Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential.
Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential. He remained in post long after the other Blairites de la première heure such as Alastair Campbell, Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson had departed the scene. The most important career civil servants, such as Sir John Holmes and Sir David Manning, did their stints and rotated out. Powell thus became ‘last man standing’ and was a key player in the triumphant denouement of May 2007, as Martin McGuinness finally lay down with Ian Paisley.
Powell duly takes his place in the very front rank of prime ministerial aides. His historic role even exceeded that of Sir Alfred (‘Andy’) Cope, Lloyd George’s backchannel to Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21. For sheer importance, he perhaps bears comparison with Neville Chamberlain’s amanuensis, Sir Horace Wilson, who also started out in the permanent Whitehall machine.
He dedicates his memoir ‘to the people of Northern Ireland who have suffered so much’. But as No 10 Chief of Staff, he spent much of the last decade facilitating the very people who had dished out the lion’s share of that suffering — the Sinn Fein/IRA high command. The index is highly revealing. There are more references to Gerry Adams than to David Trimble and Ian Paisley combined. The number of references to the IRA dwarfs those to Sinn Fein. Indeed, the references to the IRA exceed those to the UUP, DUP, UKUP, PUP, UDP, Alliance Party, SDLP, and Women’s Coalition taken together.
Powell’s account is therefore dominated by two questions. Firstly, were Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness serious about making peace? Secondly, having tacitly accepted there wouldn’t be a united Ireland in this generation, how vulnerable were they to internal challenge within the republican movement — and how much of a price had to be paid to sustain them?
Inevitably, one can only write truly interestingly on dealings with a clandestine militaristic elite such as the Provisionals by reference to secret intelligence. Powell is not a naturally discreet man, but he has learned the virtues of professional reticence. In consequence, he self-censored heavily. In some cases, the official knife further cut interesting material. The understandable exclusion of highly classified information lends the entire enterprise a slight feel of ‘apart from the assassination, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?’ Indeed, considering that the vulnerability of the Adams-McGuinness leadership is the salient theme of the book, should it have been written at all so soon after the events concerned?
Nor does Powell seem much interested in people — or, if he is, his professional carapace precludes even moderately gossipy pen portraits. For a man who has spent thousands of hours in the company of the republican leadership, he tells us remarkably little about the personalities of Adams and McGuinness beyond the fact that their first demand in any negotiation is to be fed. The references to their motivations — that they were tired of a campaign of armed struggle that wasn’t yielding sufficient fruit — may be true but don’t take us much further forward than some of the standard analyses did at the time of the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.
The account of Ian Paisley’s motivation for doing the deal is equally banal: Powell states that he underwent a near death experience in 2004 and didn’t want to die as ‘Dr No’. But there is little detailed new material about the burgeoning Blair-Paisley relationship, often conducted on a one-on-one basis through 2006/7. During the course of this bizarre tryst, the DUP leader and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church gave a Bible and assorted theological tracts to the Prime Minister, whom he considered to be a ‘very troubled spirit’.
Powell states that he does not touch the matter because he was not in the room at the time; and in any case, like Alastair Campbell, he does not ‘do God’. Powell’s squeamishness is perfectly understandable, but this shared spiritual experience constituted a critical part of getting Paisley into a comfort zone in which the DUP chieftain could do the deal. Because Powell was so focused on getting results, he had little time to enjoy the assorted gothicities of his Provincial interlocutors. Certainly, far more light is shed on the DUP’s evolution in the recently revised editions of two outstanding biographies — Frank Millar on David Trimble and Ed Moloney on Ian Paisley.
The real utility of this volume is to afford a unique insight into the mentality of the top men at No 10. It is hugely revealing on how Adams and McGuinness played to British perceptions of their own vulnerability, after the fashion of a classic protection racket: ‘Pay us or else we can’t guarantee what some of our gang might do….’ Powell sometimes acknowledged that the Sinn Fein/IRA leaders were ‘chisellers’ and that they couldn’t go back ‘to war’. And he recognises that ‘the movement’ could, miraculously, turn off the violence when it wanted to (as when all punishment beatings ceased during the Clinton visit to Northern Ireland of 1995).
But he and Blair nonetheless opted to pay up — even after the Omagh bomb of 1998 and the changed international climate post-9/11. As Charles Guthrie, who was Chief of the Defence Staff for the first three years of Blair’s premiership tells The Spectator after reading the book, ‘Blair and Powell were so obsessed with getting peace that they would pay almost any price to obtain it’.
During the course of this dialogue, the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff developed a sustained, grudging respect for the capabilities and sensibilities of the republican movement which they accorded to no other party. But it was also born out in part of a certain fascination for and frisson in dealing with the ‘rough trade’. Powell came to regard the republican leadership as ‘friends’ and even invited them to his recent wedding.
As Peter Mandelson has told The Spectator:
Adams and McGuiness knew exactly who they were dealing with in Jonathan. They were playing with a public schoolboy who seemed to love being played with — and who too often acted as if he enjoyed being beguiled by their charm.During his all-too-brief-tenure as Northern Ireland Secretary, Mandelson was never as sold on them as Powell was and declined to override the advice of the security professionals, as No 10 often wanted. This is one of the few bits of ‘insider’ gossip that is told as never before — and it says more about Powell than it does about Mandelson.
So when Powell has to go into hospital with an infected foot during another ‘crisis’ in the talks, Adams ‘jokes’ that he hopes it’s not the result of a kneecapping (which were still going on in large numbers at the time). Powell takes this high wit meekly on the chin. But he does not for one moment suppose that he enjoys the reciprocal right to dish it out.
Consider his description of Adams’ assistant,
Siobhan O’Hanlon, now sadly dead, who ferried me around Belfast on a number of occasions. She was tough but straight and entirely reliable. I particularly regretted a joke I made when, late on Thursday afternoon, she drifted into our office, asking if Gerry could have a meeting with Tony. I said Bertie [Ahern] was in but we could get rid of him. She said, ‘Oh, no need,’ and I threw in that I did not mean ‘get rid of him’ in her usual sense. She left with dignity and I felt bad.
But Powell knows full well that O’Hanlon was the fourth member of IRA Active Service Unit at Gibraltar in 1988 that sought to murder soldiers of the Royal Anglians — and was lucky enough not to have been there when her fellow terrorists were shot dead by the SAS. Siobhan O’Hanlon had a hard, fanatic heart and I doubt she lost any sleep over Powell’s quip. But it reveals much about the state of mind of one of Britain’s key negotiators.
One of the most striking things about the world according to Jonathan Powell is his approach to the role of the security forces in Northern Ireland. He treats the Army, in particular, as though it was another paramilitary faction to be squared — rather than as the legitimate arm of the state operating in support of civil power. Having spent thousands of hours with the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership, he starts talking like them. Thus, his vocabulary is littered with republican terminology such as ‘demilitarisation’, ‘securocrats’, ‘collusion’ and ‘Volunteers’.
As Powell observes of Blair and himself, ‘we were of a younger generation and the war against Irish terrorism was not our war’. Precisely because he came from a services background, Powell states he was liberated from the shackles of excessive deference to the military. Hence the ease with which Blair and Powell agreed to a host of inquiries, starting with Bloody Sunday. But even in its own terms, Powell’s recollection is not quite accurate. When the Government decided that Lord Widgery’s report of 1972 was inadequate, he says, ‘I had to contact Ted Heath and others to let them know it was coming and no one complained.’
Actually, the Prime Minister was warned.Charles Guthrie recalls being telephoned by Blair and told him that whilst the Army would certainly not mutiny, this was a bad idea. General Sir Roger Wheeler, then Chief of the General Staff, and Lt Gen Sir Rupert Smith, then GOC Northern Ireland, also expressed opposition to the inquiry, as did the then Defence Secretary, George Robertson. They were told that the decision had already been taken. Even after this unhappy precedent, Powell still seems to be at the game of moral equivalence between the security forces and the terrorists — apparently toying with the idea of a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ at which all sides could confess their sins.
But what goes around comes around. The fashion for high profile inquests into national security matters, employed so promiscuously by Blair and Powell in Northern Ireland, looks set to spread. Slowly but ineluctably we are moving to an inquiry on Iraq — which, unlike the Northern Ireland Troubles, was very much Tony Blair’s and Jonathan Powell’s War. At such a tribunal, he could easily cut as unfashionable a figure as Colonel Derek Wilford of the Paras did in front of the Bloody Sunday inquiry. If that day comes, I certainly hope that Powell will be the recipient of more corporate loyalty from his successors than he accorded to his predecessors.
Dean Godson is Research Director of Policy Exchange think tank and the author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism.