Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  When she met FitzGerald in the margins of the Milan European Council at the end of June, she poured out her heart to him. ‘She and the Taoiseach both had the same problem in mirror image … She was fearful of the reactions of the Unionists to the proposed agreement.’152

  FitzGerald unwisely started to report to her how some judges in Northern Ireland did not agree with their own Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lowry, who had privately expressed his vehement opposition to joint courts a few days earlier. Mrs Thatcher brought him up smartly. These discussions, she said acidly, ‘would run into acute difficulties if he purported to tell her about what went on in judges’ meetings in part of the United Kingdom’. FitzGerald told her that he would not sign an agreement without joint courts. He was willing for the Republic to accede to the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism (ECST) of 1977. This had both symbolic and practical importance, because of its provisions relating to the extradition of terrorists between contracting states.* She said that she absolutely could not offer anything beyond a readiness to look at the possibility of joint courts; she then repeated this ‘with great emphasis’.153

  Now it was FitzGerald’s turn to get passionate. ‘Speaking with considerable emotion the Taoiseach said that he wanted the Prime Minister to understand that the Irish government and people did not want a role in Northern Ireland.’ He was doing what he was doing because of his fear of the rise of Sinn Fein, helped by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. He spoke of the danger of Ireland ‘coming under a hostile and sinister influence’. Then he made a personal appeal: ‘He and the Prime Minister were the only two people able to reach an agreement.’ They must do so. Mrs Thatcher politely assured him that she ‘shared the Taoiseach’s aim of preventing Ireland coming under hostile and tyrannical forces’,154 but the key to building confidence would be prompt implementation of whatever agreement they ended up signing.

  The underlying common purpose behind the fierce words on both sides was shown by the fact that they ended up discussing the date for the signing of the Agreement, and the best location. On 25 July 1985, the British Cabinet approved the draft Agreement. Although few Cabinet members were later willing to defend the Agreement in public, there was hardly any dissent at the meeting. Douglas Hurd was surprised to find support from Norman Tebbit and this, Hurd felt, persuaded Mrs Thatcher. ‘He took the line that we started this negotiation and we might as well finish it. He was not enthusiastic, but he dismissed the idea that we should change our policy because his wife had been crippled and he himself had been attacked. And that settled it.’155*

  Although the two sides were now close, the ensuing period was as tense as any in the entire process. There were fears of leaks, backslidings and Unionist sabotage. The Irish were trying to get more ‘associated measures’ and enticing aspirations attached to the Agreement. Mrs Thatcher wanted fewer. Robert Armstrong was pushing for British concessions. As soon as the Cabinet had approved the draft Agreement, he acted. Following the Republic’s desire to flesh out the Agreement with explanatory documentation, he sent Mrs Thatcher a ‘Draft Passage for a Communiqué’ to appear when the Agreement was signed and a form of words which she could use in the House of Commons to disclose that terrorist prisoners would be released if there were ‘a real and sustained reduction in the level of violence’.156 He wanted her to promise quick progress ‘with a view to enhancing the confidence of all the people of Northern Ireland in the institutions of law and order’ and to ‘reinforcing’ the even-handedness of the RUC. Mrs Thatcher peppered his note with ‘NO’ and ‘The tone is wrong’: ‘I am utterly astounded by this minute. I am not prepared to go ahead with either of these things.’ At the bottom of his note, Armstrong had added: ‘This proposal has been agreed with the NIO.’ ‘Not with me,’ scrawled Mrs Thatcher, underlining it three times. Reflecting opinion in Cabinet, she emphasized the need for parliamentary approval of the Agreement itself before anything could be added: ‘The whole thing has to be debated first.’

  In his reply to Armstrong on Mrs Thatcher’s behalf, Charles Powell set out her criticisms sternly, but he did add his own gloss of her thoughts. She was saying, wrote Powell, that it would be ‘counter-productive’ to link the release of Irish prisoners to the Agreement: ‘I interpret this to mean that she would not exclude some private assurance to the Irish government at a later stage.’157 There is no evidence that such a private assurance was given, and Powell, when questioned by the present author about his note, said he could remember nothing about it. But for such a trusted official to write as he did on his mistress’s behalf suggests that she was prepared to concede more behind the scenes than she liked to disclose in public, as she had also done during the hunger strikes. In the Northern Irish ‘peace process’ of the 1990s, the release of terrorist prisoners would become a key issue. It is interesting to find it foreshadowed in the much tougher circumstances of the 1980s.

  Back and forth through the summer came messages of doubt, hesitation and pain. Here Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, insisting that mixed courts were out of the question; there Robert Armstrong suggesting that mixed courts could be dealt with in a side-document to the Agreement (‘This would probably leak and anyway be rather dishonest,’ Powell told Mrs Thatcher).158 Here were the Unionist leaders coming to see Mrs Thatcher and complaining of a sell-out. There were the Irish, denied mixed courts, threatening to withdraw their readiness to sign up for the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, thus undermining the promise of better security co-operation – a key component of the Agreement from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view. In a flurry of meetings, Armstrong–Nally went through point after point of language and detail. No one was guiltier of backsliding than Mrs Thatcher herself, always anxious about what she might have conceded. ‘Having read the Agreement again,’ she wrote on a Charles Powell memo of 26 September, ‘– I fear it does not accurately convey our meaning. The fact is that this committee is no more than consultative. We have made it sound as if we have given the Republic some authority in our affairs. We haven’t and we don’t intend to.’159 In the end, the Agreement created a mechanism by which the Republic could put forward ‘views and proposals’ about the running of Northern Ireland. The Irish role was only consultative, but that word was avoided.

  At the beginning of September, Mrs Thatcher had reshuffled her Cabinet. She promoted Douglas Hurd from Northern Ireland to the Home Office, and replaced him with Tom King.* (See Chapter 13.) Although the Irish had nothing against King personally, they regarded the change as an insult. With the Agreement imminent, changing the relevant minister implied that Mrs Thatcher did not really give much thought to Ireland, and moved her pieces round the chess board for other reasons. King, who admitted that he had not previously been familiar with the details of the negotiations,160 asked Mrs Thatcher when she offered him the job whether she was determined to push the Agreement through. ‘Yes, I am,’ she said.161 He was alarmed, when he took up the reins, to find how completely the Unionists were being ignored, when John Hume and the SDLP had been fully involved by the Dublin government. ‘The presentation, the secrecy – they stirred up the Unionists. I had to deal with this problem.’162

  On 27 September, Charles Powell passed on to Mrs Thatcher what he described in his covering note as ‘a bit of a bombshell’.163 King had sent Mrs Thatcher a memo which, in Powell’s words, ‘is, in effect, a declaration of no confidence in the present negotiating team’. Although prefacing his remarks by saying that an agreement should be sought, King warned of ‘unwelcome and unmanageable consequences, particularly in handling the unionist reaction’.164 The Agreement as drafted ‘strikes me as offering considerably more to the Irish than it does to us’: he believed that they were getting ‘an unprecedented foothold in the internal affairs of part of the United Kingdom’. Unionists would see the Agreement as breaching the undertaking that any arrangement for governing Northern Ireland must command widespread acceptance. A proposed reference to controlling parades and processions would be ‘a
red rag’ to Unionists. The idea of locating the Irish secretariat set up by the Agreement in Belfast (Stormont itself, the seat of the former Ulster government and parliament, had been suggested) was ‘asking for trouble’. The Unionists would physically impede it. And now the Irish, wrote King in exasperation, were even saying they would not accede to the terrorism convention after all.

  Mrs Thatcher was stirred by what she read. ‘This could be the end of the agreement,’165 she wrote, and added, ‘no prospect of devolution’. She endorsed King’s argument that the Agreement was heavily in favour of the Irish – ‘At present, it is.’166 Sensing a danger that Mrs Thatcher might waver, Howe and Armstrong moved fast to counter what King had said. Howe, who was at a conference in Ottawa, wrote plaintively to her, pointing out that only a month ago he had phoned the Irish Foreign Minister, Peter Barry, ‘at your express request’167 to assure him that King’s appointment had not changed the policy. It would be a terrible missed opportunity to drop everything now. Mrs Thatcher was not, in fact, intending to cancel the Agreement. Although she liked King, she found him ‘too garrulous’,168 and his rather scattergun approach no match for the more intellectual and experienced people like Howe and Armstrong ranged on the other side. Besides, she was ‘far too far down the road to go back’.169 She saw King’s warnings more as an opportunity to strengthen the British hand. ‘I fear they [the Irish] have “fudged” some of the language,’ she wrote on Howe’s letter, ‘so that our meaning and theirs is different and the words themselves unclear … We must look at the text afresh.’

  She assembled Howe, King and Armstrong to discuss King’s doubts and work out where the whole process had got to. On one side, the meeting argued that the Irish were ‘likely to prove not just a thorn in the flesh but a positive thicket of brambles’,170 and there was no clear commitment from the SDLP to co-operate with devolved government. Against this, however, was the danger of strengthening Sinn Fein and ‘the downside risks of failing to complete the Agreement’. The British must secure Irish accession to the terrorism convention, the meeting decided, and change the text of the Agreement to emphasize that national responsibilities were to be retained in their existing jurisdictions: ‘The Prime Minister stressed that in public comment after an agreement was reached, we must be able to make crystal clear that the Irish Government would have no executive role in the North.’171 She followed up the meeting with a letter to Garret FitzGerald telling him she was nervous of a ‘violent reaction’172 wrecking everything. She also asked FitzGerald to reconsider his government’s refusal to accede to the terrorism convention. Eventually, a compromise was worked out in which the Irish ‘intention’ to accede echoed the British readiness to look at the ‘possibility’ of mixed courts.

  Feelings were running high. The Unionists complained that the Pope knew more about what was happening in the negotiations than they did (which may well have been true). But the process tottered on, and discussions about a date and a place for signature neared completion. The Irish kept wanting to bring the date forward, the British to push it back. In the end, 15 November was agreed. All sorts of ideas – Dublin, the Irish Embassy in London, the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, even (an Irish suggestion) New York – were proposed for the great day, but gradually, despite anxiety about security and politics, both sides settled on Hillsborough Castle, the seat of British power in Northern Ireland.

  At the end of October, the Agreement came to the Cabinet once more. This was the moment of real decision. Charles Powell set out for Mrs Thatcher what had gone wrong – the doubts of Tom King, the rise of Unionist opposition, the fact that the package had ‘deteriorated’173 because of the weakening of security co-operation and the dilution of the Irish commitment to signing the ECST, and the lack of any commitment from the SDLP. There was also a risk of misunderstanding with the Irish about the consultative nature of their role. On the other hand, the Agreement was ‘defensible’: ‘it concedes nothing significant, though we shall be honour-bound not to make this too obvious.’ Reports suggested that the Unionists would have more difficulty than in the past in getting strikes and protests going. Failure to go ahead would disappoint the Americans. ‘You told President Reagan last week’, Powell reminded her, ‘that an agreement was likely.’174 If the Cabinet did decide not to go ahead, ‘we must leave ourselves with a good reason for terminating the negotiations.’ In Powell’s view, this would be the Republic’s failure to accede to the ECST. But in Cabinet there was no trouble. On 31 October, it accepted the Anglo-Irish Agreement in principle, while inviting ‘improvements’.

  Once the Cabinet had decided, Mrs Thatcher was keen to get on. She refused, for example, Tom King’s eleventh-hour attempt to get mixed courts out of the Agreement altogether. Of the two leaders, it was FitzGerald who became the twitchier. The day after the Cabinet decision, he deputed Richard Ryan of the Irish Embassy in London to call on Charles Powell. He was made ‘nervous’, Ryan told Powell, by Mrs Thatcher’s recent remarks in New York in which she had reiterated that decisions about the North would continue to be taken in London, as those about the South were taken in Dublin: ‘the line … woke memories of “out, out, out”.’175

  FitzGerald feared that what he regarded as great achievements would be allowed to trickle away. On 7 November, he wrote to Mrs Thatcher to say how worried he was about the location and timing of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) which the Agreement would create. It must be in Stormont, headed by representatives of high and equal rank on both sides, and it must not be delayed. Mrs Thatcher told Armstrong, Howe and King that she was ‘perturbed by the tone of the Taoiseach’s remarks about the location’.176 It would send the wrong political signal to put the IGC secretariat in Stormont. The Northern Ireland Office started desperately scrabbling round for premises, and eventually found them in government buildings at Maryfield, just outside Belfast, which had no emotional political associations. In her reply to FitzGerald, she therefore gave him a rather dusty answer, emphasizing the importance of security co-operation ‘in its own right’ and pointing out that it would take time for people ‘to get used to there being a presence of your government in Belfast’.177 The draft of the letter supplied by Armstrong ended on an upbeat note about how Britain and the Republic were embarking on ‘something entirely new and exciting’. Mrs Thatcher cut this out.

  On 11 November, FitzGerald gathered the leaders of the SDLP to brief them on the full contents of the Agreement. The meeting ended with an emotional singing of the Irish national anthem. The mood in Ulster was quite different. Unionist newspapers and politicians sounded dire warnings. In the House of Commons, at Prime Minister’s Questions a day before the signing of the Agreement, Enoch Powell asked Mrs Thatcher, ‘Does the right hon. Lady understand – if she does not yet understand she soon will – that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?’178 Richard Ryan was sitting in the public gallery: ‘Powell blew it. She just looked at him with the most ferocious, cold, hardened face, and I think that is where his influence snapped.’179 In terms of any personal relationship while she remained in office, this may well be true, although in after years Mrs Thatcher generally spoke respectfully of Powell. In the Commons, she replied that Powell’s jibe was ‘deeply offensive’, and she meant it. But his words were telling all the same.* They played on her biggest anxiety about what she was doing, an anxiety which was never completely stilled.

  Oddly, it was Bernard Ingham, normally keen that his boss should stand up to foreigners, who told her most clearly to put her heart into what was about to happen. He wrote to her to prepare for her joint press conference with FitzGerald: ‘I believe that, in my [that is, media] terms, some resignations might be helpful in the sense that you will be seen to be standing up to the Unionists about whom you are perceived to be wobbly.’180 Aware that her old friend Ian Gow was likely to resign (Gow saw her that very day to warn her of his intention), he added, ‘… you will need to deal firmly in public with those who resign.’ ‘The media’, he went
on, ‘will be looking like hawks for signs of a lack of resolve.’ He suggested a question which might be thrown at her – ‘Is this a historic agreement … And if it doesn’t mean much, why spend all the time and energy on getting it?’ In her own mind, Mrs Thatcher did not have a confident answer to this question.

  Early the next morning, Friday 15 November, Mrs Thatcher flew into RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland and was transferred by helicopter to Hillsborough Castle. Already Ian Paisley and his crowd of supporters were gathering outside the gates to protest. Inside, there was an atmosphere of ‘nervous cheerfulness’181 among British and Irish officials. Mrs Thatcher, always soothed by domestic detail, busied herself moving the flowers about and rearranging the furniture, making FitzGerald and Geoffrey Howe help her. She carefully ‘checked [that] the picture on the wall behind the table at which she and the Taoiseach would sit [for the signing] had no overtly green or orange connotations’182 and was relieved that it was an eighteenth-century view of Windsor Castle. Shortly after this, Ian Gow’s letter of resignation arrived and was passed immediately to Mrs Thatcher. In it, he told her that ‘the change of policy in Northern Ireland, including the involvement of a foreign power in a consultative role in the administration of the province, will prolong, and not diminish Ulster’s agony. I cannot support this change of policy; it follows that I cannot remain in your Government.’183 Mrs Thatcher went upstairs and spoke to Gow on the telephone for a long time, still hoping to dissuade him. She failed. The departure of such a close colleague on an issue of principle with which she instinctively sympathized made her mood even more anxious. ‘It seriously upset and rattled her,’ recalled David Goodall.184 Howe, who was present at Hillsborough, had particular cause to mourn. Gow was one of his greatest and oldest friends (he had been his election campaign assistant in the 1959 election), and his closeness to Mrs Thatcher had enabled many problems between Howe and her to be smoothed out. ‘It was a blow to us and a blow to the whole relationship,’ he recalled.185*