Undeterred, Neave pressed ahead with his review. Irish newspapers noted that there had not been a major policy statement on Northern Ireland by the Conservatives since Mrs Thatcher had become leader and were scathing about the prospects for this fresh rethink. The Irish Press accused him of reverting to a ‘pre-Carsonite stance’; John Hume’s SDLP accused him of ‘appalling ignorance’. In a speech in his constituency on 9 August, Neave made an interim statement, reiterating the Conservative Party’s pledge to maintain the unity of the United Kingdom, with Northern Ireland a part of it; that the army should remain in Ulster to support the civil power until normal policing could be restored; and expressing further concern about the release of internees. He also opposed government actions which gave credibility or status to violent organisations or individuals, a reference to the covert contacts with Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, which had first been initiated by Willie Whitelaw in 1972. His hostility to prisoner releases also went unheeded: the last detainees were released within months. Internment had proved a disaster, acting as a recruiting sergeant for the IRA and stepping up the violence.
There was, as yet, no sign of original thinking in Neave’s enquiry. If anything, policy was reverting to a traditional pro-Unionist stance. This was the view of The Times, which said in a leading article: ‘More by what he did not say than by what he said he appeared to move towards a position of simple constitutionalism, of natural alliance with Ulster Unionism.’ That was where his party was before it was redirected by the events of 1969–72 and the leadership of Heath and Whitelaw. Neave deliberately left out the Heathite mantra that the exclusion of the Catholic minority must be rectified, that constitutional arrangements must take account of their nationalist aspirations and that no settlement could last which failed to win the support of the Irish people as a whole. The omission was not lost on the Irish people, of all persuasions.
That September, Neave accompanied Thatcher on a visit to the United States. According to an anonymous source close to the Conservative leadership, ‘his [Neave’s] job was to spread disinformation about the Wilson government in political and commercial circles. The story about Harold Wilson being a KGB agent first surfaced at that time.’12 The informant was convinced that it was Neave’s activities in the USA at that time that Thatcher was so keen to ‘cover up’. Thatcher herself regarded the US trip as the most important of her years as Opposition leader, claiming that coverage in the British media ‘transformed my political standing’. The informant who highlighted Neave’s semi-clandestine role added: ‘There was an amazing amount of knocking copy about the horrors of the welfare state and the Wilson government was described as something akin to Ukraine under the iron days of Stalin. This campaign was organised by Airey Neave and——.’
While above-ground politics slipped further to the right, the secret politicking also gathered pace. Plans for the formation of the National Association for Freedom were laid in the summer of 1975, though it was not formally launched until December of that year. This body sprung from a lunch which took place with Michael Ivens, Director of Aims of Industry, and Lord De L’Isle, former Governor General of Australia. The talks had been organised by Colonel Juan Hobbs, a representative of British United Industrialists which acted as a conduit for business money into the Tory Party and right-wing political projects. Dorril and Ramsay characterise NAFF as a fusion of the anti-subversion tendency, middle protest groups and the right wing of the Tory Party. Chris Tame, who worked for NAFF in its early days, suggested that it was a successor to Ross McWhirter’s organisation Self-Help, a second try after the original had been taken over by the racist Lady Birdwood. Ross McWhirter, an early convert to the anti-subversive tendency, was shot dead by the IRA on 27 November 1975 after offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a terrorist for murder.
NAFF’s first director, John Gouriet, later said ‘we felt that 1975 and the years that followed were really a watershed in British politics … down the slippery slope towards communo-socialism [sic] and a satellite state of the Soviet Union at its worst’. Neave, along with fellow Monday Club members Jill Knight and Rhodes Boyson, joined the Council of NAFF, as did Winston Churchill and Nicholas Ridley, both members of the Shadow Cabinet. Boyson, who blamed ‘the virtual collapse of law and order in parts of our society’ on the so-called liberal establishment, went on to found (with Margaret Thatcher) the Ross McWhirter Foundation. On 16 December, he attended a memorial service for McWhirter at St Paul’s Cathedral. Sitting near him was Airey Neave. The address was given by Lord De L’Isle, progenitor of NAFF.
While it never achieved the grandiose aims set out in its Freedom Charter, NAFF did have an energising impact on the Tory right, particularly in the years of Opposition. In the months that followed its inauguration, the association launched legal actions against strikers, most notably and successfully in a cause célèbre dispute at Grunwick, the north London film processing factory. It also pushed the message of ‘Marxist subversives’ in the Labour Party, and social security ‘scroungers’, gaining valuable publicity in the press and arguably setting the agenda for Thatcher’s war against ‘the enemy within’ during her first and second terms of office. In the view of Dorril and Ramsay, it would not be too far off the mark to say that Thatcherism ‘grew out of a right-wing network with extensive links to the military-intelligence establishment’.13 Her rise to power was the climax to a long campaign by this network which included a protracted destabilisation campaign against the Labour Party between 1974 and 1976, culminating in a right-wing Tory leader and then a right-wing government. NAFF finally won the blessing of Thatcher herself, who spoke at a fund-raising dinner in January 1977.
Long before then the lineaments of what her government would look like were clearly becoming visible. In mid-March 1976, Harold Wilson shocked the nation by resigning as Prime Minister. He would be replaced by the Chancellor, James Callaghan, who as Home Secretary in the late sixties had a great deal more knowledge of the Irish problem than Neave, but by then Neave’s above-ground political strategy was set in concrete. As detention drew to a close, he excoriated Labour for failing to give leadership in the fight against terrorism, prompting a rare charge from the Northern Ireland Minister of State Stan Orme that Neave was ‘playing politics’ when he should be upholding the bipartisan approach to Ulster that had underpinned consideration of the crisis from its inception. Rumours were already surfacing early in 1976 that Rees could be moved from the Northern Ireland office, and his departure could be marked by a tougher policy on IRA terror. Special category status for prisoners (which Neave had always opposed) was already on the way out.
On 6 January, Harold Wilson called in Thatcher and Neave for talks on the deteriorating security situation. Neave was in no doubt that the IRA had been ‘dead for a long time’. The very next day, ten Protestant workers were shot dead in Kingmills. Wilson ordered in 600 extra troops, 150 of them from the SAS, who went into action in south Armagh. Neave welcomed the move as a signal that ‘we mean business’ in the campaign.
Even the Shadow Cabinet was critical of Neave’s parliamentary and political performance on the crisis. Fellow front-benchers urged him to be more vocal in his criticisms of the government, though the best idea they could come up with was a suggestion that the Irish tricolour should be removed from Crossmaglen town hall. On a visit to south Armagh, he urged a more permanent British army presence. Four months’ tour of duty was not enough to acclimatise the men to conditions, he insisted, brushing aside a media row over repeated incursions into the Republic in ‘hot pursuit’ of IRA suspects during which soldiers threatened to shoot Irish policemen. Neave kept up his ruthless harrying of Rees, accusing him of risking civil war by even discussing the phased withdrawal of the army in the event of a political settlement. The Daily Mirror had just become the first mainstream newspaper to ask whether troops should get out of Ulster. Events played into Neave’s hands. Abolition of special category status from 1 March was a
ccompanied by a predictable outbreak of violence, in which two people died and eleven were injured. In Belfast, buses were hijacked and set on fire and traffic disrupted. Neave promised Rees strong support, arguing that ending special category status was an essential step ‘so that common thugs cannot be glamorised as political martyrs’, but on 5 March he accused Rees of creating a political vacuum in the province by dissolving the moribund Constitutional Convention. He also demanded that talks should not take place with the political wings of paramilitary organisations. The papers were full of stories about secret contacts with Sinn Fein, all denied by the government but later proved to be true. Neave was not the only politician playing a clandestine game.
An adjournment debate in the Commons on 25 March opened up the fault lines between Neave and Rees. Neave had recently argued in a speech to the Young Conservatives that everything should take second place to the defeat of the terrorists. He wanted ‘far more resolute military action’. With a clear eye on his opposite number, Rees argued that those who sought simplistic solutions to the security problem by ‘war’ on the terrorists displayed their own limited outlook. He rejected Neave’s view that a political vacuum had opened up in Ulster. Neave evaded that issue, preferring to congratulate the SAS on driving the Provos out of south Armagh. An irritated Rees warned that it was ‘dangerous to preen ourselves’ prematurely. Neave brushed that aside, too, and attacked the government over reports of the talks with Sinn Fein. Stan Orme was compelled to reassure the House, as he did on 25 March, that there would be no negotiation. But there would. The IRA gave Neave their own answer a few days later, killing four British soldiers in Armagh over a thirty-six-hour period and bringing the total of such killings to forty-two in six years. Neave expressed his sorrow and called on ministers to strengthen military intelligence in the area.
He continued tacking towards Unionism, suggesting on a visit to Belfast in late March that Northern Ireland should have more MPs, and promising that a Tory government would seek to get rid of direct rule ‘as soon as we could get agreement on the right course’. Generally speaking, he said, the Conservatives favoured the principle of devolved government. In fact, they discreetly proposed to Irish ministers an ‘administrative council’ for Northern Ireland. Given the disposition of the parties in the province, this hinted at a solution favourable to the Unionists. In Belfast on 9 April Rees once again accused Neave of never having understood the policy of ending internment. He was also ‘fantastically interested’ in his job and did not seek a move. However, on 5 April James Callaghan took over from Wilson and a switch in ministers – if not policy – was inevitable. Rees soldiered on, fending off fire from Neave on ‘inadvertent’ cross-border incursions into the Republic by the SAS. A weekend of killings in mid-May, which left five policemen and eight civilians dead with more than fifty injured, brought another Private Notice Question from Neave demanding ‘tough and really quick decisions’. He proposed special anti-terrorist hit squads and again criticised a weary Rees for ‘giving credibility’ to Sinn Fein by holding exploratory talks. A similar exercise ensued after violence erupted again in the first weekend of June, claiming ten lives in Belfast.
The strong Tory in Neave could find few obvious outlets in a political situation where a Conservative Opposition and a Labour government were ostensibly engaged in a bipartisan approach to the great crisis of the day. But when, in mid-June, it came to industrial relations in Northern Ireland, Neave let rip. Heath’s ill-fated 1971 Industrial Relations Act had never applied in the province, but the government was determined that its legislation repealing that measure and its own reforms of union law would. Neave was deeply hostile to this ‘dose of socialist medicine’. However, his party did not oppose the change in principle and he was able only to score a few points before conceding. He was on more familiar ground on 14 June, accusing Rees of being half-hearted, world-weary and negative. He called on the government to ‘go over to the offensive and declare war on terrorism’. In the border areas, he demanded identity cards and movement passes. To the faint hearts who raised difficulties, he had a simple message: ‘That is not the way to win a war.’ He also disclosed that his ideas for a new offence of terrorism, border-control zones, deployment of skilled marksmen and a specially trained anti-terrorist force of RUC and army experts had been ‘informally made known in various quarters’: presumably not just his formal contacts with the security forces, but with the secret state too.
The rancorous exchanges between Neave and Rees continued until early August with Neave indicting his rival as ‘totally deluded’ by the IRA, a charge rejected by a drained Rees, who predicted that history would ultimately vindicate him. So far it has judged Rees to have been in the right, but his successor came to the Northern Ireland Office with a very different agenda. On 2 September, the Defence Secretary Roy Mason, a short, pipe-smoking, ex-coal miner from Yorkshire, took over the exacting Ulster portfolio. An exceptionally pugnacious individual schooled in the cut-throat left – right politics of the National Union of Mineworkers, Mason was cut from different cloth from Rees, who was a former grammar school teacher. While still at the MoD, he had originally proposed sending in the SAS. He shared Neave’s view that the first priority was security and he wanted constitutional change put on the back burner. At his first press conference, he offered no new security initiative but promised to punish terrorists ‘as criminals, not politicals’. Within months, he could boast of doubling the activities of the SAS and ‘harassing the IRA with as much vigour as was legally acceptable in a liberal democracy’.
Irish ministers adopted a wait and see policy on Mason but decided to raise their objections over Neave with Thatcher herself. The Dublin government was becoming increasingly concerned at the way the Conservatives were drifting away from support for power-sharing. It could not be denied that Neave was frequently scornful of the prospects of getting Unionists and Nationalists to cooperate on devolved self-rule. At the Tory Party Conference in early October, the hard-line Unionist MP the Reverend Martin Smyth had rejected power-sharing, and Neave not only failed to support the official party line but appeared to support his comments as being spoken ‘not from theory but from practice and from the very heart’. These remarks prompted a fierce reaction from the SDLP, which threatened a boycott of political contacts with the Tories until they resumed the bipartisan approach. In the face of this pressure, Neave equivocated. It was also noticeable that at no time did Neave publicly condemn the army’s apparently deliberate vacillation in the face of the 1974 loyalist strike that brought down Ulster’s first power-sharing administration. It might be thought that he shared intelligence calculations that the experiment should be allowed to fail.
At any rate, Garret FitzGerald was detailed to raise the issue with Thatcher. He did so in London on 14 October 1976. Coincidentally, Neave was away that day on an official visit to Northern Ireland and was not present to take the flak. In the leader’s Westminster office, Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw and Reginald Maudling listened with disbelief to Dublin’s litany of complaints, reproduced in a short printed summary of Neave’s speeches. FitzGerald later recorded: ‘I went on to tell her and her colleagues that in my personal contacts with a Unionist leader during the previous year he had repeatedly insisted that he was confident that Conservative policy would change and that they would restore majority rule, and in my most recent encounter with him I felt that he believed what earlier he had merely hoped.’14 Asked what should be done, FitzGerald suggested that Mrs Thatcher should make a major speech on Northern Ireland, unambiguously endorsing power-sharing. He conceded that this would involve overruling Neave on a high-profile political issue. FitzGerald left the meeting dismayed that, after eighteen months as party leader, Thatcher was still poorly briefed on Northern Ireland, but hopeful of reversing Neave’s drift. He succeeded: soon afterwards, Neave wrote to Harry West, leader of the Official Unionists, reaffirming Tory support for power-sharing. He was angry nonetheless at being forced into a corner by Dublin.
Meanwhile, the undercover operations had not ceased. Neave embroiled himself in what later became known as the Colin Wallace affair. Colin Wallace was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian father, born in 1943 in Randalstown, in staunchly Unionist County Antrim. Like Neave, he joined the Territorial Army in his late teens. Later he also entered the Ulster Special Constabulary – the B Specials, hated and feared by the Catholic nationalist community which saw them as the armed wing of Unionist ascendancy. He was a crack shot and a highly committed soldier. At the instigation of a senior officer, Wallace joined the regular army in May 1968 as an Assistant Command, Public Relations Officer, based in Lisburn barracks, HQ of the British army in Northern Ireland. It was a quiet period for the full-time soldier. The IRA was largely defunct and discredited, but the emergence of the civil rights movement, initially in Londonderry, changed everything. Brutally put down by the RUC and B Specials, the protest swiftly turned to riot and spread across the province, most viciously in Belfast. James Callaghan, then Home Secretary, sent in the army to restore order and, initially at least, they were welcomed by Catholics being burned out of their homes by loyalist fanatics. But gratitude soon turned to hatred, as the soldiers were perceived to be on the side of the Unionist majority. The army public relations offensive became critical in the British government’s efforts to restore order and the status quo. It also diversified into psychological warfare, working hand in glove with the intelligence services. Working for Army Information Policy, Wallace was drawn into these psychological operations. Strategic psy-war had ‘long-term and mainly political objectives’ designed to weaken the ability of enemies or hostile groups to wage war. ‘It can be directed against the dominating political party, the government and/or against the population as a whole, or particular elements of it. It is planned and controlled by the highest political authority.’15 It could have been more simply described as the secret state’s lie machine.
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 30