First Confession

by Chris Patten

  The civil servants who worked with me in Belfast were uniformly helpful, mostly drawn from the Northern Ireland civil service; some in the London-based Northern Ireland Office were typically former Home Office, Defence or Foreign Office officials. I only had difficulty with one rather officious civil servant in London and that was over our determination to spend the weekend together – good for us, and apparently appreciated by the locals. He said he would have to report any weekend family visits to the Inland Revenue as a taxable perk. The Inland Revenue were more sensible and I heard no more about this.

  My regular routine – weekends apart – was to spend two or three days a week in Northern Ireland, the rest of the week in Parliament or the department’s London office in the old Admiralty Building on Horse Guards. We would usually fly backwards and forwards to Belfast in a small chartered plane from Northolt. This was a bizarre consequence of Treasury accounting rules. As we trundled down the runway, we would pass small, unused RAF passenger jets, which were more expensive to take than privately hired planes, apparently because the Treasury computations for its sister department capitalized virtually every aspect of air travel. Our flights in these small private planes were the worst part of the job, especially in winter, when the journey seemed both endless and very bumpy; they became quite spiritual occasions in my life. Once safely arrived in Belfast, we stayed in the old Speaker’s House near the Stormont Parliament Building, a residence more strongly fortified than Rorke’s Drift. We were looked after by Ulster’s best providers of fries and protein was not in short supply. The whole experience was described unfairly (because the staff were all very kind) by one ministerial colleague as Stalag Fawlty Towers. I guess it had to be like this. We would give regular dinners to talk about the political way forward with local politicians. The wine flowed (except when Dr Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party was present), and we circled over and around the same points of dispute less warily as the night wore on. Ulster men and women talk well, if often about the same old things.

  My denomination – my essential manifestation for many in Northern Ireland – continued to attract interest. At an early municipal lunch in ‘Stroke City’ I made the sign of the cross after the Catholic bishop pronounced the Grace. I had been doing this since I was about five. It marked me out, ‘taig’ through and through. Usually on Sundays, I would go to mass at Riley’s Trench near Hillsborough, at a little church named after St Colman. My bodyguards liked it, as did the local men of the parish, who usually stood outside smoking until mass was well underway. Part of the reason for its popularity was the fact that the priest (as one policeman noted with enthusiasm) took less than twenty-five minutes from take-off to touch-down, sermon included. Alternatively, we would sometimes go to the Church of Ireland (Anglican) church in Hillsborough, an eighteenth-century building with a tall spire from whose gardens there were long views across the Lagan valley to the Belfast hills. We used to sit in the Governor’s seats, but I did not take Communion (something I have usually done in the Church of England at home) lest it cause offence. Ecumenism may be a matter of individual conscience but it does not always travel very well.

  With direct rule from London since 1974 – a result of the violence of the early 1970s – ministers had to lead the departments formerly run by Northern Ireland’s devolved administration. The Secretary of State did the big stuff – politics, negotiation, security; Nick Scott helped with security and took on education and the budget. An amiable peer, Charlie Lyell, looked after agriculture. I did most of the rest grouped in two large departments – the environment and health and social security.

  Environment covered housing, transport, planning, local government and urban renewal. The housing portfolio covered a massive public housing programme, an effort to remove the legitimate grievances which Catholics and some working-class Unionists had about the poor state of their homes. The quality of new social housing in Northern Ireland was way above the general standard in Britain; the costs were high both for this reason and because the construction business (like the drinks business) was under pressure from paramilitary organizations on both sides of the community divide, which extracted extra loot from protection rackets. One of my first decisions – which confronted my initial liberal sentiments that this society could not possibly be divided as much as I was told – was to agree to add another metre and a half to the height of an already high wall which divided the housing in a new Belfast estate between Republicans and Loyalists. The wall constructed was higher than parts of the one that divided contemporary Berlin.

  The most difficult part of the job intellectually was visiting the more than two dozen local councils for question-and-answer sessions. A regular feature of political life in Northern Ireland was the refusal of one political party or another to meet ministers because of some mortal sin allegedly committed by the government, though sometimes its precise nature had been forgotten. In 1983, we were just coming out of a period in which we had been sent to Coventry by some of the Unionists for one of these imagined assaults on their principles. Connecting with local councillors was thought to be a way of rebuilding bridges, though for how long and for what great purpose was never entirely clear. Anyway, it involved me touring the town halls of Ulster with huge files packed with briefings on every aspect of the local council’s life. I had to learn details of road schemes from places I had never visited to other places that I had hardly heard of; the finer points of local planning disputes; the reasons for damp ceilings in new housing estates; and on and on. Fortunately I have a good memory – or at least had one then. Some of my visits to local councils involved more cheerful duties. I was asked, for example, to visit Newry to open the mayor’s new drinks cabinet. When I got there it was discovered that someone had already broken into it, so we had to send out for more bottles of gin and whisky. Before visiting Dr Ian Paisley’s constituency in Ballymena (where there was no drinks cabinet), I met the Democratic Unionist Party leader with a delegation from his town. I had been well briefed, but did not want these local councillors to think I was showing off about how much more I knew about their community than they did. I said to Dr Paisley, ‘I must confess at the outset that I have never visited Ballymena’. ‘Confess?’ he said, well aware of my religious affiliations. ‘Not to me you don’t.’

  The most enjoyable work was the attempt to breathe new life into Belfast and Derry, both of which had been heavily targeted by IRA bombs. I got to like both cities despite the way that intimidation and violence had shunted populations from one set of streets to another. Like Glasgow or Liverpool, Belfast remained a segregated city where the industrial landscape – the shipyards, the linen mills, the tobacco factories – was the heart of where people lived; in the Falls Road, for example, Catholics lived close by the mills where they worked. Not far from the Falls Road and the police barracks at Hastings Street was a terrible reminder of the worst sort of 1960s and 1970s housing development – the brutal concrete architecture of the Divis Flats, whose balconies and walls gave cover to the IRA gunmen. Within a few hundred yards of the Falls Road was the Protestant Shankill; the roads in between were as dangerous for a foolhardy wanderer from the wrong tribe, ‘taig’ or ‘Prod’, as they were for soldiers.

  The way in which murder squads had re-planned Belfast to suit themselves was an additional unconventional challenge for redevelopment. Like the Lagan river in Belfast, Derry had its river too, the Foyle, curling around the hill on which the old city stood. The communities were probably more clearly divided there even than in Belfast, Catholics in the Bogside and the Creggan making those areas at one time no-go areas for the British army. Redevelopment in both cities required imagination, patience, lots of government money (my admirers in the party were right about that) and resilience, as the bombs continued to explode even while the new buildings were being constructed. The work which we began in the early 1980s was brilliantly continued and expanded by my successor, Richard Needham, an Irish earl of unusual talents. Richard is a justification fo
r having politicians; he made things happen in the manner of Michael Heseltine, one of his mentors. Good civil servants liked to work for him, because he knew what he wanted to do and gave them brave leadership in doing it. Inevitably, a plate or two occasionally got broken, which prevented him rising as high in politics as his talents deserved – he peaked as a very good trade minister outside the Cabinet. Richard is another example of the perils of identity pigeon-holing – the son of an Irish peer and a Jewish mother, he is married to a beautiful German whose family was not wholly put off him by the fact that at their first meeting with this strange mélange of a suitor he somehow contrived to shoot his would-be father-in-law’s gun dog.

  My civil servants at the Northern Ireland Department of Health were led by two exceptional Permanent Secretaries. The first was a Lancastrian, from Burnley, who had found his way to the Northern Ireland civil service partly because of ill-health. Norman Dugdale was reserved in manner and just a little courtly. He insisted that he should have the last sight of any piece of paper that came in to me; fair enough, because he wrote as well as any civil servant with whom I ever worked. He was a fine, published poet, who translated C. P. Cavafy and introduced me to that brilliant poet of public affairs. It seemed a very long way from the Alexandria of Cavafy and his sometimes homoerotic verse to wet and grey Ulster. Norman wrote one poem (‘Provincia Deserta’), clearly directed towards the succession of young British politicians who passed through his able hands. It was a little melancholy and tartly observed:

  Well, here it is: not Botany Bay

  But a penal settlement all the same,

  The sentence life without remission – saving,

  Of course, Sir, such as yourself, gentlemen newly sent

  To live here at the Governor’s Lodge. Two years from now

  You will be safely home again and dining out

  On your bizarre experiences, which cannot fail

  To please your hostess and amuse the company.

  Norman was one of the very best members of what he called ‘the well-trained squads that clean up the carnage’. He was succeeded by another star, Maurice Hayes, the most senior Catholic in the Northern Ireland civil service, a polymath, Gaelic speaker, friend of Seamus Heaney, a county hurler and great figure in Gaelic football, and writer of two magical volumes of autobiography describing growing up a Catholic in County Down (Sweet Killough: Let Go Your Anchor and Black Puddings with Slim: A Downpatrick Boyhood). Maurice went on to become the Northern Ireland Ombudsman, an Irish senator and chairman of the Republic’s National Forum on Europe. He is as well-read as anyone I have known, witty and very wise, and became one of my best friends. It was rather a stroke of luck to find engineers like this in the Siberian power station.

  It was the Department of Health which provided the stomach-churning shock with which I began this chapter. Visiting a hospital a couple of days after my arrival in the job, I chatted to a young nurse in the Accident and Emergency ward. Hands behind my back, the young copy-cat Duke of Edinburgh, I bent over a tiny nurse who smelt of Lux toilet soap, and asked her gravely whether there had been many recent patients as a result of the Troubles. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘Two nights ago, we had to look after a couple of Catholic knee-cappings.’ ‘Now, come on,’ I admonished her. ‘You can’t tell me that you can distinguish between a Protestant and a Catholic knee-capping.’ I heard my private secretary and bodyguard sucking in their breath. ‘Of course we can,’ she replied, clearly astonished by my naivety. ‘Catholics use a shotgun; Protestants use a Black and Decker drill.’ Welcome to the world of identity knee-cappings.

  Two other incidents came to symbolize for me the horrors of identity politics in Northern Ireland. First, a well-meaning youth leader organized a mixed team of elementary school pupils to play a team of Catholic boys in the Republic. The coach picked up one group from near the Falls Road and then the other near the Shankill. The boys got on really well together and won their game. They sang all the way home. The coach dropped off the Catholic half of the team, but as it drove away a crowd of small boys began pelting it with stones, including the boys who had been in the team. ‘Any kiddies in my school can live like a fool, / But hating, my boy, is an art’, says Ogden Nash.

  A similar goodwill gesture was made by a Belfast schoolmaster who organized a match for his Protestant pupils in Dublin. As a gift at the end of the match the boys were each presented with a statue of a woman whose identity they didn’t know. Arrived home, one eleven-year-old showed it to his father who exploded, dragged his son down the backyard to his work shed and thrashed him. He then took his big hammer and smashed the plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary to smithereens. The weeping boy, who was abused when he sought consolation from an older friend, was later one of the victims questioned by the inquiry into notorious allegations of organized paedophilia at the Kincora Boys’ Home.

  I do not think that these ‘bizarre experiences’ will amuse the company, or please my dinner hostess. For me they simply underline some of the nastier consequences of the abuse of identity. But for Northern Ireland as a whole I formed considerable affection, first for the many friends we made there, not least the aristocrats who gave us hospitality from time to time, like the Duke of Abercorn at Baronscourt in Omagh and the artist Lindy, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, at Clandeboys in County Down, full of the gubernatorial collections from Canada to Burma of a former Marquess. We were also generously taken on occasional picnics by Enoch (a local MP) and Pamela Powell, travelling with my armed bodyguards. From Enoch’s careful study of the Ordnance Survey the Powells would find perfect places to lunch in the Mournes. Wine Society sherry would be followed by cold Ulster beef, a lesson on Ulster’s topography for my children, and home for tea at their simple cottage to eat one of Pamela’s delicious sponges. One Sunday Alice, our youngest daughter, was sick all over the back seat of their car. They could not have been nicer about it, commenting kindly that one of their daughters used to do this regularly on their journeys to his Wolverhampton constituency. Come the following Monday morning Enoch would cut me dead in the House of Commons corridor.

  The last time I talked to Enoch and Pamela was in Italy in the 1990s. We had taken a family holiday in the Marche and were putting our car on the train in Bologna. Looking in my rear-view mirror I spotted their familiar faces in the car behind. I went back to talk to them and offer to drive their car onto the train, a slightly hazardous enterprise. We chatted afterwards. Enoch explained that he had wanted to make one last visit to Italy before he died to see some of his favourite churches and paintings. In particular he was keen to confirm his view (shared by many scholars) that the frescoes in the Basilica in Assisi were probably not by Giotto but by Cavallini. He was pretty sure about this, but then he was pretty sure of everything: for example, that Jesus Christ was not crucified but stoned to death by the Jews. He was closer to the mark with his Italian pictures.

  From these hosts and other friends, not least my police guards, I got to see much of the beauty of Northern Ireland from the granite of the Mournes to the Causeway coastal route and the golden beach at Portstewart on the North Atlantic coast. I loved the white thorn and the fuchsia hedges, the waters of Strangford Lough and the Fermanagh lakes with their sandpipers, blackthorn and Gueler roses, the whitewashed farmhouses (preferable to the hacienda-style bungalows that spring up everywhere) and the incomparable bluebells of late spring followed by the magnificent rhododendrons and in late summer the plump raspberries.

  My ministerial job was demanding and enjoyable. I was running most of the life of the ordinary government of Northern Ireland, under two secretaries of state, Jim Prior and Douglas Hurd, who left me to get on with it. They were both kind to me and Lavender. We built houses, opened health facilities, conserved buildings, ran a railway and spent the public’s money pretty well. I had little to do with security issues or the big political questions, though I was sometimes asked my opinion and required to canvas the views of Ulster’s politicians, with whom I ha
d a lot of day-to-day contact over what were generally constituency issues. They were not too bad a bunch, with some very decent and brave ones like the Unionist Ken Maginnis and the moderate Labour Nationalist Seamus Mallon.

  The only real trouble I got into was over the name of ‘Stroke City’, or rather of its district council. When the political composition of the council changed from Unionist to moderate Nationalist (the Social Democratic and Labour Party), the new councillors announced that they wanted to alter the name of the council from the Londonderry District Council to the Derry District Council. This was meant to be provocative to both the moderate Unionists and the Paisleyites, the Democratic Unionist Party, and it was. You could argue that the Unionists had not been beyond provocative gestures themselves, but that was not the point. The point was the law, which made it clear that councillors had the power to change the name of the district council though not of the city which it covered. It remained Londonderry, within the territory of the Derry District Council. You could not make it up – nor the explosion of Loyalist/Unionist rage when I announced the legal opinion. But the law was the law, rather an important part of the British way of life. This earned me for a time the sobriquet ‘the Minister of Treachery’. I awoke one morning at our government hostel at Stormont to the sound of the Lambeg drum as Orange Lodges gathered to march on the house in a protest to denounce my decision. It passed off smoothly enough, though it doubtless reinforced the Loyalist view that you could not trust a ‘taig’ minister who crossed himself and went to mass on Sundays.