The Iron Lady

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 his 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

By 1993 Lady Thatcher had concluded that the whole philosophy behind the 1985 Agreement had been a mistake. She did not suggest what an alternative approach might be: the implication was tougher security, even a ‘military’ solution. But she had not attempted that in office, nor were her successors tempted by it. The same logic that impelled her, against her instincts, drove them too; and the 1985 Agreement gradually bore fruit. It can now be seen as the start of a process which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the power- sharing government of 2007. First, it served a warning to the Unionists that their bluff could be called: London’s repeated guarantee that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom, so long as the majority of its people wanted, did not give them a veto on how Britain chose to implement its sovereignty. Second, it did help to reconcile the nationalists to British rule, shored up the position of the SDLP and, most significantly, began to convert Sinn Fein and the IRA itself to the idea that more might be achieved by negotiation than by endless violence. At the same time the machinery of cooperation established in 1985 provided mechanisms to defuse problems between the two governments; and the Agreement did – as was perhaps Mrs Thatcher’s primary motivation – convince the United States that Britain was genuinely trying to resolve the problem, which led to better American understanding of the Unionist position and encouraged increased international, particularly American, investment in Northern Ireland.³⁵ All these beneficial developments flowed from the 1985 Agreement. It was understandable, as the murder of soldiers continued unabated, that MrsThatcher should have felt disappointed; understandable too, when Ian Gow was killed in the drive of his own house in 1990, that she should feel guilty that perhaps she had betrayed Ulster after all. But she was wrong to disparage the Agreement. She was brave and far-sighted to have concluded it, and it should stand among her diplomatic achievements alongside the Zimbabwe and Hong Kong settlements. If lasting peace finally comes to Northern Ireland, she will have played her part in the process.

20 Elective Dictatorship

‘She who must be obeyed’

THE idea that the Prime Minister is merely the first among equals has long been a fiction. The power of the Prime Minister vis-a-vis his Cabinet colleagues has increased steadily for a number of reasons to do with the growth of the state, the increasing complexity of the government machine and the escalating demands of the media. Both Harold Wilson and Ted Heath in their day were criticised for being excessively ‘presidential’. Unquestionably, however, the concentration of power in the person of the Prime Minister grew still more pronounced under Mrs Thatcher, as a result partly of her longevity in the job, partly of her personality.

During her first term she was to some extent constrained by her own relative inexperience, by the presence in the Cabinet of several heavyweight colleagues profoundly sceptical of her approach and by the dire economic situation. Even so, by placing her few reliable allies in the key departments, she broadly got her way most of the time and managed to remove or neutralise most of her critics. By the middle of her second term she had achieved a Cabinet much more nearly of her own choice. Though the old wet/dry dichotomy had been resolved, there were still three identifiable groups around the table. Despite the loss of Parkinson, she now had a solid core of true believers: Lawson, Howe and (till 1986) Keith Joseph, reinforced by Norman Tebbit, Leon Brittan, Nicholas Ridley, David Young and (from 1986) John Moore. In the middle there was the ballast of steady loyalists who took their cue from Willie Whitelaw: Tom King, Norman Fowler, Nicholas Edwards, George Younger, Michael Jopling and