A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  to be sad. If one was down, the other immediately went up. It was unbelievable. At crucial moments, when we had just scrabbled one party back on board, I would be terrified in case they went out of the room looking satisfied in front of those waiting to come in for the next meeting.

  We had one bonus, however: there were a huge number of different elements in the deal. At one level this complicated things, but at another it gave us lots of dimensions to play with. Unionists might feel unhappy with conceding on the way the Executive worked, but they could be brought round by a good deal on North–South bodies. There was always another card in the hand.

  Sinn Fein came back with forty pages of detailed changes. I was aghast when I received the document. I used to be a lawyer; forty pages of amendments means a lot of negotiating. I assumed all were to be taken seriously, and needless to say, they would have made Unionist hair curl and would have unified their delegation. It was here that Mo played an important part in the negotiation. Mo’s idea of negotiating with Sinn Fein was rather smart. She heard them out, took receipt of the document, as it were, then ignored the overwhelming majority of the points, focusing on the one or two things that might matter. The rest sort of fell by the wayside. It seemed very odd to me, but it worked.

  The point which she correctly identified did matter was the IRA men behind bars for various terrorist acts and killings. She took an extraordinarily forward position on this. Basically, she thought the issue not of enormous consequence to Unionism; after all, prisoners had been released before in the 1970s, and people more or less expected something similar. She offered Sinn Fein the release of them all within a year; they came back on board.

  Then I started to reconsider. It seemed to me inherently implausible that Unionist opinion wouldn’t object to ‘IRA killers’ being out on the street. I asked Alastair, who thought the notion abhorrent to the British public, never mind Unionist Northern Ireland. I asked John Steele, a senior and very sensible NIO official, who gave his view in civil servant language – which I was beginning to be able to translate – and told me the whole business was barking. (I think he said it wouldn’t be ‘frightfully helpful’.)

  But I was stuck. I had agreed with Gerry that they would be released. I went back to him to renegotiate – never a good tactic. In the end, I did something very ‘Tonyish’ and he did something very ‘Gerryish’: I privately assured him we would do it in one year if the conditions allowed, but publicly and officially, it would be two. He agreed, and what’s more, never called in the promise or used it publicly to embarrass me.

  So: Irish government OK. UUP OK. SDLP satisfied. Sinn Fein back on board. We had an agreement. I called President Clinton and asked him to phone Gerry Adams to bind them in, which he did. He was a total brick throughout, tracking the negotiation, staying up all night, calling anyone he needed to call, saying anything he needed to say and much more besides, and being supremely on the ball, and typically, with that instant knack of his, getting right to the political nub.

  The hours passed as we went back over the detail yet again, filling in the gaps, sorting out the administrative glitches, working at what we would say and to whom.

  It was of course ludicrously optimistic to think we had an agreement. Even though we had carried on through the night, now having been almost forty-eight hours without sleep, the wretched see-saw slipped again in the early hours of Good Friday morning, 10 April 1998. The Irish – still fretting a little over how the North–South part would be received – added a section to that strand, creating two new North–South bodies (thus indicating Ireland would act on a unified basis) in the areas of trade protection and the Irish language.

  Now you might think cooperation on these two issues would be relatively uncontentious. In fact the Unionists screeched to a halt. It turned out there was some obscure language called Ullans, a Scottish dialect spoken in some parts of Ulster which was the Unionists’ equivalent of the Irish language. By this time, nothing surprised me. They could have suggested siting the Assembly on Mars and I would have started to draft options.

  Everyone was now tired and fractious. I had an awful meeting with Bertie and David Trimble, in which Bertie did not take quite the same relaxed view of the importance of Ullans as I did, suggesting that maybe David would like to speak some of the ‘fecking thing’ so we could hear what it sounded like; and David taking umbrage at the idea that the dialect was a Unionist invention, explaining solemnly and at length the Scottish roots of Ullans with all the sensitivity of a landowner talking to the village idiot.

  The episode sent David Trimble’s delegation down the helter-skelter, and fresh amendments started flying out. Alastair, meanwhile, had hinted to the media, who were now pretty fractious themselves, that we had an agreement, which in all good faith he thought we had. When I told him of the impasse, he expressed himself in terms of which only Alastair was capable, to the effect that if I thought he was now going to tell the world’s media that contrary to what he had told them earlier, we had failed to secure an agreement after all because of a Scottish Ulster dialect called Ullans, and so the war in Northern Ireland would go on, such an announcement, on his part, was more than a tad unlikely. I was at my wits’ end. Even calls from Bill Clinton yielded nothing. Here again, Jonathan was superb. He dealt with the Unionist concerns one by one, calmed their delegation, tried to put it back into balance.

  We whittled it down to two issues – one real, the other surreal – but by now the border between the two was becoming harder to discern. The surreal issue was the Unionist desire to close down somewhere called Maryfield. At first there was confusion, since we thought that the Unionists were saying ‘Murrayfield’ had to close, and even I winced at the prospect of demolishing the Edinburgh home of Scottish rugby that I had visited often as a teenager. But it was a measure of our now complete isolation in the negotiating cell that I neither asked why Unionism might want to erase a rugby pitch, nor was unprepared to do it.

  After a few minutes, we elicited to my relief that Maryfield was in fact the name of the secretariat established under Mrs Thatcher’s hated Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s. The secretariat basically did nothing, and in any event would be superseded by our agreement. Maryfield was just an office, so the whole business was entirely symbolic. Then it transpired they didn’t simply want the secretariat shut – that would happen anyway – they wanted the physical building closed. ‘Fine, we’ll use it for something else,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ they said, ‘we want Maryfield shut. Closed. No longer in use. For anything.’

  It was as if the building had become a political manifestation of the dispute, which I suppose in a sense it had. By now, I didn’t care. I would have taken a crane and concrete block round and demolished it myself if it meant they signed up.

  The Northern Ireland Office cavilled. ‘Why do they need it closed? Can’t we use it for filing?’

  ‘Guys,’ I said, ‘please don’t ask why. From now on Maryfield is a thing of the past. It’s over. Part of history. Raze it to the ground.’ I never did find out what happened to it. Probably everyone forgot about it.

  The serious issue was one in which I had a lot of sympathy for David. He and Unionism as a whole were worried that if the Republican movement reneged, if they failed to decommission, how would they be excluded from government? Of course, the Unionists could walk out; but, reasonably enough, they felt it shouldn’t be them that would have to bring the thing down.

  For Sinn Fein, any talk of exclusion was anathema. They had point-blank refused such a suggestion earlier. Reopen it now and we would lose the whole show. I explained to David. He went away crestfallen and his delegation walked into a closed session.

  I sat and reflected with Jonathan. We were within inches, but I could tell it was not going to work. David couldn’t swing it. Heaven knows what would be going on in that delegation room, but if it were positive, my Great-Aunt Lizzie was a philanthropist. ‘We’ve got to do something,’ I said. I was pacing the room
. I had a thought. ‘Let’s write him a letter, a side letter.’ The letter guaranteed that if within the first six months of the Assembly, Sinn Fein didn’t deliver on decommissioning, we would support changing the provisions within the agreement to allow exclusion. It was very typical of the intricate nuance of the negotiation: we didn’t say we would exclude, we said we would support changing the agreement so as to exclude.

  We drafted at speed, Jonathan at his laptop, me dictating, and both Jonathan and John Steele offering comments. I signed it, and sent Jonathan racing down to the delegation room. At first he couldn’t get in. Eventually, like the message from the governor halting the execution just before they turn the switch on, he brought it into the packed session. John Taylor, David Trimble’s other deputy who by turns could be incredibly helpful or incredibly unhelpful, read it, looked up and said, ‘That’s fine by me.’

  I sat in trepidation and anxiety for a further hour (not least because I’m afraid I had told none of the other parties about the side letter) while each member of the delegation gave their views. David called up to my room. ‘We’re going to run with this.’

  We had a deal.

  The next hours passed in a blur. We were beyond exhaustion, light-headed almost. George Mitchell announced the agreement. Bertie and I gave statements. There was general euphoria. At long last I was released from the hellhole Castle Buildings had become.

  I had lost all sense of time. As I got into the car to drive away and the close protection team said we would be at the airport in twenty minutes, I realised with a start that I was off to Spain. Like all of us, I had thought this would be a quick negotiation and had booked a visit to Spain, taking up the invitation of the Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, whom I only knew slightly at that time, for me and my family to come and spend some days with him. I knew he was a tough negotiator and a strong, successful party leader, but little else. We were from different political families, he being leader of the Partido Popular, the Spanish Conservative Party, and I thought it worthwhile to get to know him. I knew about his toughness because we had been together at the Amsterdam Treaty negotiation at the end of May 1997, just weeks after I had come to power and a year into his first term.

  In Amsterdam I had had all sorts of complicating demands, some correct, some hangovers from the previous government, and I was negotiating hard. It was my first international deal and I didn’t want to mess up. José María had one major sticking point: he needed the treaty to reflect Spain’s special position as the recipient of European support and as a ‘big’ country along with other ‘bigs’, not a ‘small’. This was a real problem for the other ‘bigs’, notably the Germans led by Helmut Kohl.

  The Dutch tried the old tactic, with German encouragement, of leaving the Spanish demands till last. The idea was that you settled everyone else and then put the thumbscrews on the remaining recalcitrant, who got bullied or shamed into submission. ‘Europe needs you. How can you disturb Europe’s stability at a moment like this? Have you no sense of history? Do you want to be responsible for a European failure?’ etc. A load of old nonsense, but effective in a large number of cases.

  But not with Aznar. They waited until everyone had settled, including me, and then offered him a compromise, not a bad one but not a good one. He said, no, I told you my terms. Ah, yes, but we need to know your bottom line, they said. That is my bottom line, he replied. He then said: I’m going into the next room to smoke a cigar. Which he promptly did.

  They tried everything. Wim Kok went in and made his disapproval clear in a mildly Dutch Protestant way. Jacques Chirac tried to lord it over him in a very French way. Helmut Kohl finally rose to his feet and carried his considerable weight into the next room, looking like a juggernaut in search of a hedgehog. He came back mystified. The hedgehog had inexplicably refused to be squashed. Kohl turned to me. ‘You’re new like him,’ he barked. ‘You go and try.’

  I went into where José María was sitting, just him, his interpreter and his cigar, on which he was puffing away as if he hadn’t a care in the world. We dispensed with the interpreter and spoke French. I gave him a spiel about how important it was, how this negotiation hung in the balance, how only he could save the day, and ended by saying how truly disappointed everyone would be, especially Helmut, if he didn’t compromise. ‘I know. I am so sad,’ he said with an enormous grin. ‘Can you give them a message from me? Tell them I said on what terms this treaty was acceptable to Spain and I said it at the beginning. And until now, they never asked me again. But if they had, I would have told them those were the terms acceptable to Spain. And look,’ he said, pulling something out of his pocket, ‘I have so many more cigars to smoke.’ He got his terms.

  The family and I had been due to pass a few days before Easter with him. Such was my confidence on the Ireland negotiations – crazy, I know – that I decided to send Cherie, the kids and my mother-in-law on ahead, telling them I would join them shortly.

  Now this was a real mark of Aznar. They arrived on the Wednesday, forty-eight hours before me, during which time he hosted them all with enormous kindness and effusive goodwill. I think I and most leaders would have been a tiny bit disconcerted having to entertain the family of another leader, and moreover a family they’d never met, with young kids to boot; but he took it all with perfect equanimity and it formed the basis of a lasting personal friendship that had important consequences at a later date.

  At Belfast’s RAF Aldergrove I somehow got on to the plane, and took a call from the Queen to congratulate me. I think until then I really hadn’t understood the enormity of the achievement. I thought, I bet she doesn’t do this often, and indeed she doesn’t. I then fell asleep for the whole journey.

  It was the early hours of the morning when I finally crept into bed beside Cherie, who woke and also congratulated me. I slept again until mid-morning. When I got up I went in search of my host, only to find him somewhat alarmingly closeted with my mother-in-law. ‘Oh, you needn’t have bothered turning up,’ she said, ‘we’ve sorted everything.’

  ‘Sorted what?’ I said.

  ‘Gibraltar of course,’ she said.

  Well, she would have done as good a job as anyone.

  After a couple of days with the Aznars we went to spend some time with Derry’s friends Karin and Paco Peña – the flamenco guitarist – in Córdoba. I completely fell in love with Córdoba, a beautiful place. The Mezquita was the highlight, but the whole city was enchanting. Paco had a delightful old home in the centre of town with a traditional courtyard and, perhaps less traditionally, a barrel of sherry at the top of the stairs to the balcony, to slake the thirst of any passing guest. It was a week of wonderful relaxation. Paco taught me some classical guitar, we visited tapas bars and sherry vaults and generally passed an agreeable time.

  The impact of the Good Friday Agreement, as it was already being called (except by Unionists who insisted in calling it the Belfast Agreement), reverberated around the world. I was constantly stopped and congratulated, and it was one of the few times in the job I can honestly say I felt content, fulfilled and proud. There weren’t many more!

  Back home, reality swiftly took hold. The thing is, the Good Friday Agreement was a supreme achievement – without it, nothing else could have been done – but it wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. It was a predictor of the course that the peace process should take if all went well. The implementation then had to begin; and whereas the agreement could be described as art – at least in concept – the implementation was more akin to heavy manufacturing.

  The first challenge was to have a referendum North and South endorsing the agreement and then an election in the Assembly so as to begin the procedure for getting a working Executive. The Northern Irish were, to be fair, hugely supportive of the agreement – at least as an idea. However, they didn’t know the detail, and in the euphoria of the moment certainly hadn’t contemplated the true ramifications. Very soon, they started to.

  In a typical twist, the ag
reement was formally agreed to by the UUP, but never by Sinn Fein. The UUP might therefore have been expected to be the more upbeat, but no: as soon as the agreement was signed (fortunately David Trimble quickly got his party executive to endorse it), Unionist tremors, never far below the surface, broke out. Such doubts were magnified by the political equivalent of the Hubble telescope by what happened next.

  The deal on prisoners included the power in the United Kingdom government to transfer IRA prisoners to the South. Rather unwisely, Mo decided to transfer from England to Ireland the ‘Balcombe Street Four’, members of the notorious gang which had carried out assassinations and terror attacks for the IRA in the 1970s. Then the Irish government, having taken receipt of the prisoners, released them on parole to attend Sinn Fein’s Dublin Conference without telling us. The prisoners received a ten-minute ovation on prime-time telly while Unionists looked on in utter horror.

  It is true to say that that decision very nearly wrecked the train as it was leaving the station. It certainly put it on one rail for the duration of the referendum campaign and subsequent election to the Assembly, all of which had to happen within roughly ten weeks of the Good Friday Agreement being signed.

  John Major and I visited to calm things. Then I went with William Hague. I wrote out pledges in my own hand, promising no seat in government for those of violence and other such things. Bill Clinton issued a statement of support from the G8 in Birmingham, which I was also chairing.

  It was an anxious time. We got a majority of Unionists to back the agreement in the referendum (55 per cent to 45 per cent). David won the Assembly election over the DUP, and the SDLP were the second biggest party. But we had learned a lesson: there was still a long way to go. Although we had the map, we were miles from journey’s end.

  It took us another nine years to put it all together in a final working solution. Each of those years was fraught, and many times we were close to admitting failure. Deadlines were missed and negotiations over minutiae took months, but we kept going.