the Household Cavalry were passing. Four troopers and seven horses were killed. Stacy Bustin, an eighteen-year-old American bystander, was hit by shrapnel in the face, stomach, legs and throat, and had a two-inch hole ripped in her left thigh. She said of the bomber: ‘My first reaction was I’d love to kill him, but then I realized I would be lowering myself down to his level if I did.’9
Throughout the decade, there was evidence that individuals in the security forces quietly agreed with the likes of Rev. Bradford about applying the death penalty to terrorists, and did so unofficially, by shooting to kill. On 11 November 1982, three unarmed IRA men were shot dead by the police at a roadblock outside Lurgan. In the same month, two teenagers with no contact with the paramilitaries innocently approached a hayshed where arms were hidden. Michael Tighe, aged seventeen, was shot dead by members of a previously secret special unit called E4A, and his nineteen-year-old friend was injured. A few weeks later, two INLA men were killed by members of the same unit. The magistrate in charge of their inquests resigned in protest at police obstruction, and under pressure the police agreed to an inquiry into allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy. John Stalker, deputy chief constable of Manchester Police, was brought in to head the inquiry, but was suspended in May 1986 before his inquiry was complete and replaced by Colin Sampson, chief constable of West Yorkshire.
Meanwhile Jim Prior, the new secretary of state, was being pursued by shouts of ‘Brits out’ from Catholics and Protestants alike whenever he ventured out in his bullet-proof car, feeling like ‘a foreigner in another land’.10 When he turned up at Rev. Bradford’s funeral, the reaction was so hostile that he could not take the seat at the front that the family had reserved for him, and he was jostled and kicked on the way out to shouts of ‘kill him’. The Unionists then refused to attend a conference Prior tried to call to discuss political solutions to the troubles, and like Humphrey Atkins before him, Prior was left sitting in a half-empty room with members of the SDLP and the tiny Alliance Party.
In the hope of steering a way out of this logjam, Prior proposed a programme of ‘rolling devolution’ that would begin with the election of a 78-seat assembly that had no power initially, only a right to be consulted, but which would gradually acquire power. The elections went ahead on 20 October 1982, despite opposition from Enoch Powell’s supporters, who saw it as a betrayal of the Unionists, and from the SDLP, who thought it did not go far enough. The UUP secured 26 seats to 21 for Ian Paisley’s DUP, 14 for the SDLP and 10 for the Alliance, but the election’s real sensation was that Sinn Fein took part and won 10 per cent of the total, earning them 5 seats. It was sufficient to convince the IRA’s hard-men that the strategy of ‘the ballot and the bullet’ might work, though it did not mean there would be any let-up in the killing. In December 1982, an INLA bomb killed sixteen people in the crowded Droppin’ Well disco in Ballykelly, near Derry, where British soldiers went to meet local girls.
There was a much bigger prey in the IRA’s sights: Margaret Thatcher. Her decision to let the hunger strikers die, and the remarks she made about them, had entered folklore on Northern Ireland’s Catholic estates. The British police anticipated an attempt on her life, but wrongly surmised that it would take place during her twice-weekly journeys from Downing Street to the Commons for Prime Minister’s Questions. Instead, a man calling himself Roy Walsh, who gave a Lewisham address, booked himself into Room 629, overlooking the sea, on the sixth floor of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on 15 September 1984. Three weeks later, the Conservative annual conference began and at 2.54 a.m. on Friday, 12 October, the frontage of the hotel was destroyed by a massive explosion. Four people were killed, including Conservative MP Anthony Berry (whose seat in Enfield North was taken by Michael Portillo, who held it until 1997). Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, was buried under rubble for hours. His eventual rescue was shown live on television; his wife, Margaret, was paralysed. Mrs Thatcher had been working on her speech. After the bomb went off, she plunged into the dust-filled room where her husband Denis was asleep to check that he was alright, then to her secretaries’ room across the way. As she entered, one of them announced: ‘Mrs Thatcher, it’s all right. I’ve still got the speech. I’m just typing it.’11 The conference resumed at 9.30 a.m. precisely, and Thatcher delivered that speech with iron self-control.
It did not take the police long to establish that ‘Roy Walsh’ was a false name. Applying laser and chemicals to his hotel registration, they found a finger and palm print belonging to Patrick Magee, who had been a known IRA activist for more than a decade. He was arrested in Glasgow the following June, with three other bombers, and spent fourteen years in prison, two-fifths of the minimum sentence passed on him at the time.
Every tragedy needs a comic interlude. The IRA never knew how much confusion they caused behind the scenes, which dragged senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic into a pointless waste of time, all because the prime minister’s son liked to travel. In January 1982, Mark Thatcher competed in the Paris-Dakar motor rally, with a French woman driver and their mechanic, and became lost in the Sahara for six days near the Algeria-Mali border. On the day he was reported missing, Mrs Thatcher was due to speak to the National Federation of Self Employed. She arrived red-eyed, answered questions from waiting reporters, went into the lobby and burst into tears. She managed to deliver her speech, but for the rest of the day appears to have been effectively out of action. She then cancelled other engagements. Downing Street put out a statement saying that she was ‘very upset’. Denis Thatcher flew to Algeria to coordinate the search operation. Later that week, the three missing people were found by their broken-down car. When she knew that Mark was safe, Mrs Thatcher let on that her ‘heart had stopped’ when she first feared for his life, but now her world looked ‘totally different’. Mark’s sister, Carol, was not quite so euphoric. ‘I hope this is the last of Mark’s motor racing. Mum can do without the hassle,’12 she said.
When Mark Thatcher returned to London, people noticed that everywhere he went a police officer was always in close vicinity, giving rise to frivolous speculation that the Metropolitan Police had been told to make sure he did not get lost again. Rumours reached the Labour MP, Willie Hamilton, an inveterate
troublemaker, who penned a written question to the home secretary asking what this police presence was costing.13
Whitelaw refused to answer, but before he made that decision, someone in the Home Office helpfully drew up a briefing note, preserved in the archives, to ensure that the home secretary, at least, knew what was going on, even if he was not telling Hamilton. The security forces had received a tip-off the previous August that Mark Thatcher might be on the IRA’s list of targets, and having seen the effect his temporary disappearance had on his mother, they could not risk anything else happening. He had been assigned a police driver and two officers who provided round-the-clock protection.14
This became complicated when, soon after the Brighton bombing, Mark Thatcher moved to Dallas on business. The British embassy in Washington asked the Americans to give Mark Thatcher the same twenty-four-hour surveillance that he had had in London, which at first they were willing to do, for the sake of President Reagan’s friend and ally, but not permanently. It was not long before British diplomats and the officers assigned to guard Mark Thatcher were given an insight into his character. He wanted to be protected, but as a harassed British official in Dallas complained to a colleague in the Washington embassy in January 1985, ‘one of the problems about Mr Thatcher is that he does not let anyone know about his movements’.15 Their problems were by no means over when, to everyone’s relief, Mark Thatcher announced that he had found a suitable house in Dallas that he liked. In exchange for shedding his twenty-four-hour protection, he wanted an estimated $18,000 worth of modifications to improve security at his new house and proposed to send the bill to the British embassy. When they said that, regretfully, they could not justify such a use of British taxpayers’ money, he suggested that they appoint him ‘honorary consul’ in Dallas, because then the US government would foot the bill. When told that was not likely to go down well with the British public, Mark refused to move house. John Kerr, the second most senior diplomat in the Washington embassy, and his deputy Nigel Sheinwald (who, at the time of writing, is the ambassador to Washington) had to negotiate with the authorities in Texas to get Mark’s twenty-four-hour protection extended as negotiations dragged on. In return, he was expected to keep Sheinwald informed of his whereabouts, but although Sheinwald tried every few days for several months to get through to him, all Sheinwald’s messages were ignored.16 Meanwhile, neighbours in the Dallas apartment that was Mark Thatcher’s temporary home objected to the disruption caused by his permanent police guard, which drew attention to his presence and added to the security problem.
After almost a year, Mark Thatcher visited London and called in at Downing Street, where he was subjected to a severe lecture by Nigel Wicks, the prime minister’s principal private secretary (who would achieve prominence sixteen years later as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life). Wicks did not care for the young Thatcher’s ‘relaxed’ attitude to his safety and ‘I told him rather bluntly that our interest was not so much in his own personal welfare but in the effect on his mother – and therefore on the government of the United Kingdom – if anything happened to him.’ Having thus been put firmly in his place, young Thatcher promised to behave and to report to Nigel Sheinwald as soon as he was back in the USA, though Wicks warned that he would be ‘surprised’ if Mark kept his word.17 He did, though. The embassy staff ‘formed the impression, for the first time in our (year long) discussions, Mark intends to cooperate’.18
Alas, it was a false dawn. Six months later, the embassy wrote to Downing Street again, in despair, asking for the ultimate weapon to be deployed. They wanted Margaret Thatcher to speak ‘firmly’ to her son.19 A few days later, he called in to Downing Street, where Nigel Wicks discovered that he was still clinging to the notion of being appointed an ‘honorary consul’. Wicks put that idea to rest by pointing out to Mark Thatcher that if he became a public official, Labour MPs would be able to ask questions in the Commons about what he was doing in Dallas, and they would have to be answered. Wicks reported that the conversation was ‘not altogether satisfactory’.20
However, in July, after this had dragged on for more than eighteen months, Mark Thatcher called at the Washington embassy and talked to his mother on a secure telephone line.21 Apparently that sorted him out, because the Cabinet Office file contains no more anguished correspondence between London and Washington on this topic.
A month after the Brighton bomb, in November 1984, Mrs Thatcher held a joint press conference with Garret FitzGerald, the Irish prime minister. He had set up a New Ireland Forum, consisting of representatives of nationalist parties from the north, which had since come forward with three proposals, to which she replied: ‘A unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out.’22 Out, out, out – the Unionists loved the language. Here was a prime minister they thought they could trust. It did not even appear to rouse their suspicions that no one was keeping them informed about talks in progress between the British and Irish governments, so it came as a complete shock when, on 15 November 1985, Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, recognizing for the first time Dublin’s right to a formal say in a range of matters affecting the north, including security, public appointments and even which flags were to be flown. Eight days later, between 100,000 and 200,000 Unionists demonstrated outside Belfast City Hall. In Westminster, Ian Gow, who had been Thatcher’s trusted parliamentary aide, resigned from the government, a loss that she acknowledged as a ‘personal blow’.23 All fifteen Unionist MPs resigned from the Commons simultaneously to force by-elections to demonstrate the strength of opposition to the Agreement; and fourteen were re-elected on 14 January 1986, with a combined total of more than 418,000 votes.
What the votes also demonstrated was an electoral swing from Sinn Fein to the SDLP, who gained an extra seat. Sinn Fein’s vote fell again in the 1987 general election. Adams, McGuinness and Morrison easily saw off another rebellion within IRA/Sinn Fein over whether or not to continue the practice of fighting elections, but perhaps for that reason, the IRA violence increased. The toll of soldiers, police and police reservists had been falling year by year from 1981, but in the first four months of 1987 the IRA killed nine police officers. They also killed Lord Justice Maurice Gibson, Northern Ireland’s second most senior judge, and his wife. On 8 November, a bomb went off in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, during a Remembrance Day ceremony, killing eleven people and injuring sixty-three others, one of whom went into a coma and died more than thirteen years later without recovering consciousness. Millions saw or heard Gordon Wilson, a devout Christian, talk about the death of his twenty-year-old daughter, Marie: ‘I bear no ill will. That sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life . . . She’s in heaven and we’ll meet again . . . It is part of a greater plan and God is good and we shall meet again.’24 That bomb did more damage to the IRA’s reputation than any other atrocity committed in the 1980s. On Remembrance Day 1997, Gerry Adams issued a formal apology for it.
Then, as if to even the balance, the SAS presented the IRA with a propaganda gift. On 6 March 1988, they shot dead three IRA members, two men and a woman, in Gibraltar. The trio were undoubtedly preparing a bomb attack; their Semtex was found later in a car in an underground car park. However, the SAS’s lethal action revived the suspicion that the authorities were conducting a policy of shooting to kill. ‘Unless the government wishes Britain’s enemies to enjoy a propaganda bonanza, it should explain why it was necessary to shoot dead all three terrorists,’25 a Daily Telegraph leader, written personally by the editor Max Hastings, warned.
This incident had a truly horrible aftermath. As mourners gathered for the funeral of one of the dead, at Milltown Cemetery, a lone member of the Ulster Defence Force, Michael Stone, opened fire and killed three of them. Stone was lucky to escape being beaten to death by the other mourners. He was rescued by the police and sentenced to 684 years in prison, of which he served 10. As one of his
victims, an IRA member, was being buried, two British soldiers driving near the cortege took a wrong turn and found their car surrounded. Television cameras and press photographers caught the moment at which they were dragged from their car. They were taken out of sight and beaten to death.
The Gibraltar shootings also drew attention again to the Stalker inquiry, and the old ‘shoot-to-kill’ allegations that had never been cleared up. Stalker had published a book in which he accused officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of tampering with evidence at the scenes of the shootings he had been detailed to investigate. The RUC issued a statement in 1990 alleging that his book was riddled with inaccuracies, but there is at least one story Stalker told that rings true, and which may help explain why he was removed from the inquiry. He recounted having a brief conversation in the Crumlin Road courthouse with a lawyer named Pat Finucane, who specialized in representing IRA prisoners and whose brothers were IRA members. Afterwards a Royal Ulster Constabulary sergeant approached him and angrily accused him of undermining the RUC by associating with Finucane. He said: ‘The solicitor is an IRA man. Any man who represents IRA men is worse than an IRA man . . . I will be reporting this conversation and what you have done to my superiors.’26 Douglas Hogg, a junior Home Office minister, may have had Finucane in mind when he told the Commons in January 1989 that some of Northern Ireland’s solicitors were ‘unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA’.27 Three weeks later, on 12 February, Finucane was murdered in front of his wife and three children by gunmen from the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). The UFF had been infiltrated by British Military Intelligence, who appear to have been in a position to avert the murder, even if they did not actually instigate it.28 Fifteen years later, a judge recommended an inquiry into Finucane’s murder and other deaths where British collusion was suspected, but the inquiry was stalled by an argument over its terms between the family and the Northern Ireland Office. The Stalker-Simpson report was unpublished and relatives of those killed in the latter months of 1982 were still demanding answers more than twenty-five years later.