Food issues, bickering, boredom and the occasional fit of giggles - there are some quirky details in Jonathan Powell's compelling account of the peace process
'IT'S ALWAYS jam tomorrow," Jonathan Powell notes in a surprisingly rare complaint as the IRA prepares to fall short and force the suspension of the first power-sharing Executive at Stormont in January 2000.
Tony Blair's former chief of staff is no whinger.
Indeed, there is more than a hint of his steeliness late in the day as Tony Blair despairs of a possible breakthrough at St Andrews six long years later. "It's hopeless, isn't it?" asks Blair, proceeding to criticise his right-hand man for not having prepared the talks properly. "I told him not to be so stupid," Powell records in his compelling book on the peace process, Great Hatred, Little Room.
Yet his account certainly leaves one with the overwhelming sense that Powell, like his boss (and not to mention Bertie Ahern) really does deserve reward for sheer endurance in the face of what many consider to be an obdurate, self-indulgent and overly-indulged political class in Northern Ireland.
And there is the occasional reminder here of the absurd demands made on Downing Street's time, and of the big world outside. Of the attempt to broker agreement between the Orange Order and Garvaghy Road residents, Powell says: "I had been involved in many negotiations in my life, with the Chinese over the return of Hong Kong, in the 'Two-plus-Four' negotiations over German unification in the late 1980s and with the former Soviet Union on human rights abuses and arms control. But I had never before encountered such unreasonableness from both sides." Nor does he spare even those whose contributions he hugely admires: "[ David] Trimble and [ Seamus] Mallon were both proud and prickly and could never get on at a personal level. On their first trip to the United States together, Mo [ Mowlam] rang me to say she was thinking of sending them back because they were behaving so badly.
"When they met President Clinton, they spent the entire half-hour arguing with each other in front of him. The White House staff were bemused, given how hard it was even for heads of state of major countries to get half an hour with the President."
After a first meeting with Sinn Féin, Powell recorded in his diary that he found Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness "much more articulate and interesting than most of the other Northern Ireland politicians". Yet, in contrast with his political master, Powell had declined to shake their hands "on principle". For all that unionists later found him too soft on the republicans, Powell was in no doubt about who and what he was dealing with.
After the IRA killings of two alleged drug dealers forced Sinn Féin's temporary exclusion from the talks, Powell says: "Adams and McGuinness acted in public as if they, rather than the men who were murdered, were the victims." At a particularly difficult moment following the Northern Bank robbery, Powell says: "They didn't make much of an effort to pretend the IRA had not carried out the robbery, but McGuinness made a histrionic attempt to persuade me that he and Adams had not known about it in advance, and asked rhetorically how we could work together if we didn't trust him. I said I hadn't believed their denials of IRA membership down the years, but had carried on working with them."
During the subsequent negotiations finally leading to the DUP/Sinn Féin deal, Adams accused the British of making themselves look ridiculous by spinning, adding that he was going to open "a Paisley interpretation centre".
Powell replied "that Paisley had learned the art of ambiguity from previous IRA statements". We also learn, surprisingly, that "food had been important to Sinn Féin throughout the process, particularly to Adams, whose first demand in any negotiation was normally to be fed, and who complained regularly about the quality of the food we provided".
Mowlam complained too, often, about finding herself usurped by the PM's man, at one stage booking him a flight back to London. With the brilliant economy of language that is a hallmark of this book, Powell pays tribute to her, saying: "There is no way it would have been possible for us to reach agreement on Good Friday 1998 if Mo had not breached the barrier with her ebullient personality. Mo was a necessary though not sufficient condition for peace."
While Powell was delighted to see Peter Mandelson appointed as her successor, he also throws an interesting light on how Labour MPs generally viewed the Northern Ireland post: "Tony was eager to bring him [ Mandelson] back into government. Clearly he couldn't put him back in a top-flight position, or anything the parliamentary Labour Party might consider enjoyable, such as Aid or Culture, since he was expected to do penance. Tony had therefore fixed on Northern Ireland, which would be seen as a suitable form of punishment."
Powell found relief from the punishing hours and tedious negotiations in "fits of giggles" with Alistair Campbell, most notably after Blair delivered his most famous soundbite about feeling "the hand of history" upon his shoulder. And, again, in the week of the Belfast Agreement, when Trimble left them in "hysterics" after lecturing them "on the importance of the recognition of Ullans, the Scots-Irish dialect, if we were to recognise Irish . . ."
Powell echoed Adams's words in finding that Stormont reeked "of a Boer mentality" while reserving special dislike for Castle Buildings, the "sick building" where the historic talks took place. "Its Formica panelling was chipped and crumbling; its maze of anonymous corridors made sure you were disorientated as soon as you opened a door. And after months of negotiations, it stank of sweat and stale food," he records. "The malaise of the building affected the mood of the people inside it. If ever there was an unpropitious place in which to reach agreement, this was it."
Small wonder then, in later years, as he and Blair sweltered in army barracks in Afghanistan and Iraq, that they would each comfort the other: "At least we aren't in Castle Buildings."