First Confession

by Chris Patten

  I was sad to leave Northern Ireland, not least because it was a job in which I was largely left to my own devices and did not have to attend too many Cabinet committee meetings or engage in rows with Treasury ministers. My family too missed the beauties of Ulster. But I was never seduced into thinking, as some seemed to believe, that these six counties were so uniquely beautiful as to explain or justify people killing to control them, a downright absurd and rather offensive argument. There were also beautiful parts of Scotland, Wales and England which people did not kill one another to run. Paris might have been worth a mass at the end of the sixteenth century, but Ulster was certainly not worth a car bomb, let alone hundreds of them, at the end of the twentieth. We ruled it because that was what the overwhelming majority of its people wanted us to do, and we will continue to do so until they don’t.

  I had never expected to go back with any meaningful responsibilities to Northern Ireland, though I continued to be concerned about what happened there and returned occasionally to do a broadcast or speak at a university. So far as I was concerned it was definitely not ‘Provincia Deserta’. Then, a few months after I left Hong Kong in 1997, I was telephoned by a friend to be told that Mo Mowlam (Northern Ireland’s relatively new Labour Secretary of State) was anxious to find out whether I might be at all interested in taking on the chairmanship of the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, which was to recommend how the police service should be reorganized to reflect the recent Belfast Agreement. The Agreement had been concluded through the brave and sensitive leadership of Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern (the Republic’s Taoiseach), Senator George Mitchell and Mowlam herself (all building on work begun by John Major for which he got too little credit). It appeared to have brought peace and reconciliation to the Province, and for once London, Dublin and Washington were all on the same page. Washington’s contribution was important – too often, American politicians had played to the Irish diaspora vote, ignoring the advice of some of their best diplomats, like the US ambassador in London Ray Seitz. The one thing that the Northern Ireland politicians who accepted this new deal could not agree was what should happen to policing. This issue went right to the poisoned heart of politics in Northern Ireland. To the surprise of Mo Mowlam, though not I think my friend, I said yes to this offer straight away. When Mo talked to me on the phone (I was in New York giving a lecture), she asked, ‘But don’t you want to think it over for a bit with your wife?’ I replied, ‘She’ll say yes too’ – and she did. Some right-wing Conservative suggested that I should not help get the government out of a difficult corner. The issue after all had not come close to resolution during the main talks. This argument seemed rather a departure from customary attitudes to public service. Norman Tebbit went further and said I was just doing the job for the money: thirty pieces of silver and all that. Norman is a bit of a card and one can forgive him his views on Ireland given what the IRA did to his wife, whom he has looked after for decades with such devotion. As it happened, the per diem was a bit more than that, though I cannot imagine anyone regarding it as sufficient to give its recipients a reason for following the example of Judas Iscariot.

  I had little say in choosing the members of the Commission which emerged from negotiations between London, Dublin and (I am sure) Washington. I was lucky to have two very good police officers, one an outstanding policewoman from Boston, Cathy O’Toole, the other a retired Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Smith. Even greater fortune came in the shape of the principal Northern Ireland members, Maurice Hayes and Peter Smith, a wise and brave Unionist barrister. As things turned out Peter took much of the heat in Northern Ireland for our eventual proposals; he was a man of unquestioned integrity who took the view – uncomfortable for some Unionist politicians – that the Belfast Agreement and our terms of reference meant what they said. For the post of secretary of the Commission, I persuaded the Foreign Office to loan us the young diplomat who had been my main diplomatic adviser and negotiator in Hong Kong, Bob Pierce, one of the most intelligent people who has ever worked for me.

  Our terms of reference – agreed by the parties to the Belfast Agreement – could not have been much clearer. Taking account of the Agreement we were required to ‘bring forward proposals for future policing structures and arrangements … Our proposals should be designed to ensure that policing arrangements, including composition, recruitment, training, culture, ethos and symbols, are such that in a new approach Northern Ireland has a police service that can enjoy widespread support from, and is seen as an integral part of, the community as a whole.’

  We described the heart of the problem we had to tackle at the beginning of our report. The composition of Northern Ireland’s police – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – had always been disproportionately Protestant and Unionist. While more than 40 per cent of the population in Northern Ireland was Roman Catholic only 8 per cent of RUC officers were. We argued that ‘in the past, when the police were subject to control by the Unionist government at Stormont, and more recently in the period of direct rule from Westminster, they had been identified by one section of the population not primarily as upholders of the rule of law but as defenders of the state, and the nature of the state itself has remained the cardinal issue of political argument. This identification of police and state is contrary to policing practice in the rest of the United Kingdom. It has left the police in an unenviable position, lamented by many police officers. In one political language they are the custodians of nationhood. In its rhetorical opposite, they are the symbols of oppression. Policing therefore goes right to the heart of the sense of security and identity of both communities, and because of the difference between them, this seriously hampers the effectiveness of the police service in Northern Ireland.’

  We observed that the problems faced by the police were similar to those confronted by police in other divided societies. It was impossible to have fully effective policies ‘when the police have to operate from fortified stations in armoured vehicles, and when police officers dare not tell their children what they do for a living for fear of attack from extremists from both sides’. Police had frequently been burned out of their homes when they tried to live in the communities they served.

  The Commission invited written submissions, conducted a survey, researched through focus groups, met police services and experts in other countries and held open public meetings throughout Northern Ireland. When we announced that we were going to do this, some suggested that it would be a waste of time since no one attended public meetings these days. In fact, about 10,000 people came and over 1,000 spoke. They were pretty harrowing occasions: Omagh – not long after the Republican terrorist bombs there killed thirty-one people; Portadown – a raw little town where the meeting was kept just on the peaceful side of very heated debate by a Catholic solicitor who not long after was murdered by ‘Loyalist paramilitary car bombs’; the same evening on to Craigavon, where four police widows spoke in turn, including one whose alleged IRA murderer had been got off on what seemed a technicality by the solicitor from Portadown. To make these occasions possible, but also to add to their tension, I decided from the outset with my fellow commissioners that we would work without security. How, after all, could you examine the history and behaviour of the RUC while being guarded by its officers? We depended on the word of the paramilitary terrorists on both sides that they would give us safe passage. We would occasionally gulp on our way into community halls at some of those clearly providing their own version of security for the occasion. But they kept their word with only one or two scares.

  The political difficulties were clear enough. Whatever they had signed up to in the Belfast Agreement, the leading political figures wanted irreconcilable outcomes. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and their Republican colleagues wanted the RUC to be scrapped. Any reformulated police force should include only those who had gone through a human rights test to prove they were suitable. This process went by a rather liturgical sounding na
me – ‘lustration’, they called it. The idea that terrorists who had murdered their fellow citizens, including policemen, should be given a veto over who could join a new force was clearly a complete non-starter.

  Loyalists like David Trimble were not at all clear what they wanted except that there could be no change which suggested that the RUC had been less than pluperfect or that those who had died had done so in vain. This broadly meant that issues like the name of the force and its symbols needed to be preserved at all costs. Lustration to the left, status quo to the right. Given these views, it was difficult to see how the politicians had signed the Agreement. Trimble’s opinion – more hardline than that of many serving police officers – suggested that he had not comprehended the underlying bargain that brought about peace. The Nationalists had accepted that change in the nature of the Northern Ireland state (the end of partition) would only come democratically through the ballot box. In return, they should not be required to demonstrate loyalty to a state which they wanted to change, albeit peacefully. Both sides would retain their own sense of who they were. One state, two identities.

  We decided that there should be five tests for our recommendations. First, would they promote effective and efficient policing? Would they deliver fair and impartial policing, far from partisan control? Would they provide for accountability both to the law and to the community? Would they make the police more representative of the society they serve? Finally, did proposals protect and vindicate the human rights and dignity of all?

  Our report, advocating ‘a new beginning’ for Northern Ireland’s police, contained 175 recommendations covering accountability, human rights, management, public order policing, recruitment, training, co-operation with other police services, ethos and symbols. The greatest controversy touched on balanced recruitment and on ethos and symbols. To make the police service more representative we argued that for at least ten years new recruits for the police should be drawn on a 50:50 Catholic and non-Catholic basis from a qualified pool so that within ten years 30 per cent of the force would be Catholic. Second, to promote impartiality we recommended symbols ‘free from association with the British or Irish states’. The name, Royal Ulster Constabulary, was not neutral and would have to go; instead, police officers should be part of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Its badge and symbols should change, just as those of the Northern Ireland Assembly had changed by political agreement. The Union Flag should no longer be flown from police buildings.

  When the Commission had been established there had been a tacit acceptance that the government would accept whatever we could agree. By and large, our report was pretty well received, except by some members of the police service and Loyalist politicians led by David Trimble. He argued, among other things, that I had promised to show him our report before it was published to check it over with him. The idea that I would have done this with him or any other political leader was plainly absurd, though the party leaders all got sight of it just before it was published. Trimble stuck to his guns, denounced me and the report at every turn, and went through all the usual pantomime tricks of refusing to shake my hand and so on. I am prepared to believe that he must be a nicer man than he seems. His outrage was sufficient to knock the government off its stride. Despite the assurances we had been given, Mr Blair and his new Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson (Mo Mowlam had alas moved on), thought they could square the circles that we had recognized were ‘unsquarable’ and tinker with our recommendations (especially on recruitment, name and symbols) in the legislation required to implement the report. I concede with alacrity that Peter Mandelson is a clever fellow and is usually much too transparent to deserve being called ‘the prince of darkness’. He was a good Business Minister and the Labour Party would have been better off if it had listened to him more. But I have never believed that Mandelson is quite as clever as he thinks he is. When he started to water down our proposals to keep Unionist critics quiet, there was outrage about what one serious newspaper called the ‘travesty of a bill’. The cry went up from Nationalists – ‘We want Patten, and nothing but Patten.’ This sentiment was also expressed in some surprising quarters, by Republicans who not many years before had been minded to kill me. So Patten is what the Blair government concluded it had to accept. Opposition died away. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was instituted and soon settled down. The police were removed from the heart of the political dispute and the violence which had accompanied it. Our report was regarded by many others in divided communities elsewhere as a model. Today the proportion of Catholics in the PSNI is over 30 per cent. Since the Belfast Agreement there have been very few police fatalities. Why did it all work out so well? Above all, I reckon, because we did not duck trying to do the right thing in a moderate way.

  I took with me a particularly strong memory from one of our public meetings. It was in a small village on the coast in the beautiful Mournes. The village was half dependent on agriculture, half on fishing; it was half Catholic and half Protestant. We met in the village cinema, a little like the one in Cinema Paradiso. I recollect that it had just been showing the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. Here it was yesterday that seemed never to have died. We were sat up on the stage, three of us, as the audience told us their stories of suffering and complaint, one lot of stories contrasting like so many antonyms with the others. I eventually called an end, and gave my usual pretty little peroration about the need for generosity, reconciliation, healing and hope, thinking as I offered these clichés about the large malt whisky that awaited me back at Hillsborough. A little old lady at the back of the hall in a hat and coat of many colours put her hand up insistently. ‘Before you go,’ she said loudly. ‘I’ve got just one thing to say to you. It’s all very well coming over here and giving us all that stuff about generosity of spirit. You go home after this is over. We have to stay with our histories and experience all around us. For example,’ she said, leaning forward and touching a young man in front of her on the shoulder, ‘this man here murdered my son.’ It was true. He was a murderer let out of prison as part of the Agreement. His victim’s mother lived on with the intimacy of violence, so often in all its bragging insolence, the stuff of her daily existence. That was and in a sense still is real life in a small and beautiful village in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

  8

  Out East

  The most important political office is that of private citizen.

  Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Boston Record (1903)

  I don’t actually believe in a clash of civilization. I believe in a clash of the civilized and the non-civilized.

  Madeleine K. Albright, Bloomberg (23 December 2002)

  Not the least peculiar irony in the history of democracy in Hong Kong – a story still far from its final pages, whatever President Xi may think – is that the collapse of the Labour Party vote in the British constituency of Bath resulted in 1992 in that city’s defeated MP becoming the last Governor of Britain’s last major colony. Conservative success in Bath had for years depended on the Opposition vote splitting between Labour and Liberals. In 1992, Labour voters deserted the red rose and voted tactically to defeat me, encouraged by an effective and expensive campaign funded by David Sainsbury, the supermarket multi-millionaire and (later) Labour minister. It was painful. I felt hurt and, for a time, sick at the humiliation. My wife and daughters, who had worked hard in my campaign, were shocked at its nastiness as well as the result. But that is political life. Expect garlands and petals scattered before the wheels of your chariot and you are bound to be in for a rude and salutary shock. I had been the chair of a successful – in national terms – General Election campaign, but as the slave accompanying the victorious general during his Roman triumph used to whisper, ‘Remember you are mortal.’

  Fortunately, I had expected this outcome (which did not make it any less unpleasant) and had even told the Prime Minister, John Major, that he would win the election overall but that I would lose my ow
n seat. I tend to pessimism at the best of times and I think John believed that I was exaggerating the difficulties. In any event, I had plenty of time before and during the campaign to consider what I wanted to do if I lost. When that happened, I was not attracted to the idea of trying to continue my political career in the House of Lords, though the opportunity was offered to me. So was the possibility of being parachuted into a rapidly vacated constituency in a by-election. Kensington and Chelsea was suggested, apparently gift-wrapped. This struck me as unseemly, and a further unfair burden on my wife and children, who had already faced the heat of an occasionally vicious campaign in Bath.fn1 I resisted some well-meaning pressure to pursue this course, or at least to hang around the political scene, a wallflower at the ball, waiting for someone to ask me to dance, an embarrassment to everyone. Despite occasional second or third thoughts I never really regretted this decision. I was thinking about looking for a post outside politics in the field of development assistance. Then John Major offered me the chance to go to Hong Kong as the last British Governor, a politician to end a line of Colonial or Foreign Office appointments. Recent policy seemed to have driven London into a diplomatic cul-de-sac, in which routine humiliations by China (not least of the Prime Minister, John Major) never seemed to bring any benefit for Hong Kong or Britain. The diplomatic object was simply a smooth transition to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Smooth was defined as meeting Chinese demands, after a few ineffectual objections and a bit of hand-wringing. But what price a successful and honourable transition? One of my advisers used to ask mischievously whether you could describe a funeral as ‘a smooth transition’.

  The offer was made and, after talking to Lavender, I accepted. It was quite a sacrifice for her. Her career as a family lawyer at the Bar had taken off. We were happily settled in London with teenage daughters. As ever, she supported me at some personal cost. This has happened throughout our marriage. In Hong Kong she worked immensely hard to give leadership to a number of charities, like hospice care, street children, prostitution, mental handicap and AIDS, that for local cultural reasons had not attracted much public support in the past.