A Journey_ My Political Life Part 8

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 NorthSouth 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 doc.u.ment. I used to be a lawyer; forty pages of amendments means a lot of negotiating. I a.s.sumed 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 doc.u.ment, 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 a.s.sured 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 embarra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 NorthSouth part would be received added a section to that strand, creating two new NorthSouth 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 a.s.sembly 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 'f.e.c.king 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 impa.s.se, 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.

We whittled it down to two issues one real, the other surreal but by now the border between the two was becoming harder to discern. The surreal issue was the Unionist desire to close down somewhere called Maryfield. At first there was confusion, since we thought that the Unionists were saying 'Murrayfield' had to close, and even I winced at the prospect of demolis.h.i.+ng the Edinburgh home of Scottish rugby that I had visited often as a teenager. But it was a measure of our now complete isolation in the negotiating cell that I neither asked why Unionism might want to erase a rugby pitch, nor was unprepared to do it.

After a few minutes, we elicited to my relief that Maryfield was in fact the name of the secretariat established under Mrs Thatcher's hated Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s. The secretariat basically did nothing, and in any event would be superseded by our agreement. Maryfield was just an office, so the whole business was entirely symbolic. Then it transpired they didn't simply want the secretariat shut that would happen anyway they wanted the physical building closed. 'Fine, we'll use it for something else,' I said.

'No,' they said, 'we want Maryfield shut. Closed. No longer in use. For anything.'

It was as if the building had become a political manifestation of the dispute, which I suppose in a sense it had. By now, I didn't care. I would have taken a crane and concrete block round and demolished it myself if it meant they signed up.

The Northern Ireland Office cavilled. 'Why do they need it closed? Can't we use it for filing?'

'Guys,' I said, 'please don't ask why. From now on Maryfield is a thing of the past. It's over. Part of history. Raze it to the ground.' I never did find out what happened to it. Probably everyone forgot about it.

The serious issue was one in which I had a lot of sympathy for David. He and Unionism as a whole were worried that if the Republican movement reneged, if they failed to decommission, how would they be excluded from government? Of course, the Unionists could walk out; but, reasonably enough, they felt it shouldn't be them that would have to bring the thing down.

For Sinn Fein, any talk of exclusion was anathema. They had point-blank refused such a suggestion earlier. Reopen it now and we would lose the whole show. I explained to David. He went away crestfallen and his delegation walked into a closed session.

I sat and reflected with Jonathan. We were within inches, but I could tell it was not going to work. David couldn't swing it. Heaven knows what would be going on in that delegation room, but if it were positive, my Great-Aunt Lizzie was a philanthropist. 'We've got to do something,' I said. I was pacing the room. I had a thought. 'Let's write him a letter, a side letter.' The letter guaranteed that if within the first six months of the a.s.sembly, Sinn Fein didn't deliver on decommissioning, we would support changing the provisions within the agreement to allow exclusion. It was very typical of the intricate nuance of the negotiation: we didn't say we would would exclude, we said we would support changing the agreement so as to exclude. exclude, we said we would support changing the agreement so as to exclude.

We drafted at speed, Jonathan at his laptop, me dictating, and both Jonathan and John Steele offering comments. I signed it, and sent Jonathan racing down to the delegation room. At first he couldn't get in. Eventually, like the message from the governor halting the execution just before they turn the switch on, he brought it into the packed session. John Taylor, David Trimble's other deputy who by turns could be incredibly helpful or incredibly unhelpful, read it, looked up and said, 'That's fine by me.'

I sat in trepidation and anxiety for a further hour (not least because I'm afraid I had told none of the other parties about the side letter) while each member of the delegation gave their views. David called up to my room. 'We're going to run with this.'

We had a deal.

The next hours pa.s.sed in a blur. We were beyond exhaustion, light-headed almost. George Mitch.e.l.l announced the agreement. Bertie and I gave statements. There was general euphoria. At long last I was released from the h.e.l.lhole Castle Buildings had become.

I had lost all sense of time. As I got into the car to drive away and the close protection team said we would be at the airport in twenty minutes, I realised with a start that I was off to Spain. Like all of us, I had thought this would be a quick negotiation and had booked a visit to Spain, taking up the invitation of the Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, whom I only knew slightly at that time, for me and my family to come and spend some days with him. I knew he was a tough negotiator and a strong, successful party leader, but little else. We were from different political families, he being leader of the Partido Popular, the Spanish Conservative Party, and I thought it worthwhile to get to know him. I knew about his toughness because we had been together at the Amsterdam Treaty negotiation at the end of May 1997, just weeks after I had come to power and a year into his first term.

In Amsterdam I had had all sorts of complicating demands, some correct, some hangovers from the previous government, and I was negotiating hard. It was my first international deal and I didn't want to mess up. Jose Maria had one major sticking point: he needed the treaty to reflect Spain's special position as the recipient of European support and as a 'big' country along with other 'bigs', not a 'small'. This was a real problem for the other 'bigs', notably the Germans led by Helmut Kohl.

The Dutch tried the old tactic, with German encouragement, of leaving the Spanish demands till last. The idea was that you settled everyone else and then put the thumbscrews on the remaining recalcitrant, who got bullied or shamed into submission. 'Europe needs you. How can you disturb Europe's stability at a moment like this? Have you no sense of history? Do you want to be responsible for a European failure?' etc. A load of old nonsense, but effective in a large number of cases.

But not with Aznar. They waited until everyone had settled, including me, and then offered him a compromise, not a bad one but not a good one. He said, no, I told you my terms. Ah, yes, but we need to know your bottom line, they said. That is my bottom line, he replied. He then said: I'm going into the next room to smoke a cigar. Which he promptly did.

They tried everything. Wim Kok went in and made his disapproval clear in a mildly Dutch Protestant way. Jacques Chirac tried to lord it over him in a very French way. Helmut Kohl finally rose to his feet and carried his considerable weight into the next room, looking like a juggernaut in search of a hedgehog. He came back mystified. The hedgehog had inexplicably refused to be squashed. Kohl turned to me. 'You're new like him,' he barked. 'You go and try.'

I went into where Jose Maria was sitting, just him, his interpreter and his cigar, on which he was puffing away as if he hadn't a care in the world. We dispensed with the interpreter and spoke French. I gave him a spiel about how important it was, how this negotiation hung in the balance, how only he could save the day, and ended by saying how truly disappointed everyone would be, especially Helmut, if he didn't compromise. 'I know. I am so sad,' he said with an enormous grin. 'Can you give them a message from me? Tell them I said on what terms this treaty was acceptable to Spain and I said it at the beginning. And until now, they never asked me again. But if they had, I would have told them those were the terms acceptable to Spain. And look,' he said, pulling something out of his pocket, 'I have so many more cigars to smoke.' He got his terms.

The family and I had been due to pa.s.s a few days before Easter with him. Such was my confidence on the Ireland negotiations crazy, I know that I decided to send Cherie, the kids and my mother-in-law on ahead, telling them I would join them shortly.

Now this was a real mark of Aznar. They arrived on the Wednesday, forty-eight hours before me, during which time he hosted them all with enormous kindness and effusive goodwill. I think I and most leaders would have been a tiny bit disconcerted having to entertain the family of another leader, and moreover a family they'd never met, with young kids to boot; but he took it all with perfect equanimity and it formed the basis of a lasting personal friends.h.i.+p that had important consequences at a later date.

At Belfast's RAF Aldergrove I somehow got on to the plane, and took a call from the Queen to congratulate me. I think until then I really hadn't understood the enormity of the achievement. I thought, I bet she doesn't do this often, and indeed she doesn't. I then fell asleep for the whole journey.

It was the early hours of the morning when I finally crept into bed beside Cherie, who woke and also congratulated me. I slept again until mid-morning. When I got up I went in search of my host, only to find him somewhat alarmingly closeted with my mother-in-law. 'Oh, you needn't have bothered turning up,' she said, 'we've sorted everything.'

'Sorted what?' I said.

'Gibraltar of course,' she said.

Well, she would have done as good a job as anyone.

After a couple of days with the Aznars we went to spend some time with Derry's friends Karin and Paco Pena the flamenco guitarist in Cordoba. I completely fell in love with Cordoba, a beautiful place. The Mezquita was the highlight, but the whole city was enchanting. Paco had a delightful old home in the centre of town with a traditional courtyard and, perhaps less traditionally, a barrel of sherry at the top of the stairs to the balcony, to slake the thirst of any pa.s.sing guest. It was a week of wonderful relaxation. Paco taught me some cla.s.sical guitar, we visited tapas bars and sherry vaults and generally pa.s.sed an agreeable time.

The impact of the Good Friday Agreement, as it was already being called (except by Unionists who insisted in calling it the Belfast Agreement), reverberated around the world. I was constantly stopped and congratulated, and it was one of the few times in the job I can honestly say I felt content, fulfilled and proud. There weren't many more!

Back home, reality swiftly took hold. The thing is, the Good Friday Agreement was a supreme achievement without it, nothing else could have been done but it wasn't the end, it was the beginning. It was a predictor of the course that the peace process should take if all went well. The implementation then had to begin; and whereas the agreement could be described as art at least in concept the implementation was more akin to heavy manufacturing.

The first challenge was to have a referendum North and South endorsing the agreement and then an election in the a.s.sembly so as to begin the procedure for getting a working Executive. The Northern Irish were, to be fair, hugely supportive of the agreement at least as an idea. However, they didn't know the detail, and in the euphoria of the moment certainly hadn't contemplated the true ramifications. Very soon, they started to.

In a typical twist, the agreement was formally agreed to by the UUP, but never by Sinn Fein. The UUP might therefore have been expected to be the more upbeat, but no: as soon as the agreement was signed (fortunately David Trimble quickly got his party executive to endorse it), Unionist tremors, never far below the surface, broke out. Such doubts were magnified by the political equivalent of the Hubble telescope by what happened next.

The deal on prisoners included the power in the United Kingdom government to transfer IRA prisoners to the South. Rather unwisely, Mo decided to transfer from England to Ireland the 'Balcombe Street Four', members of the notorious gang which had carried out a.s.sa.s.sinations and terror attacks for the IRA in the 1970s. Then the Irish government, having taken receipt of the prisoners, released them on parole to attend Sinn Fein's Dublin Conference without telling us. The prisoners received a ten-minute ovation on prime-time telly while Unionists looked on in utter horror.

It is true to say that that decision very nearly wrecked the train as it was leaving the station. It certainly put it on one rail for the duration of the referendum campaign and subsequent election to the a.s.sembly, all of which had to happen within roughly ten weeks of the Good Friday Agreement being signed.

John Major and I visited to calm things. Then I went with William Hague. I wrote out pledges in my own hand, promising no seat in government for those of violence and other such things. Bill Clinton issued a statement of support from the G8 in Birmingham, which I was also chairing.

It was an anxious time. We got a majority of Unionists to back the agreement in the referendum (55 per cent to 45 per cent). David won the a.s.sembly election over the DUP, and the SDLP were the second biggest party. But we had learned a lesson: there was still a long way to go. Although we had the map, we were miles from journey's end.

It took us another nine years to put it all together in a final working solution. Each of those years was fraught, and many times we were close to admitting failure. Deadlines were missed and negotiations over minutiae took months, but we kept going.

There was never again a negotiation as comprehensive as at Castle Buildings, but there was a constant stream of meetings over one, two or three days, which we usually tried to hold in a nice place. Looking back, it reads like a roll call of stately homes: Hillsborough, Weston Park, Leeds Castle, St Andrews. The parties always feigned reluctance to be taken out of their natural habitat in order to have the discussions to move the process forward, but I had a hunch they were probably like me: if you were going to have a h.e.l.lish time arguing back and forth, you might as well do it in a pretty environment. It also served to free people up, in some strange way if we had had the meetings in the middle of Belfast or in Downing Street, people would cling to cherished positions, but somehow a new setting produced a new att.i.tude. Or at least sometimes it did. Anyway, that was my justification for the partners.h.i.+p between the Northern Ireland peace process and something from the pages of Country Life Country Life.

I could go through, by chronology, all the tortured and tortuous steps between June 1998 and May 2007, but you can be grateful that I won't. Essentially it took another fifteen months or so, even after the June 1998 a.s.sembly election, to get the Executive up and running. The Executive was chosen according to an erudite voting formula named after the Belgian mathematician d'Hondt (whose name can be added to the proud list of famous Belgians). Let me not attempt the impossible by explaining it to you. Suffice to say, it meant Martin McGuinness and another Sinn Fein member, Bairbre de Brun, became ministers, in charge of education and health respectively; itself a historic moment.

The reason for the delay in setting up the Executive was the endless wrangle over decommissioning. There was also a long-running dispute over policing, because in the new Northern Ireland the RUC had to be changed into something all parts of the province could accept. The process was suspended in February 2000, reinstated in May 2000 and lasted until October 2002 when, again over the IRA disarming and various other things, it was suspended. It stayed that way up to May 2007. In the meantime, Ian Paisley's DUP overtook David Trimble's party as the largest Unionist party, and Sinn Fein overtook the SDLP. It took approximately three and a half years of negotiation before the historic day dawned when Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sat down in government together and we could say the peace process, though not ended, had fructified.

But throughout the setbacks, the steps forward that were immediately displaced by steps back, the declarations succeeded by new declarations succeeded by clarifying declarations, the accusations against us were legion (usually all sides could agree at least on the perfidy of the British government). We experienced, as a modus vivendi, the roller coaster of emotions in which hope and despair coexisted on an almost daily basis.

The Good Friday Agreement came to be a vastly different exercise in negotiation, and the doc.u.ment vastly more compendious, than originally thought. If I hadn't been a (relatively) new prime minister, if I hadn't ended up, by a mixture of happenstance and good fortune (though it seemed at the beginning ill fortune), taking charge of the negotiation and then pa.s.sing the point of no return in the search for a solution almost without knowing it, we would probably never have reached agreement.

Every conflict is, of course, different each has its own genesis, its opposing traditions, its shared history, its variegated array of dimensions to resolve so lessons in resolution are difficult to draw, but I came to the conclusion by the end that there were indeed core principles that have a general application. Rather than describe each and every event of the nine years of implementation, let me describe what I think are the central principles of resolution and weave some of the key events of the years into the exegesis.

1.At the heart of any conflict resolution must be a framework based on agreed principles. One of the things I always try to do in politics is to go back to first principles: what is it really about? What are we trying to achieve? What is at the heart of the matter?

In Northern Ireland we had a basic disagreement which made the conflict very hard to resolve: one side wanted a united Ireland, the other wanted to remain in the United Kingdom. Sometimes people say to me: Northern Ireland can't be as hard as the Middle East, surely. In fact, in this respect it is even harder. In the Middle East peace process, there is an agreement as to the eventual outcome: a two-state solution. In Northern Ireland, there is a profound and actually irreconcilable argument whether Northern Ireland should remain in the United Kingdom or unite with the South and become part of the Irish state. Because we couldn't resolve this issue, we had to search for principles that would allow peace while leaving that issue open for the future.

It seemed to me that the first principle was really what was called the principle of consent. If a majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted to unite with the South, then there would be unity, but until then, Northern Ireland would be part of the United Kingdom. It was this principle that Republicans could not accept historically, arguing that the part.i.tion of Ireland was const.i.tutionally invalid and that the island as a whole should be treated as the voting const.i.tuency. Obviously this meant peace was impossible. So they had to be brought to accept the principle of consent, explicitly or implicitly.

The question then was: on what basis and on what principles would Republicans accept it? The answer, which then underpinned the formation of the Good Friday Agreement, was peace in return for power-sharing and equality, i.e. the IRA war would end if there was a government in Northern Ireland which was truly representative of all parts of the community and there was genuine equality of treatment for Protestants and Catholics alike. Hence the need for reform of the police and the courts, and hence the acknowledgement of the Irish language. Those wanting a united Ireland would have to accept part.i.tion, at least until they were in the majority; but in return, within a divided Ireland, they would receive fair and equal treatment and recognition of the aspiration to a united Ireland. Hence also the NorthSouth bodies.

Once those core principles were agreed, everything else then became a matter of intensely complicated, hard-fought, often malfunctioning engineering, but based on a valid design concept accepted by all parties.

Without such a framework of principle, progress in conflict resolution is difficult, if not impossible. It is an enduring reference point. It const.i.tutes guidance. It also traps the parties within it. Once they accept the framework they can't argue things inconsistent with it; or if they do, the inconsistency tells against them. So, if there is an agreed programme for policing, based on the principle of equal treatment, how can there be a paramilitary army operating alongside it? Actually, once the principle of peace for power-sharing is agreed, the rationale for the IRA founded to create a united Ireland without the consent of the Unionist majority disintegrates. Likewise, once equality of treatment is accepted as the basis of governing, how could Unionism continue its opposition to Sinn Fein members in the government, provided of course they were committed to peace?

In this way, establis.h.i.+ng the core principles shapes the process and makes the reconciliation possible.

2.Then to proceed to resolution, the thing needs to be gripped and focused on. Continually. Inexhaustibly. Relentlessly. Day by day by day by day. The biggest problem with the Middle East peace process is that no one has ever gripped it long enough or firmly enough. The gripping is intermittent, and intermittent won't do. It doesn't work. If it was gripped, it would be solved.

In the case of Northern Ireland, we had a very detailed agreement across a range of issues. There were new bodies set up, new strains of working to be executed, a panoply of interlocking arrangements to be carried forward. Each of these then had to be negotiated further in the precise detail, and all of it required a perpetual grip.

On policing, for example, we had a vast number of unresolved questions. We asked Chris Patten, a former Tory Northern Ireland minister and former chairman of the Tory Party, to head up an inquiry into how it could be done. He did a brilliant job, and his report was the cornerstone for policing reform; but believe me, each bit of it was refined and refined again sometimes to his understandable annoyance as we tried to keep the see-saw in balance.

Decommissioning was the real bugbear. For the reasons given, this was extraordinarily sensitive for the IRA. And at one level Unionists understood it was more symbolic than real. In truth, if the IRA destroyed their weapons, they could always buy new ones. In other words, peace didn't ultimately depend on destroying weapons but on destroying a mindset.

We had a Roget's Thesaurus Roget's Thesaurus debate about this. In the end, the IRA agreed to 'put the weapons beyond use' rather than destroy them but how to tell if this had been done? We devised a means whereby two international statesmen Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a leading light of the ANC took on the task of certifying the weapons were 'beyond use'. Those poor guys were ferried around the Irish countryside examining weapons dumps, which they did with incredible good grace. Cyril was a smart, stand-up guy who I always thought should have been a contender for leaders.h.i.+p of the ANC. Martti was that rarity in politics, and in life: a person as modest as he was capable (and he was a very modest man). debate about this. In the end, the IRA agreed to 'put the weapons beyond use' rather than destroy them but how to tell if this had been done? We devised a means whereby two international statesmen Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a leading light of the ANC took on the task of certifying the weapons were 'beyond use'. Those poor guys were ferried around the Irish countryside examining weapons dumps, which they did with incredible good grace. Cyril was a smart, stand-up guy who I always thought should have been a contender for leaders.h.i.+p of the ANC. Martti was that rarity in politics, and in life: a person as modest as he was capable (and he was a very modest man).

But then how did we know that these weapons were all all the weapons? A Canadian general, John de Chastelain, who by coincidence had been to the same school as me in Edinburgh, headed up the IICD. At this time the Executive was suspended. David Trimble was trying to put it back together but needed real action on decommissioning. The IRA were still deeply reluctant. They kept doing only 90 per cent of what was needed, and in this context that might as well have been zero per cent. the weapons? A Canadian general, John de Chastelain, who by coincidence had been to the same school as me in Edinburgh, headed up the IICD. At this time the Executive was suspended. David Trimble was trying to put it back together but needed real action on decommissioning. The IRA were still deeply reluctant. They kept doing only 90 per cent of what was needed, and in this context that might as well have been zero per cent.

We went to Hillsborough after much negotiation, while John was taken to witness an IRA 'act of decommissioning'. We were to await the news that the act had taken place a bit like in the old days when crowds gathered to hear the news that the king's marriage had been consummated. John then disappeared off our radar literally. The IRA held him incommunicado, and while they let him witness the act, they wouldn't let him describe it at all, in any way a bit like the herald being unable to say with whom the king had been abed, or when exactly it had happened, or what room they were in, or something about the nightdress, or how joyful they were; in other words, anything to give the thing some d.a.m.n credibility. In this case, the crowd waiting for the news was awash with scepticism bordering on downright distrust.

Finally poor John turned up to do his heralding. It immediately became clear that he, as a man of integrity and honour, felt bound by the IRA stricture on total confidentiality. We decided nonetheless to field him to a press conference, whose only lasting historic significance is that it should be compulsory viewing for all students of press conferences.

John gave them the bald statement that in effect it had happened, but he resolutely refused to say more. In answer to the question 'What was decommissioned?', he replied: 'Well, it wasn't a tank' a bit like the herald, when asked with whom the king had consummated his marriage, saying, 'Well, it wasn't a donkey.'

This did then for David Trimble, I'm afraid, and I blame myself for it. Even Sylvia Hermon, one of his MPs, who was the most decent, sensible and clear-sighted of the lot and just a thoroughly lovely woman, said she couldn't support reinstating the Executive on this basis.

It was as well that John was a patient man; he required patience in saintly quant.i.ties. He was put upon, mucked about, abused, disabused, and took it all in the interests of peace. To his enormous credit, he stuck with it and his reputation as a straight guy was an invaluable part of the whole process. The point is that in each phase of this wrangle and there were many the thing had to be gripped throughout.

3.In conflict resolution, small things can be big things. This is not just about gripping, it is also about putting aside your view of what is important in favour of theirs. And not being prissy about finding such things below your pay grade. Your pay grade covers anything important to the parties you are serving; as defined by them.

Occasionally in my new role in the Middle East, people say to me: Don't you find it demeaning to be arguing about where some obscure roadblock should be positioned or whether permission can be given to rebuild two hundred yards of road in some remote part of Palestine? I say: No if it matters to them, it matters to me.

I used to know the precise whereabouts and could describe the structure of each and every one of the watchtowers the British Army used in South Armagh. For the IRA this border country was their country, where many of their key activists lived. The watchtowers were a constant source of friction, symbolising that the British Army was still after them. Our military, of course, regarded the towers as a vital point of surveillance, especially on dissident Republicans coming up from the South to commit acts of terror. They could point to attempts foiled and lives saved. So it was delicate and the removal of the towers had to happen bit by bit, and each step had to be focused on.

For both sides in a dispute, symbols are crucial. They need to be handled with care. In Northern Ireland, each aspect of the new policing regime, from the cap badge through to the precise method of recruiting, had to be painstakingly circ.u.mnavigated.

Very often, such small things can be traded. With each part of the Northern Ireland negotiation, someone was always having to compromise, someone was always upset. In such a dispute, both sides are in a state of more or less permanent complaint, about each other or about the mediator. Both sides think only they are making concessions, only they truly want peace, only they are acting in genuine good faith. I would regularly have identical conversations in consecutive meetings with the two sides, each convinced it had made all the movement and the other had made none.

I remember once talking to a group of Unionists some time after the Good Friday Agreement. One of them said to me and not aggressively, but quite sincerely 'Tell me what we have really got out of this agreement.' I said: 'The Union. That's pretty big, don't you think?' In other words, the basis of the deal meant that the principle of consent was avowed; and so as long as a majority desired it, the Union would remain. That, after all, was the raison d'etre raison d'etre of Unionism. But he didn't really see it like that. He just saw a string of concessions to bring 'the men of violence' to stop what they should never have been doing anyway. of Unionism. But he didn't really see it like that. He just saw a string of concessions to bring 'the men of violence' to stop what they should never have been doing anyway.

So the small things matter because in the minds of the key parties, they often loom large with a perspective we can't always grasp.

4.Be creative. Use the big or small things, singly or in combination, and if necessary invent a few more, to unblock progress. Here is where Jonathan particularly was brilliantly inventive. At times the impa.s.se seemed insurmountable. Right at the end we had set a deadline for reconst.i.tuting the Executive on 26 March 2007. So many deadlines had come and gone that they were a devalued currency. They were better than no currency, however, and although they were always rejected by the parties, to my mind they always served some sort of purpose; but this time the Irish side put their foot down in unison. No budging from this deadline. We had been three years or more trying to get Ian Paisley into a deal and it was now or never, do or die, etc. So 26 March had to be it. At the last minute, as I had suspected might happen, Ian Paisley told me he couldn't carry his party for March. It had to be May. The Irish were sceptical. Sinn Fein were furious. Everything teetered on the brink.

I thought it crazy to bring the whole thing down for the sake of two months. Jonathan came up with the idea of giving the DUP their two months, but asking them in return to agree to a face-to-face meeting between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, who had never met before. We made the offer. The DUP accepted and then Gerry Adams went along with it.

Then and yes, it really does come to this we had to negotiate not just the ch.o.r.eography of the actual meeting but its furniture. It came down to the shape of the table. The DUP wanted the sides to sit opposite each other to show they were still adversaries. Sinn Fein wanted everyone to sit next to each other to show they were partners and therefore now equals. Robert Hannigan, a great young official who had taken over as the main Number 10 person, then supplied the final piece of creativity: he suggested a diamond-shaped table so they could sit both opposite and with each other. The deal was done.

In the creativity, you cannot always think of everything, but you should be wary of doing anything that forfeits trust.

By the way, trust, as a political concept, is multilayered. At one level no one trusts politicians, and politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand it be done. Of course, where the line is drawn is crucial, and is not in any way an exact science. (And don't get too affronted by it; we all make these decisions every day in our business and personal lives.) Without operating with some subtlety at this level, the job would be well-nigh impossible.

But the public are quite discerning, and discriminate between politicians they don't trust at a superficial level, i.e. pretty much all of them, and those they don't trust at a more profound level. This level of trust is about whether the public believe that the political leader is trying to do his or her best for them, with whatever mistakes or compromises, Machiavellian or otherwise, are made. This is the level of trust that really matters.

I heard an interesting example of this once from, of all people, Nelson Mandela. Mandela or Madiba as he is also called (his clan name) is a fascinating study, not because he's a saint but because he isn't. Or rather he is, but not in the sense that he can't be as fly as h.e.l.l when the occasion demands. I bet Gandhi was the same.

I always got on well with Madiba, partly I think because I treated him as a political leader and not a saint. He knew exactly how he was used by people including me to boost their credibility at certain points, and provided he liked you, he was totally prepared to do it. The most fascinating thing about him was his shrewdness. He was wily, clever as in the French word habile habile, smart and completely capable of manipulating a situation when it suited his higher purpose.

We were discussing how he changed and reformed the ANC from a revolutionary movement to a governing party no easy task. They used, of course, to commit specific acts of violence, called terrorism by the apartheid regime but regarded by the ANC as a legitimate means of achieving freedom. Madiba decided they had to drop the campaign of violence, and also knew that if he approached it from the point of view of principle, he would be bitterly opposed and would divide the movement, perhaps split it. So he contrived a tactical reason for suspending it. He told the ANC cadres that he was as committed as them, but that tactically they should suspend violence for a period, so that later all options would be open to them and more achievable. Of course once it was suspended, it remained suspended in perpetuity.

Such tactical manoeuvres were the warp and woof of the Northern Ireland peace process. Again at the last minute, after the negotiation over the St Andrews declaration of October 2006, up popped the issue of what oath would be sworn by those taking office in the reconstructed a.s.sembly and Executive. All manner of permutations were gone through to find a mutually acceptable formula. Naturally the DUP wanted a very clear commitment to the police in the oath itself. Sinn Fein didn't like the wording and wouldn't commit until it was clear the Executive was in being, so there was a synchronising issue as well as a language problem.

In the end they agreed a timing and, roughly, a wording, but over the following weeks it started to fall apart. Gerry Adams had agreed to call an Ard Fheis (a council meeting of Sinn Fein) to endorse it, but only if Ian Paisley had clearly stated in advance that such an endors.e.m.e.nt would allow the inst.i.tutions to be revived. For once, roles were reversed, with Gerry Adams demanding clarity and Ian Paisley producing waffle. I then had the idea that I would reinterpret the waffle and so deliver Gerry his rea.s.surance.

I had a Christmas holiday in Miami. The sun shone, but that was about it as far as holidaying went. Because of the time difference I had to start my calls at 5 a.m. Frequently the Paisleys would be out visiting friends so calls were missed. I took horrendous chances in what I was telling each the other had agreed to stretching the truth, I fear, on occasions past breaking point but I could see the whole thing collapsing because of the wording of an oath of office. Somehow, with creativity pouring out of every orifice, we got through it.

The point is you need to be nimble, flexible and innovative. I often reflect on issues like settlements, Jerusalem or refugees in the Middle East peace process; in each case, ingenuity will find a way through, but ingenuity in abundant supply there will have to be.

5.The conflict won't be resolved by the parties if left to themselves. If it were possible for them to resolve it on their own, they would have done so. Ergo, they need outside help.

This third-party a.s.sistance is vital in many different ways. Obviously it can produce much of the ingenuity necessary as stated above. It can also help rea.s.sure the parties of each other's good faith. In the Middle East, talk to any Israeli and they will say, with utter sincerity, Of course I want peace.

I remember saying to the head of Israel's military intelligence a man with a tough a.s.signment that he had to understand Palestinians didn't believe Israel was serious about creating a Palestinian state. 'They think you want just to swallow them up,' I said.

'That's not true,' he replied. 'I'll tell you a story. A guy who owns a Rottweiler goes into a bar and says, "Who owns the chihuahua dog outside?" "I do," says someone. "Then help me," the man says, "because your chihuahua's killing my Rottweiler." "That's ridiculous," says the chihuahua's owner, "how can a chihuahua kill a Rottweiler?" The man replies: "He's stuck in his throat."'