Blair took instant advantage of the landslide victory in 1997 to ‘kick things forward’. In the words of Sir John Holmes, a senior official who provided expertise developed working on Northern Ireland with John Major: ‘He saw a real opportunity by moving fast to get everybody caught up in the whirl, not let them think too hard about what was happening and get some momentum in the process.’16
Within two weeks of becoming Prime Minister, Blair made the first of what would be many flights to Belfast to make a speech, with a great deal of input from Holmes, which reinvigorated the stalled process inherited from Major. The speech was ‘well-balanced, thoughtful and it established a sense of urgency’, in the expert view of George Mitchell, the former American senator who was guiding the process.17 Blair reassured the Unionists that he was not going to give away Northern Ireland by affirming: ‘My agenda is not a united Ireland … I believe in the United Kingdom. I value the Union.’18 In an unscripted addition which appalled some of his officials, he stood amidst a group of primary school children and declared that he didn’t think a united Ireland would happen in their lifetimes. This helped to engage the Unionists, whose leader, David Trimble, was impressed because it ‘not just re-energised the process, but set out what we would now call a road map’.19 To the Republicans, Blair declared that ‘the settlement train was leaving’ and he wanted them aboard.20 Martin McGuinness says they took this as an encouraging sign that Blair:
recognised that there wasn’t going to be a solution unless Irish Republicans were part of that. He was challenging the Thatcher mentality that the enemy was the Republicans, the enemy was the IRA, that they had to be defeated at all costs. It was his willingness to do that that made an impression on me.21
Blair’s facility for getting people to like him was also at work. Gerry Adams found him ‘the opposite of the stuffy, arms-length attitude of the Tories. He was personable and informal, easy to talk to … an engaging personality. I dared to hope that there was a chance that we could actually do business with him.’22
The Good Friday Agreement signed during Holy Week in 1998 was a high point of his first term. When those talks teetered on the brink of collapse, Blair gambled with his reputation by dashing across the Irish Sea to hurl himself into the negotiations. George Mitchell calls it ‘a courageous, critical and decisive’ intervention. He negotiated ‘paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word. He was personally and directly involved in the critical negotiation. On this I am absolutely certain: without the direct intervention of Tony Blair there would not have been an agreement.’23 Martin McGuinness agrees ‘that if the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister had not come to Castle Buildings we’d probably still be sitting there. That was of critical importance.’24 From the other side of the divide, David Trimble concurs that Blair ‘made the difference’.25
That agreement secured a historic compromise between Unionism and Nationalism. For the first time, Unionists accepted that they shared Northern Ireland with another tradition that deserved equality of respect, conceded to the principle of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and accepted a cross-border dimension. For the first time, Nationalists explicitly acknowledged that the status of Northern Ireland could not be changed without the consent of the majority of its population. The Irish Government removed the territorial claim to Northern Ireland from the Republic’s constitution.
The Good Friday Agreement enjoyed a further crucial advantage over all previous attempts. It had a popular mandate. More than 90 per cent of voters in the Republic ratified it in the cross-border referendum. In the north, it won the support of 96 per cent of Nationalists. Unionists approved by the narrower margin of 53 per cent following another decisive intervention by Blair, when he threw himself into the campaign to secure endorsement.26 Trimble believes Blair ‘probably turned the campaign round and enabled us to get a narrow majority of Unionists’.27
The Agreement was a triumph, but a necessarily imperfect one which still left chasms of mistrust between the two communities. Blair and Powell initially and wrongly thought that their main challenge was simply to get it implemented. Only after a while did they grasp that what they actually faced was ‘an endurance test’.28 It left unclear the extent to which the IRA would be required to disarm before its political twin, Sinn Féin, could become part of a devolved government. In the words of Powell: ‘There was deliberate constructive ambiguity about decommissioning which came back to haunt us as it became destructive ambiguity.’29 The refusal of the IRA to unequivocally declare an end to its ‘war’ was not just an affront to the Unionists. All the constitutional parties had reason to object while Sinn Féin sat at the table with a private army at its back. ‘Guns and government’ bedevilled the negotiations for years. The Unionists were resistant to allowing Republicans into government so long as they had their guns. Republicans were reluctant to surrender their arsenal before the Unionists demonstrated a sincere intent to share power.
In mid-August 1998, a splinter terrorist group, the Real IRA, killed twenty-nine people and injured hundreds more with a massive bomb in the market town of Omagh. The leadership of Sinn Féin condemned that atrocity, but resisted taking the next step. Republican theology would not let them be seen to surrender. Gerry Adams argued: ‘Historically the IRA has never decommissioned weapons and it is not going to start now.’30
Adams and Martin McGuinness were the principal negotiators for Sinn Féin throughout the many tortuous years of the process. Both had joined the IRA as young men. Adams first grew his beard when on the run from arrest during internment in the 1970s. He represented Belfast, the ideological centre of Republicanism. McGuinness came from Derry, its emotional heart. He was a former Chief of Staff of the IRA who commanded its Derry Brigade during some of the bloodiest years of the Troubles that had claimed 3,326 lives and maimed many more.31
Adams and McGuinness made a first and highly symbolic public visit to Number 10 at Christmas 1997. What was at first a momentous shift – the Prime Minister shaking hands and talking over the table with Sinn Féin when the IRA had tried to murder both of his immediate predecessors – rapidly became part of the scene. Yet the full scale of the encounters would have shocked and repelled a lot of opinion had it been known at the time. Their many subsequent visits to Downing Street and to Chequers were largely kept hidden from public view. Paddy Ashdown and his wife drove up to Chequers one weekend and had to wait for a while at the police checkpoint because the car in front of them was being ‘searched minutely’. It turned out to be Gerry Adams arriving for a meeting with Blair. The Ashdowns went in to see Cherie, who was feeding baby Leo. The Prime Minister suddenly appeared. ‘I must show him to Gerry Adams!’ he said and grabbed his son to do just that.32
During a big negotiation at Number 10 in May 1999, Adams and McGuinness managed to slip out of the building and into the back garden, the same garden over which the IRA fired mortars in an attempt to kill John Major. Jonathan Powell looked out of the window and was horrified to witness the Sinn Féin leaders playing with the Blairs’ children. Adams and McGuinness were trying to ride Nicky Blair’s skateboard down the path through the Downing Street rose garden. At a time when the IRA still retained the arms which had caused so many deaths, a picture of this remarkable scene would have caused widespread outrage. ‘Oh fuck,’ Powell whispered to himself. He ran out into the garden to get them back inside before anyone noticed.33
The Chief of Staff spent more face-time negotiating with Sinn Féin than anyone else. Many clandestine encounters took place at the Clonard monastery in west Belfast. Powell would turn up clutching his official briefcase embossed with the royal crest to parley about the intentions of the IRA, an organisation which had blown up the Queen’s cousin and put his elder brother, Charles, on its death list when he worked for Margaret Thatcher. MI5 grew very apprehensive that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff was endangering himself by becoming ‘over-exposed’.34
Powell trusted McGuinness more than Adams.35 The former IRA c
apo was a paradox: a dedicated Catholic with an unblemished family life. In the assessment of one senior intelligence official: ‘McGuinness hated lying.’36 Adams was a more conventional politician. During one heated negotiation in the Sinn Féin centre on the Falls Road, Adams leaned across the table towards Powell and said: ‘The thing I like about you, Jonathan, is that you always blush when you lie.’ Another official present, Bill Jeffrey of the Northern Ireland Office, quipped back: ‘Unlike you, Gerry.’ They all laughed.37
The Sinn Féin leaders had a hostile relationship with Peter Mandelson when he was Northern Ireland Secretary. ‘When Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness entered the room, you were expected to stand up,’ says Mandelson. ‘They were senior military, they were top brass. Apart from being leaders of Sinn Féin, they were leaders of the military council. And they knew you knew it. I did not address them as if they were leaders of the military council, so that fiction was maintained. They were lordly, this pair. They are bloody hard people. There was very, very tough psychological game-playing, a lot of unspoken intimidation.’38 Peter Hain found them ‘professionally probably the best negotiators I have come across’.39
British ministers and officials would look into the clear, ice blue eyes of McGuinness and the bearded face of Adams and try to gauge their sincerity. ‘We were very worried the Republicans could go back to violence,’ says Powell.40 That fear was understandable. Violent splits had been a regular feature of the history of republicanism since 1921. John Reid, Mandelson’s successor as Northern Ireland Secretary, observes: ‘Any time the Republican movement has tried to reach an accommodation with the British Government before, there has been a split and they’ve ended up killing each other.’41 The Sinn Féin leaders would amplify that fear by stressing that they were risking their own lives. Explaining why the IRA would not agree to start decommissioning in 1999, Powell was told by McGuinness that ‘There was a real threat that someone would give a gun to some impressionable seventeen-year-old and get them to shoot Adams or him.’42 Tom Kelly, a Protestant from Northern Ireland who was heavily involved throughout the process, accepts that they might have ‘put more pressure on the Shinners to deliver decommissioning earlier, but you could never be quite sure how far you could push Adams and McGuinness without pushing them over the edge’.43 Blair and Powell ‘wanted to make peace once, rather than many times’.44
While this goal was right, it also handed a negotiating lever to Adams and McGuinness not available to parties which did not have gunmen in the shadows. They exploited it. Mandelson complained that they would present ‘the Sinn Féin shopping list’ of demands and intimate that if they didn’t get what they wanted ‘then power would pass back to the bad men’.45
This caused serious division between Mandelson and Blair. ‘Tony used to say “the process is the policy”. If it stops, you will roll back into disaster and God alone knows what.’ Mandelson thought Blair was too willing to concede ‘sweeties’ to Sinn Féin and ‘dangle carrots’ before them which were ‘calculated to push the Unionists off the other end of the table’.46 David Trimble agrees that Blair was ‘nervous’ about ‘bringing pressure to bear on Republicans’, which made it appear that they were ‘driving the agenda’. Concessions to Sinn Féin ‘wore out the patience of Unionist voters’.47
Blair had deployed his talent for winning friends to forge a vital relationship with Trimble. They were very different people: the smooth and supple Blair was the temperamental opposite of the prickly and proud Trimble, a man who could erupt in red-faced rages. Yet Blair admired Trimble for his bravery and Trimble was fascinated by Blair. In the view of one sympathetic biographer: ‘At some level, Trimble hero-worshipped Blair and was loath to say no to a politician still at the height of his powers.’48 The connection was instrumental in inducing the Unionist to make the courageous decision to sign up to the Good Friday Agreement. Trimble made that leap conscious that he could be next in the long line of moderate Unionists to be destroyed when they tried to compromise. Despite his eventual fate, he would still call it ‘the high point’ of his political life.49
The power-sharing executive was finally set up at midnight on 30 November 1999, but was suspended after just seventy-two days over the issue of ‘guns and government’. John de Chastelain, the Canadian general who was head of the body monitoring the process, reported that there had been no progress on IRA decommissioning. In early May 2000, the IRA did finally agree to open its arms dumps to inspection by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. The executive came back to life at the end of the month only to founder again later on the same issue.
Trimble was intermittently First Minister when the devolved executive was functioning. He was feted internationally when he won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with John Hume, the constitutional nationalist who had been a brave pathfinder for peace. The international accolades were not enough to bolster Trimble’s crumbling position with his own community. The Good Friday Agreement was a victory for the Unionists on what mattered most to them: the guarantee of their place in the United Kingdom. Yet many of them saw themselves losing more than they were gaining. IRA prisoners were released two years after the agreement. ‘It was an extremely distasteful business. Nobody wanted to do this,’ says John Holmes. ‘But it was clear to all of us that if we didn’t do this then there wouldn’t be a deal.’50 The Royal Ulster Constabulary was being transformed into the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The police, heavily dominated by Protestants and with a history of brutality towards Catholics, needed reform to reconcile them with the Nationalist community. But Unionists recoiled at the conjunction of their police force, many of whom had lost their lives fighting terrorism, being ‘destroyed’ while killers went free and the IRA was still not disarmed. Trimble felt it was the absence of early decommissioning, changes to the police that ‘failed to acknowledge the service and sacrifice that had gone before’ and the agreement to ‘unconditional prisoner release’ that ‘caused the disenchantment’ and ‘the eclipse’ of him and his party.51 His position became increasingly precarious as he clung on by his fingertips from one cliffhanging meeting of his party’s ruling council to another.
Unionist disenchantment was fed on both by his internal opponents and by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists, who had boycotted the Good Friday Agreement. The general election in May 2001 squeezed the moderates in Northern Ireland. David Trimble won six seats to Ian Paisley’s five, but half of Trimble’s MPs ‘were at odds with me on policy’.52 The constitutional nationalists of the SDLP, who rightly felt taken for granted because they did not have arms to lay down, were overtaken by Sinn Féin. Six days of talks at Weston Park that July broke up without agreement. When Adams and McGuinness were pressed to produce more movement on decommissioning, they came back with the familiar refrain that if the Republicans were pushed too fast it would ‘lead to the emergence of a new IRA which would do nothing to solve the historical problem’.53
In late August 2001, Powell wrote a note to Blair arguing that it was time to call Sinn Féin’s bluff. It had been a violent summer in north Belfast and the IRA was clearly encouraging the trouble. Three alleged senior IRA members were arrested in Colombia that summer and accused of collaborating with FARC, a vicious terrorist organisation fuelled by the cocaine trade. In pursuit of the prize of peace, the British Government had adopted a Nelsonian blind eye and pretended not to see many things which would be normally intolerable to a democratic government. They could not indefinitely ignore continuing criminal and paramilitary activity.
9/11 added further pressure to lay down arms, one of the few instances of those atrocities having a benign effect. The mass murder in New York and Washington made the IRA’s brand of terrorism seem obsolete. They could not compete when al-Qaeda was prepared to use suicide bombers to kill people in their thousands. Those Americans who had been romantically indulgent of violent republicanism became intolerant of any form of terrorism. In October 2001, the IRA finally conducted its first act of decom
missioning. The international monitors reported that they witnessed the destruction of arms, ammunition and explosives. In the view of Republicans, this was a major concession and a historic step. But it came too late, and the disarmament was not visible enough, to satisfy distrusting Unionists. They felt vindicated in their suspicions when there was a break-in at the headquarters of Special Branch in Belfast in March 2002. A large number of police officers were forced to move home for fear that their addresses were compromised. Those and other lower-profile episodes suggested that the IRA might be relatively quiescent, but it had not gone away. This was one of several acts which Number 10 interpreted as ‘the Provos doing things to reassure supporters that they hadn’t gone soft’.54 That October, the police raided Republican addresses in Belfast and stormed into Sinn Féin’s offices at Stormont. It was declared that they had found evidence of an IRA ‘spy ring’ which was collecting information to target police officers and soldiers.55
In the wake of the ‘spy ring’ affair, the pressure on Trimble from his own side became even more intense. The devolved government was suspended in October 2002 and would not function again for more than four years. After many years trying to climb ladders to agreement, the peace process was slithering back down the snake.
This forced Blair into a major reappraisal of how he had been trying to progress. ‘It looked as though the institutions we had worked so hard to create in Northern Ireland were falling, irreparably, apart,’ observes Powell.
We had struggled for four years to implement the Good Friday Agreement, by giving a few concessions to one side and then a few to the other in the hope that we could build trust between the sides over time. But time had worked against us: the peace process had become badly discredited and morally undermined. It no longer seemed to be based on principle. Now we had to restore its credibility and force the Republicans into a choice between the ballot box and the Armalite.56
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