A Journey (31 page)

The next thing was to see David Trimble with his full team. Here was a strange phenomenon about the difference between the two sides. When you saw the Republicans, you saw unity in motion. They had a line; they took it; they held it. If it appeared to modify in the course of a meeting, it was an illusion – the modification had been pre-built into the line, and the line was sustained. Gerry Adams was the leader. You would no more have had one of the delegation raising eyebrows during his remarks, let alone uttering words of dissent, than you would have had Ian Paisley leading a rousing chorus of ‘Danny Boy’. Per contra, the UUP had the most alarming way of conducting meetings. You would think you had them all jolly and sorted and then one of them, usually not the leader, would make a depressing or downbeat comment and helter-skelter they would all follow in leaping off the cliff. Even more alarmingly, it could happen on the most apparently minor issue. As for supporting their leader, they didn’t regard that as their job. At all. Not merely eyebrows, whole hairlines would be raised in mock bemusement as their leader spoke, generally insinuating that whatever he might be saying, don’t let that kid you for a moment they were going down that path.

They also had an innate and powerful tendency to think they were being had. It wasn’t always without justification, but that wasn’t the point. That’s just how they were. David Trimble would go back and explain what he thought was a reasonable outcome, only to be clattered around the head with innumerable objections, qualifications, additional points, amendments, requests for clarification and so forth. Whenever I used to think leading the Labour Party was hard, I would think of David and feel grateful.

Having conceded a lot to David, I thought we might get a smooth enough ride with him and his colleagues in delegation. I was quickly disabused of such a fond notion. Ken McGuinness, a big, hale, hearty and actually rather decent man, who was in charge of security for them, had a whole new raft of changes. Disconcerted, I tried to accommodate them. Then Reg Empey, David’s deputy, began the helter-skelter by saying: Why not take the whole thing off the table and start all over again? The room swayed. I sent Jonathan off to talk to Ken about security, and pretended Reg hadn’t said what he had said (which was hard since he kept repeating it). I was throwing concessions around like confetti, since I knew the danger was they would just march out. Putting off until tomorrow what you didn’t want to do today had served Unionists well for decades, if not centuries. I knew delay was fatal.

I had a now-or-never sense. Truth be told, at that point I would have bet the house on ‘never’. Jonathan, though, was insanely upbeat and said it could be done. Bertie had had to return home for his mother’s funeral. When he got back, he just took the decision that he would agree to the North–South amendments. It was a big step. He simply took it. Progress!

We then got the Irish and UUP in the one room – my office – to talk it through. Bertie’s decision gave the Unionists heart. We decided overnight that they should come up with an agreed text.

Jonathan and I got a couple of hours’ sleep after meeting other parties (all of them had to be seen regardless of whether or not they could add anything, because otherwise backs were put up and feet might walk). When we returned, to our consternation the Irish and UUP had only talked around the issue and had not agreed anything. Frantic work ensued. I decided to let the UUP draft a text and the Irish amend it. By midday we had what I thought was an agreed text, and on the trickiest of issues.

Foolish thought. I said that the Republicans showed military discipline in presenting their case and supporting their leader. That is true, but they weren’t the only party on the Irish side. There were the Irish government and the SDLP, the moderate Nationalist party, and they would be locked in the same frenetic dance with each other as were the Unionists. The SDLP thought that they often got ignored because we were too busy dealing with Sinn Fein. ‘If we had weapons you’d treat us more seriously’ was their continual refrain. There was some truth in it. The big prize was plainly an end to violence, and they weren’t the authors of the violence. Their real problem was that strategically they decided they would never go into government with the Unionists unless Sinn Fein were at the table too. This was understandable, because in the past Sinn Fein had collapsed the show by claiming the SDLP were selling out. They therefore had somewhat of the same problem the UUP had with the DUP.

Nonetheless, it meant that they gave up their trump card. They used to attack me for ‘handing Sinn Fein the veto’, but actually
they
had, since without Sinn Fein there could be no government with the SDLP. But the point was this: they were always looking to stymie Sinn Fein if they could. When Bertie had told the Irish side – for these purposes the whole spectrum of Irish opinion – the concessions he’d made, they revolted.

The result was, in the afternoon, the thing fell apart. Again Bertie came to the rescue. I explained we could not now go back to the UUP with the old text. They would walk. Reluctantly he agreed they would negotiate on the basis of the UUP draft, and faced everyone else down.

Once that happened, on Strand One (the governing of Northern Ireland) the Unionists conceded to work off the SDLP proposals. Crucially – and this was David Trimble’s huge contribution – they agreed that there would be a system guaranteeing genuine power-sharing across Assembly voting and in the Executive. Up to then, Unionism had always said it should be a majority vote, ignoring that, practically speaking, this could mean supremacy of the majority, i.e. them, in Northern Ireland. Instead, now there would need to be cross-community support for things to happen and the government seats on the Executive would have to be shared out fairly.

The thing started to come together again. We breathed a sigh of relief. Again too soon. Sinn Fein had resented the way the SDLP got agreement with the UUP. They felt cut out, and issued a press release that there would be no agreement.

At this point, I should say something about the world beyond the negotiating madhouse which we were inhabiting. We were in a cocoon. We might as well have been in outer space. As the hours then the days passed, I had little sense of the fact that outside Castle Buildings had gathered an army, a convocation, a full-blown live happening of the world’s media. It was the start of 24-hour-a-day news, and they came in their droves, with a lot to say and nothing to say, if you get my meaning.

I didn’t really imbibe the full purport of this until after the event, which is just as well, since had I thought about it, I would have quailed at the political risk we were taking. As time went on, the stakes became ever higher as it was clear I was putting my whole prime ministerial authority on the line for a deal. Failure was going to be not just bad, but potentially dangerous, with both streets – Unionist and Nationalist – inflamed, possibly literally.

Alastair and John Holmes, the other part of the team, were performing to the highest standard. Alastair was rather brilliantly trying to feed the media beast without a lot of meat in the sandwich, conscious that one word out of place could provoke some party or other to feel slighted. John was the perfect foil for Jonathan and me, working up the detail, providing ideas, being brilliantly creative and letting us take care of the politics. Mo Mowlam was glad-handing and looking after people, but a little removed from the negotiations.

The moment Sinn Fein told the waiting hordes of media there would be no agreement, collective hysteria broke out. The result, as no doubt Gerry and Martin intended, was that we had to scuttle off to them and try to bring them back. They were negative. Martin bluntly said he couldn’t recommend it. I suggested that they went away and came back with their amendments. I knew the Unionists would go nuts if they thought we were asking Sinn Fein for ideas on their document, but I couldn’t think of another option. Everyone had to be kept in play. The see-saw was in a state of constant imbalance, as first this side and then that felt cheated, or taken advantage of, or let down.

Here I discovered another piece of bizarre psychology about the whole thing: it was a zero-sum game to all of them, and not only in terms of negotiating detail – ‘You suggest this. We oppose. You like this. We don’t’, etc. Walking around the building they would spot the other’s expression. If one looked happy, the other looked for a reason to be sad. If one was down, the other immediately went up. It was unbelievable. At crucial moments, when we had just scrabbled one party back on board, I would be terrified in case they went out of the room looking satisfied in front of those waiting to come in for the next meeting.

We had one bonus, however: there were a huge number of different elements in the deal. At one level this complicated things, but at another it gave us lots of dimensions to play with. Unionists might feel unhappy with conceding on the way the Executive worked, but they could be brought round by a good deal on North–South bodies. There was always another card in the hand.

Sinn Fein came back with forty pages of detailed changes. I was aghast when I received the document. I used to be a lawyer; forty pages of amendments means a lot of negotiating. I assumed all were to be taken seriously, and needless to say, they would have made Unionist hair curl and would have unified their delegation. It was here that Mo played an important part in the negotiation. Mo’s idea of negotiating with Sinn Fein was rather smart. She heard them out, took receipt of the document, as it were, then ignored the overwhelming majority of the points, focusing on the one or two things that might matter. The rest sort of fell by the wayside. It seemed very odd to me, but it worked.

The point which she correctly identified did matter was the IRA men behind bars for various terrorist acts and killings. She took an extraordinarily forward position on this. Basically, she thought the issue not of enormous consequence to Unionism; after all, prisoners had been released before in the 1970s, and people more or less expected something similar. She offered Sinn Fein the release of them all within a year; they came back on board.

Then I started to reconsider. It seemed to me inherently implausible that Unionist opinion wouldn’t object to ‘IRA killers’ being out on the street. I asked Alastair, who thought the notion abhorrent to the British public, never mind Unionist Northern Ireland. I asked John Steele, a senior and very sensible NIO official, who gave his view in civil servant language – which I was beginning to be able to translate – and told me the whole business was barking. (I think he said it wouldn’t be ‘frightfully helpful’.)

But I was stuck. I had agreed with Gerry that they would be released. I went back to him to renegotiate – never a good tactic. In the end, I did something very ‘Tonyish’ and he did something very ‘Gerryish’: I privately assured him we would do it in one year if the conditions allowed, but publicly and officially, it would be two. He agreed, and what’s more, never called in the promise or used it publicly to embarrass me.

So: Irish government OK. UUP OK. SDLP satisfied. Sinn Fein back on board. We had an agreement. I called President Clinton and asked him to phone Gerry Adams to bind them in, which he did. He was a total brick throughout, tracking the negotiation, staying up all night, calling anyone he needed to call, saying anything he needed to say and much more besides, and being supremely on the ball, and typically, with that instant knack of his, getting right to the political nub.

The hours passed as we went back over the detail yet again, filling in the gaps, sorting out the administrative glitches, working at what we would say and to whom.

It was of course ludicrously optimistic to think we had an agreement. Even though we had carried on through the night, now having been almost forty-eight hours without sleep, the wretched see-saw slipped again in the early hours of Good Friday morning, 10 April 1998. The Irish – still fretting a little over how the North–South part would be received – added a section to that strand, creating two new North–South bodies (thus indicating Ireland would act on a unified basis) in the areas of trade protection and the Irish language.

Now you might think cooperation on these two issues would be relatively uncontentious. In fact the Unionists screeched to a halt. It turned out there was some obscure language called Ullans, a Scottish dialect spoken in some parts of Ulster which was the Unionists’ equivalent of the Irish language. By this time, nothing surprised me. They could have suggested siting the Assembly on Mars and I would have started to draft options.

Everyone was now tired and fractious. I had an awful meeting with Bertie and David Trimble, in which Bertie did not take quite the same relaxed view of the importance of Ullans as I did, suggesting that maybe David would like to speak some of the ‘fecking thing’ so we could hear what it sounded like; and David taking umbrage at the idea that the dialect was a Unionist invention, explaining solemnly and at length the Scottish roots of Ullans with all the sensitivity of a landowner talking to the village idiot.

The episode sent David Trimble’s delegation down the helter-skelter, and fresh amendments started flying out. Alastair, meanwhile, had hinted to the media, who were now pretty fractious themselves, that we had an agreement, which in all good faith he thought we had. When I told him of the impasse, he expressed himself in terms of which only Alastair was capable, to the effect that if I thought he was now going to tell the world’s media that contrary to what he had told them earlier, we had failed to secure an agreement after all because of a Scottish Ulster dialect called Ullans, and so the war in Northern Ireland would go on, such an announcement, on his part, was more than a tad unlikely. I was at my wits’ end. Even calls from Bill Clinton yielded nothing. Here again, Jonathan was superb. He dealt with the Unionist concerns one by one, calmed their delegation, tried to put it back into balance.