When Trimble was briefed by Ancram on the Mitchell Report, he shared the Government’s disappointment: in particular, he found the principles and the reference to the elective route too weak. Trimble made it absolutely clear that if Washington III was abandoned without compensating gains, he would be ‘blown out of the water’. To this day, he believes that his warnings were responsible for the strength and tone of Major’s response to Mitchell in the Commons on 24 January 1996.15 The strength of Major’s response may also have been partly conditioned by a rough ride meted out to Mayhew at the meeting of the backbench Northern Ireland Committee when they were briefed on the report. The Irish claim they also received a faxed copy of Major’s remarks an hour and a half before he was due to deliver his official response in the Commons. Fergus Finlay recalls that the DFA felt that it was written by ‘John Major, the Chief Whip’, looking at it from the point of view of his parliamentary majority, rather than ‘John Major, the Prime Minister’. As they saw it, the assembly idea was another ‘precondition’, meaning ‘elections first, and then we’ll see’. Indeed, there was no date set for the commencement of all-party talks. Finlay says there was a huge sense of shock that this risk had been taken with nationalist Ireland in order to keep David Trimble on board (whom the DFA believed to be far stronger than he made out).16 Major responded much along the lines which Mayhew had outlined, but his tone was more insistent; significantly, Tony Blair, the Opposition leader, maintained the bi-partisan approach and offered unqualified support (thus upsetting Labour’s ‘Green’ wing, which often took its cue from John Hume). Trimble, who spoke third, praised Blair for his willingness to facilitate legislation on the assembly. He also tweaked Hume’s tail with an aside about the degree of sympathy for the elective route amongst SDLP supporters: this may have contributed to the Derryman’s mood and, in a rare misjudgment of the mood of the Commons, he lashed out at Major and the Conservatives.17 For the first time in years, an Ulster Unionist leader was making the political weather, and nationalist Ireland did not like it.
SIXTEEN ‘Putting manners on the Brits’
AT 7:02 p.m. on Friday, 9 February, the British and Irish official elites were assembling for pre-prandial drinks at the Foreign Office conference facility at Wilton Park. At that precise moment, a massive bomb detonated at South Quay in London’s Docklands, ending the IRA ceasefire. Within minutes, the news had been relayed to Ted Barrington, the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. Barrington told his fellow guest, Quentin Thomas, what had occurred. The Political Director of the NIO was stunned. So, too, was Martin Mansergh, special adviser to successive leaders of Fianna Fail. The next day, he paced around the gardens, alone, seemingly in a state of shock. The attempt to draw this generation of republicans into constitutional politics – one of his life’s main goals – appeared for the time being to be in ruins. According to Thomas, the two men had spoken a few minutes earlier, when Mansergh had expressed optimism about the future.1 Meanwhile, John Major was in his Huntingdon constituency when the news came to the No. 10 switchboard at 6 p.m. that RTE had received a call from the IRA stating that the ceasefire was over: the codeword was genuine.2 The White House rang shortly thereafter to say that Adams had called with the same information. According to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the Sinn Fein President was ‘elliptical and sounded concerned. But we didn’t know what he meant. And I still don’t know whether he knew what was going to happen.’3 At Stormont House in Belfast, Sir John Wheeler, the Security Minister at the NIO, was making his way through paperwork: it was his turn to be the duty minister. His Private Secretary immediately came on the line with the news. Wheeler stayed up till 1 a.m., reintroducing many of the security measures withdrawn after the ceasefire began.4
But despite the shock of the South Quay bomb, the British state did not alter course: there was no fundamental reappraisal of the nature of republicanism. Wheeler says that at no stage did the Government even contemplate the notion that there should be anything other than an inclusive settlement so long as the IRA was on some kind of ceasefire; or, as Cranborne puts it, ‘it was treated almost as though it was a cri de coeur from a delinquent teenager rather than a full-scale assault on British democracy’.5 Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary of 21 February 1996 that even as Mayhew expected another IRA ‘spectacular’ on the mainland, the Government still were looking for signals that some kind of process was possible. Indeed, one senior NIO official was shocked within weeks of the blast to find the Government negotiating again with Sinn Fein: he concluded from this episode that if even a Conservative ministry with a narrow majority could do such a thing, then a serious question mark had been placed against the viability of the Union. The official was therefore prepared to toy with the idea that negotiating a federal Ireland was a possible means of ‘getting the Provisionals off the Prods’ backs’ and to minimise their leverage over the system.6
John Steele, the then Director of Security in the NIO, states that as he saw it, ‘the IRA were cracking the whip. They were demonstrating that bad things could happen. But the break in the ceasefire was a carefully calculated signal, not a wild lashing-out.’ Steele recalls that even Wheeler – the minister most sceptical of the IRA – only wanted to respond with enhanced intelligence gathering. The Security Minister suggested neither the reintroduction of internment, nor did he advocate letting the SAS use lethal force.7 Nor were the prisoners released during the first ceasefire recalled, and the border was not sealed. Mary Holland correctly observed the ‘surprisingly mild’ response to that atrocity. ‘We heard almost nothing from the British side about the spirit of the bulldog breed,’ she noted in her Irish Times column of 29 February.
The British were convinced that such measures would prove counterproductive at home and abroad. At home, they concluded, it could be a recruiting sergeant for the IRA. Abroad, principally in America, old-style counter-insurgency was deemed diplomatically too costly – even if set in the context of an overall ‘carrot and stick’ approach to the republican movement. Thus, Cranborne also had no purist scruples about offering the republicans the ‘carrot’ of political development – provided they were prepared to abandon armed struggle entirely. But he also believed that the political forms of the ‘stick’ were not being employed properly either. He therefore sent Major ‘an intemperate memo’ suggesting that the Government was totally inactive in trying to defeat the IRA. Cranborne wanted ‘to put our money where our mouth is and appoint a counter-terrorist supremo in the Cabinet in charge of winning it on all levels’. This supremo would be responsible to the Prime Minister, special Cabinet committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee of the Commons. Cranborne knew that the ‘mandarinate’ would oppose his plans, on the grounds that they would cut across existing lines of departmental reponsibility and chains of command in the security forces and the police (although the creation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had shown that there was scope for innovation). Major was deeply uncomfortable with the idea and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, shot it down completely. Butler and Major met with Cranborne and instead offered improved intelligence coordination but no radical overhaul.8
Curiously, for all his rhetoric, David Trimble did not really push a return to an old-style security crackdown; nor, even then, did he think that the republican movement would necessarily be beyond the pale in the future. Mayhew notes that Trimble did not ask the Government to scrap the ‘peace process’ as a concept now clearly based upon false premises. ‘I think