The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  The Anglo-Irish Agreement

  Several factors pushed her in this direction. First was the return of Garret FitzGerald as Taoiseach in December 1982, soon followed by her own re-election in June 1983. FitzGerald recognised that Ireland could only be united by consent. He had spoken in 1981 of a ‘republican crusade’ to reform those aspects of the Irish constitution which antagonised Protestants, and specifically of scrapping clauses 2 and 3 which laid territorial claim to the Six Counties.13 But instead of grand gestures, he was anxious to proceed incrementally by rebuilding the confidence of northern nationalists and diminishing support for Sinn Fein and the IRA. Though she found him at times tiresomely verbose and academic, Mrs Thatcher ‘trusted and liked and perhaps even admired Garret FitzGerald’, in the words of one of her junior ministers in the Northern Ireland Office. ‘She thought he was straight and that he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on her.’14 Geoffrey Howe has spoken of ‘an extraordinary chemistry’ between the two leaders which he compares to her relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev.15

  Second, despite her Unionist sympathies Mrs Thatcher did actually come to a partial appreciation of the nationalist case. When she was persuaded that the IRA and their Sinn Fein apologists were not Irish infiltrators but predominantly British citizens, an indigenous northern movement poorly supported in the Republic, and that the legitimate nationalist party, the SDLP, won a lot of impeccably democratic votes – 18 per cent in 1983, compared with 13 per cent for Sinn Fein – she became convinced that the law-abiding Catholic community had somehow to be reconciled to the British state. She could never accept the idea of dual allegiance – she resented the anomalous right of the Irish to vote in British elections, and thought that they should be treated logically as foreign – but she came to see that the legacy of history gave the Republic an interest in the equitable government of the north.16 In other words she recognised that there was not just a security problem in Northern Ireland, which might be solved by stronger policing, but a real political problem which required a political solution.

  Third, she was influenced – as on Rhodesia, Hong Kong and other comparable issues – by the Foreign Office. The Anglo-Irish Agreement which eventually emerged in 1985 was the fruit of painstaking spadework by the Foreign Office and the Irish foreign ministry with minimal involvement of the Northern Ireland Office and behind the backs of the Unionists.

  Most important of all, she was significantly influenced by American pressure. The Irish lobby in Washington, led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, was very powerful – second only to the Jewish lobby – and very partisan, continually issuing violent denunciations of British colonial oppression and the alleged denial of human rights in Northern Ireland. Ronald Reagan, with his own Irish background, was susceptible to this line; while Mrs Thatcher, faced with hostile demonstrators every time she visited America, was uncomfortably aware that Northern Ireland strained her special relationship with the US. At the time of the hunger strikes in 1981 the President refused to become involved in Britain’s internal affairs, though the White House delicately warned London that it was in danger of ‘losing the media campaign here in the United States’.17 But following his sentimental visit to the land of his fathers in the summer of 1984 – at a time when Washington horsetrading additionally required him to buy O’Neill’s acquiescence in American aid to the Nicaraguan Contras – Reagan became increasingly anxious to encourage his favourite ally to be more constructive.

  For all these reasons, then, from the moment she was re-elected in June 1983, Mrs Thatcher began to look more favourably on the idea of recognising an ‘Irish dimension’ in tackling the Ulster problem. The catalyst was provided by the New Ireland Forum, established in May 1983 by the new leader of the SDLP, John Hume, with the encouragement of Garret FitzGerald, to bring together all the constitutional nationalist parties on both sides of the border to seek a peaceful way forward to undercut Sinn Fein and the IRA. Mrs Thatcher was slow to grasp the opportunity it offered. At the same time she and FitzGerald – meeting in the margin of the European summit at Stuttgart in June 1983 – agreed to revive the Anglo-Irish Council, under whose aegis officials of both countries were able to meet without fanfare sixteen times between November 1983 and March 1985. Then, in September 1984, when Prior left the Government (more or less at his own wish), she signalled a fresh start by appointing Douglas Hurd to the Northern Ireland Office, telling him she wanted ‘someone of intellect and toughness’ there.18

  Four weeks later the process was derailed when the IRA exploded a massive bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Prime Minister and most of the Conservative hierarchy were staying during the party conference. She was very lucky to survive unscathed. The bomb ripped out the whole central section of the hotel and badly damaged her bathroom. When it went off, just before three in the morning, she had just been putting the finishing touches to her speech for the next day with Ronnie Millar and John Gummer. As they left, Robin Butler came in with a last letter for her to sign before she got ready for bed. But for that, she would have been in the bathroom at the critical moment and, though she might not have been killed, she would certainly have suffered serious injury from flying glass. Her sitting room, however, and the bedroom where Denis was asleep, were undamaged. Her first thought was that it was a car bomb outside; her next was to make sure that Denis was all right. ‘It touched me,’ Butler recalled, ‘because it was one of those moments where there could be no play-acting.’19 As Denis quickly pulled on some trousers over his pyjamas, she crossed the corridor to the room where the secretaries had been typing the speech. Only now did the scale of what had happened become clear.

  Amazingly, the lights had stayed on. Millar, who had been thrown against a wall by the explosion as he walked away from her room, described the scene. ‘There were no cries for help, no sound at all, just dust, clouds of dust, followed by the occasional crunch of falling masonry from somewhere above. Otherwise silence. It was eerie.’ Pausing only to gather up the scattered pages of the precious speech which had burst from his briefcase, he hobbled back the way he had come and found Mrs Thatcher in the secretaries’ room ‘sitting on an upright chair, very still. The girls were standing on chairs peering out of a side window, bubbling with excitement… At length she murmured, “I think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?”’20 Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe, the Gummers, David Wolfson and others who had been sleeping on the same corridor gathered in various states of undress, speculating about the possibility of a second device. They still did not know whether anyone had been hurt. It was a quarter of an hour before firemen arrived to escort them to safety down the main staircase and out through the kitchens, to be driven to Brighton police station. There they were gradually joined by other members of the Cabinet. Mrs Thatcher was still wearing the evening gown she had worn to the Conservative Agents’ Ball a few hours earlier. Following a quick consultation with Willie Whitelaw, Leon Brittan and John Gummer, she insisted that the final day of the conference must go on as planned. She refused to return to Downing Street but – with her security men anxious to hustle her away – changed into a blue suit and gave a calmly determined interview on camera to the BBC’s John Cole. ‘Even under the most appalling personal strain,’ he noted, ‘Margaret Thatcher… was a supreme political professional.’21 She was then driven to Lewes Police College, where she snatched a couple of hours’ sleep.

  She woke to see the television pictures of Norman Tebbit being pulled agonisingly out of the rubble and hear the news that five people had been killed and Margaret Tebbit badly injured. She was shocked but still determined that the conference should go ahead. At 9.30 a.m. precisely Mrs Thatcher walked into the conference centre to emotional applause to give her speech, shorn of the normal party point-scoring but prefaced by a defiant denunciation of the bombers. The bomb, she said, was not only ‘an inhuman and undiscriminating attempt to massacre innocent, unsuspecting men a
nd women’. It was also ‘an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government’:

  That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.22

  Mrs Thatcher’s coolness, in the immediate aftermath of the attack and in the hours after it, won universal admiration. Her defiance was another Churchillian moment in her premiership which seemed to encapsulate both her own steely character and the British public’s stoical refusal to submit to terrorism. ‘We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country,’ she told her constituents in Finchley the following weekend. ‘And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do, and I thought, let us stand together, for we are British.’23 Her popularity rating temporarily recovered to near-Falklands levels. In public she appeared unruffled by the attack. But the psychological damage may have been greater than she showed. Carol immediately flew back from Korea and found her mother at Chequers on the Sunday morning ‘calm but… still shaken’. For ever afterwards she felt that Margaret Tebbit’s fate – confined to a wheelchair for life – had been intended for her.24 Though the lights had not gone out at Brighton, she always carried a torch in her handbag thereafter. The assassination of Indira Gandhi two weeks after Brighton underlined how vulnerable she was. Denis bought her a watch and wrote her a rare note: ‘Every minute is precious.’25

  Brighton had a political effect as well. ‘Though it killed only a few unfortunate people,’ Alistair McAlpine suggested some years later, ‘it had a profound effect on the Tory party.’26 The annual conference, hitherto remarkably open, was henceforth ringed by tight security. Many felt that not only Norman Tebbit, but Mrs Thatcher too, was never the same again. She seemed to lose some of her self-confidence and her political touch.

  In the short run Mrs Thatcher’s enthusiasm for talks with Dublin was understandably dented. The next month Garret FitzGerald came to Chequers to try to make progress on the lines explored by the New Ireland Forum, whose report had been published in May. This set out three possible solutions: a united Ireland, a federal or confederal Ireland, or some form of joint sovereignty. FitzGerald recognised that the first two were out of the question; but he hoped to win Mrs Thatcher’s support for some version of the third option. If she would agree to give Dublin a role in the government of Northern Ireland – he was happy to call it ‘joint authority’ rather than joint sovereignty if that helped – he thought he could win a referendum in the south to scrap clauses 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution which laid claim to the whole island. Mrs Thatcher, however, doubted whether he could deliver this, except in return for an unacceptable degree of southern interference in the north. She was not prepared to pay a high price to be rid of clauses which she did not think should have been in the Irish constitution in the first place. She only wanted to commit the Irish to closer security cooperation across the border, ideally by means of a security zone on the Irish side where British troops would be allowed to operate. Alternatively she was prepared to consider redrawing the border and repatriating nationalists to the Republic.27 FitzGerald was disappointed, but still unprepared for the devastating post-summit press conference in which Mrs Thatcher dismissed all three of the Forum’s options out of hand. She started positively, but right at the end, when asked about the Forum’s proposals, she slipped her leash:

  I have made it quite clear… that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out.28

  It was not so much what she said but the withering tone in which she said it. Her uncompromising triple repetition ‘out… out… out’ was taken as a gratuitous slap in the face for FitzGerald and seemed to slam the door on all the hopes that had been raised by their relationship. The Irish press next day was seething with fury, and London – Dublin relations seemed to be back to square one. But in fact this diplomatic disaster turned out to be the low point from which the 1985 Agreement emerged. Mrs Thatcher herself realised that she had gone too far and recognised that she would have to give some ground to repair the damage. Above all, her provocative language persuaded Reagan that it was time to get involved. Not only was the White House bombarded with the usual wild communications from Irish pressure groups like the Ancient Order of Hibernians;29 but, more constructively, O’Neill, Kennedy, Moynihan and forty-two other Senators and Congressmen wrote to him that ‘Mrs Thatcher’s peremptory dismissal of the reasonable alternatives put forth by the Forum’ had dashed the most hopeful opportunity for peace since the Sunningdale accord of 1973.30 They urged Reagan to press her to reconsider when she came to Camp David in December; and he did exactly as they asked.

  The record confirms that Northern Ireland was discussed over lunch. Mrs Thatcher assured the President that, ‘despite reports to the contrary, she and Garret FitzGerald were on good terms and we are working toward making progress on this difficult question’. He replied that ‘making progress is important, and observed that there is great Congressional interest in the matter’, specifically mentioning O’Neill’s request that he appeal to her to be ‘reasonable and forthcoming’.31 To the Speaker himself Reagan wrote that he had ‘made a special effort to bring your letter to her personal attention…I also personally emphasised the need for progress in resolving the complex situation in Northern Ireland and the desirability for flexibility on the part of all the involved parties.’32

  An appeal from this quarter was not one that Mrs Thatcher could ignore. In the negotiations that followed her first concern was still security; but she realised that in order to get this she must concede what were called ‘confidence-building measures’ on the ground – mainly addressing practical grievances over policing, prisons and the court system – to reconcile the northern Catholic population to the British state. She still ruled out the sort of comprehensive constitutional settlement FitzGerald had originally wanted. Yet she was now prepared to accept some sort of ‘Irish dimension’ in exchange for assurances that Dublin accepted Ulster’s right to remain British so long as the majority wished it, without formally amending the Irish constitution. It still took months of tortuous negotiation between officials, and a crucial meeting between Mrs Thatcher and FitzGerald in the margin of the Milan EC summit in May, to overcome her doubts; she was still worried that they were going too far, too fast. But eventually she bit the bullet and agreed to accord Dublin not just consultation on Northern Irish matters, but guaranteed institutional input in the form of a commission to be jointly chaired by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and an Irish minister, with a permanent secretariat housed outside Belfast. This was the core of the Anglo-Irish Agreement finally signed by the two leaders at Hillsborough Castle on 15 November 1985.

  It was a measure of how tightly the negotiations had been conducted within a narrow circle of insiders that Mrs Thatcher was unprepared for the fury of the Unionist response.While Dublin had kept John Hume closely informed throughout, the Unionist leaders – James Molyneaux of the official Unionist party and Ian Paisley of the still more uncompromising Democratic Unionists – were deliberately excluded. They were excluded, obviously, because everyone knew there would be no agreement if they were included. But then no one should have been surprised that they objected. In fact they had inevitably picked up hints of what was in the wind and had made their position very clear to the Prime Minister personally.

  She could not say she had not been warned. But she had closed her mind to the Unionist reaction in the interest of being seen to make an effort. She was shaken by the violence of the Unionist rejection of the Agreement and the storm of denunciation which they levelled at her, which was ‘worse than anyone had predicted to me’.33 But if these reactions were predictable she was most upset by the resignation of her former PPS, Ian Gow, from hi
s junior job in the Treasury, to which she had only just appointed him. Gow was her Unionist conscience, as well as her most devoted supporter: if he could not bring himself to accept the Agreement, she feared that perhaps she had gone too far.

  It was true that there was a fundamental inequity in the way the Agreement was negotiated behind the back of one of the two communities that would have to make it work. Always hypersensitive to any hint of a sell-out, the Unionists were bound to try to wreck it, as they had wrecked other promising initiatives in the past. But this time their bluff was called. Claiming that the Agreement could not be implemented against the democratic will of the majority community, all fifteen Unionist MPs resigned their seats and stood again in by-elections, held simultaneously on 26 January. They made their point, slightly spoiled by the loss of one seat to the SDLP. But in the House of Commons they gained the support of only thirty Conservative MPs: the Government won an overwhelming all-party majority of 473 – 47. The fact that FitzGerald faced a much closer vote in the Dail, where Haughey – following Sinn Fein – charged his rival with abandoning the goal of Irish unity, helped convince British opinion that Ulster was crying wolf as usual. Polls in both Britain and the Republic showed strong public support: most people felt that an agreement denounced by the diehards on both sides was probably on the right lines.

  As time passed Mrs Thatcher came to regret the Anglo-Irish Agreement. She was bitterly disappointed that it failed to deliver the sort of cross-border cooperation against terrorism that she had hoped for. In 1987 Haughey returned to power in the Republic, and though he did not tear up the Agreement he remained truculent and unhelpful. Far from reducing violence, the Agreement provoked the paramilitaries on both sides to increased activity. Over the next two years the IRA stepped up attacks on British military personnel in Northern Ireland itself (where twenty-one soldiers were killed in 1988 and twelve in 1989), on the mainland (ten bandsmen were killed in an attack on the Royal Marines School of Music in September 1989) and on the Continent. In March 1988 the SAS thwarted a planned attack on bandsmen in Gibraltar by shooting dead three suspects before they could plant their bomb. Mrs Thatcher had no time whatever for critics who charged that the security services were operating an illegal ‘shoot to kill’ policy. She would not admit that the security forces themselves ever overstepped the limit, but promised once again that ‘this Government will never surrender to the IRA. Never.’ 34