Dean Godson

Thursday

31 May 2018
Dean Godson

Why is Corbyn cosying up to Northern Ireland’s unionists?

How serious are Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynites about winning power? Deadly serious, if the remarkable tactical flexibility he displayed on his first official visit to Belfast as leader of the Labour Party is anything to go by. Corbyn took care to genuflect not just to nationalist idols such as Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and John Hume, but also to three Unionist big beasts – Arlene Foster, Ian Paisley Sr and David Trimble. The Labour leader has not suddenly become a “revisionist” in the affairs of Northern Ireland, which to this day remains one of his longest-lasting and deepest ideological commitments. He has engaged in no “agonising reappraisal “ of his view of the historical roots of conflict on the island of Ireland – 800 years of British oppression and all that.

Why is Corbyn cosying up to Northern Ireland’s unionists?

Monday

21 May 2018
Dean Godson

A new Unionism could be the answer to Tory prayers

With four years until the next general election, British politics is in a bloody stalemate. The main parties are stuck at 40 per cent in the polls, reflected in the inconclusive local elections this month. The possibility of a 1997-style landslide has faded and even over-confident strategists (on both left and right) have learnt the meaning of hubris. It's true that the current divisions in our politics run deep. There is a clearer left-right split than there has been since the 1980s, with new sources of division amplified by the EU referendum: old vs young, city vs country, the so-called Somewheres vs Anywheres. These exist alongside other regional and national anomalies – including the dominance of London’s economy.

A new Unionism could be the answer to Tory prayers

Thursday

24 Aug 2017
Dean Godson

The meaning of Sean O’Callaghan

Sean O’Callaghan, one of the most important defectors from the Provisional IRA , successfully evaded the republican movement in death as in life – by dying yesterday of natural causes. Much will written in the obituaries tomorrow about the amazing details of O’Callaghan’s journey  – from the precocious, murderous,  republican  'boy soldier' of the 1970s to the double agent extraordinaire who saved the life of the Prince and Princess of Wales from an IRA bomb which was due to be planted in a lavatory next to the Royal Box at the Dominion Theatre in 1983. What, though, was the wider significance of his career? The title of his autobiography is The Informer – and he was an informer in every sense of the word: first, for his handlers in the Garda Siochana and in MI5; but, subsequently, also in the wider sense – by informing key decision makers in the United Kingdom (such as Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell and the Ulster Unionist Leader David Trimble) about the nature of the republican movement after his release from prison in 1996.

The meaning of Sean O’Callaghan

Saturday

14 Mar 2009
Dean Godson

We are not ready for an escalation of violence in Ulster

Dean Godson says that this week’s murders have yielded impressive displays of cross-party unity. But they also draw attention to Northern Ireland’s vulnerability to terrorist attack, and the risks that were always inherent in the dismantling of the Province’s security structure‘After they die, they will be forgotten, just as the policemen and soldiers who died are forgotten after a while, except by those who loved them.’ So said Florence Cobb, widow of RUC Inspector Harry Cobb, murdered in Lurgan by the Provisional IRA in 1977. I recalled those simple but powerful words when I heard that Constable Stephen Paul Carroll had been murdered by dissident Republicans on Monday night — just five miles away in Craigavon, Co.

We are not ready for an escalation of violence in Ulster

Saturday

12 Apr 2008
Dean Godson

Paying the price of peace

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.

Saturday

5 May 2007
Dean Godson

‘They know the extent of our reach’

John Grieve, the long-time head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, observed shortly after the conviction of the IRA men who bombed South Quay in 1996: ‘It’s great — but every time we have one of these long trials, we give the men of violence a free masterclass on how we go about protecting the public and how they can try to get around us next time.’On the day after the triumphant conclusion to the ‘Crevice’ trial, I asked Peter Clarke — Grieve’s lineal successor — about this in his 15th-floor office at New Scotland Yard. Clarke takes the point. But the pluses of taking this case through the courts still massively outweigh the minuses.‘The system was able to deal with a big and highly complex international conspiracy, in a trial that took many months, with 17 lawyers, and with robust challenges to the evidence — as well as jury sickness,’ notes Clarke.

Saturday

24 Feb 2007
Dean Godson

A tribute to Ulster’s A.J.P. Taylor

Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots’ successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, had been elevated to the peerage. Far from being the cue for an orgy of resentment, the news was greeted with almost universal pleasure.Until 15 years ago, Bew was an obscure Marxist historian at a provincial university. Today, he is the A.J.P. Taylor of the Northern Ireland peace process. He has become well-nigh ubiquitous on the airwaves and in the corridors of power — on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Wednesday

24 May 2006
Dean Godson

Rifkind could be deselected

Is Kensington and Chelsea, that jewel in the crown of Conservative parliamentary seats, becoming the Bermuda Triangle of Tory politics? Thanks to the little-noticed workings of the Boundary Commission, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, could soon find himself in a battle royal to remain in the Commons.The local precedents are not good for Sir Malcolm. When Kensington was amalgamated with Chelsea in the run-up to the 1997 election, Dudley Fishburn stood down in favour of the Chelsea MP, Sir Nicholas Scott. The following year, Scott (by then suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s) nearly crushed a child while parking his car and was then too drunk to attend his association’s party at party conference.

Saturday

13 Aug 2005
Dean Godson

Terror camps in the Lake District

Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, occupies one of the two hottest seats in British policing today. Since it emerged that all four British suicide bombers of 7 July came from his patch, he has scarcely drawn breath. Cramphorn’s only relaxation in that fevered week came after his surgeon — who has been treating him for prostate cancer — called on the day of the police raids in Leeds and Dewsbury with the bad news that the tumour had spread to his spine. The consultant dispatched Cramphorn straight to the MRI scanner. ‘I stuck on my earphones, lay back and listened to Vivaldi,’ he recalls with customary matter-of-factness. ‘But after days of worrying about whether there were other suicide bombers at the addresses that we were raiding who might blow themselves up like the Madrid bombers did when they were cornered, I certainly needed those moments of peace.

Saturday

26 Feb 2005
Dean Godson

Will Dublin turn on Gerry Adams?

Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most popular politician in the Irish Republic. His party seemed set fair to make huge gains in the next Irish general election and he was being widely talked of as the next president of this state. Even the foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, spoke of the republicans as potential partners in a future coalition. Southerners have historically afforded the republican movement a degree of latitude in operating up north.

Saturday

27 Mar 2004
Dean Godson

Labour’s forgotten army

If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean the hard Left: indeed, this largely working-class group constituted the Bennites’ staunchest opponents. The old Labour Right tended to be patriotic and conservative on social issues, whilst remaining firmly wedded to the welfare state. This wing of Labour was allied to (but culturally had little in common with) those middle-class ‘revisionist’ intellectuals who are the true spiritual forebears of Blairism. Yet were it not for their holding action during the hard Left’s surge after Labour lost office in 1979, the party would have been irretrievably damaged.

Saturday

20 Mar 2004
Dean Godson

How a coalition of the willing could save Blair — and Howard

Could terrorism turn the British political landscape on its head, much as it has done in Spain? Government sources naturally give this scenario short shrift. They argue that Tony Blair faces no comparable electoral test here any time soon. They add that the war in Iraq, though never popular, has never been quite as universally loathed as its detractors on both Left and Right have made out. Indeed, one famously robust Labour minister from a Midlands manufacturing constituency even claims that because of the war, support for the government has actually gone up among the much vaunted C1s and C2s — the cream of the upper-working classes and lower-middle classes whose support the Tories must regain if ever they are to return to power.

Saturday

6 Dec 2003
Dean Godson

Meeting of the extremes

That's another fine mess you've gotten me into,' quipped David Trimble with black humour as he bounded in to meet with Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Lady Grey Room at Hillsborough Castle last Saturday. As well he might: for the first time, Ian Paisley's anti-Agreement Democratic Unionists had won more seats than the moderate Ulster Unionists in a Stormont election. The drift away from the parties of the centre ground in last Wednesday's poll was even more dramatic on the nationalist side, where Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein inflicted a 'Redmond moment' upon the Social Democratic and Labour party led by Mark Durkan. In other words, an overwhelming defeat not far removed from the death blow suffered by John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary party at the hands of republicans in the 1918 general election.

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