He was pilloried for it at the time, but the departing words about Northern Ireland from the then British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, were the shrewdest ever uttered: "What a bloody awful country: get me a scotch, someone."
It is truly a bloody awful country; crackpot and deranged, and now made conceited by the vigorous attentions of some of the most powerful people in existence.
The possession of submarines armed with nuclear weapons defines world power: only four countries possess such devices. The leaders of two of them have spent hundreds of hours attempting to solve Northern Ireland's problems. They might as well whip out a bicycle repair outfit and try to fix the Hubble telescope with blown circuitry.
Yet vanity still drives them: and their vanity feeds the almost bottomless self-regard of the people of Northern Ireland.
Will we never learn? The place is not fixable, not governable, not manageable at any but the most rudimentary parish level. In this sense the republicans are right. It is not a "natural" entity.
But "natural" entities are the recent invention of romantic nationalists. States were formed from the furthermost reach of any king: the outer marches of his power defined what for him was "natural". And it is the outermost parts where his rule is diluted, and his subjects restless. Hence the planted provinces of Ulster.
Throw in the austerity of Calvinism, the mumbo-jumbo of armed republicanism, the passivity of Catholicism, the voodoo of tribes competing for the same space, and overlay it all with the grisly simplicities of sub-Marxist doggerel, and what you have is the six tiresome counties of Ulster: with so many people whinging, girning, whining, scowling, howling, and generally providing the behavioural mannerisms of the higher simians.
Unfortunately for them - and us all - we insisted that the place was ours. So too did the British. It belongs to neither, but to the inhabitants engaged in their permanent feud in their drumlins. The natural instinct of people in such an environment is to come to a settlement or secure an eviction: and something similar would have occurred sooner or later in Northern Ireland. But interference from outsiders has meant this didn't happen.
During the course of this endless meddling,the people of Northern Ireland have come to expect to be fed by outsiders and ceased much useful economic activity. Northern Ireland once made linen, textiles, ships and aircraft in abundance. Now it makes almost nothing.
Enterprise has been replaced by dependency. One third of the population is employed by the British government. The other two- thirds sells imported articles to that third. The result is a largely unproductive people, with proportionately the highest Mercedes and yacht ownership in Europe.
Last week we heard cries for MORE, yet again: this time for further state (i.e., English) subsidies for their transport system. Northern Ireland is a dole queue that is forever brawling how the dole queue should be run, even as the dole continues to be doled, regardless. British ministers come and go, as helpless as supply-teachers supervising a secondary school playground in London's Tower Hamlets.
The odd one gets to like it. The security minister, Jane Kennedy, always has a little girl in a sweetshop look about her. She probably pinches herself in disbelief each morning as her MI 5 adviser presents her morning briefs marked Top Secret: FYO.
Not so long ago she was a care assistant in a young offenders' home. She still is; only now a man with a break-down automatic rifle sits beside her driver, and her armour-plated car-door is too heavy for her to open.
She's unusual. Most other politicians have gone mad there, like district commissioners who hit the bottle and were never heard of again. Reggie Maudling was merely rough-hewing the fate of those who would follow: Northern Ireland then shaped their ends.
So when will this farce at the peace process lathe be put out of its misery? When will all those bright minds in Dublin and London finally realise that the submarine-cum-space satellite, lawnmower-cum-microwave, trowel-cum-deep freeze of cross-community power sharing will not work? Worse than merely not working, this cyclical charade of failure, followed by loud and fevered declarations of imminent success from its architects and its cheerleaders in RTE has made so many people in Northern Ireland positively doolally.
They have internalised the fictions of the peace process: they swear that it will succeed, with a little more transparency, a little more demilitarisation, a bit more Patten, some Shinner recognition of police boards: the peace process hokey-kokey.
Otherwise, they insist that everything's just fine, and it's evil for people like me to say that the peace process won't work.
But then by their actual conduct, by their endless shrieking, and most of all by the way they vote, the people of Northern Ireland show why it won't. This is dysfunctionality at its most demented, firemen denouncing observers who are gloomy about the future of the burning building even as they try to extinguish the flames with Esso Blue.
So, dear God, no more prime ministerial or taoiseachly visits to Belfast or Hillsborough. Let's spell the bloody place in the lower case: northern ireland. End all subsidies and all interest in the place. Close down all outside television and newspaper offices. No more directly reported news.
Let travellers bring tales of the darkness there and of the strange customs of the people who inhabit it, as once they did from China. Most of all, no more talk about cross-community all-inclusive government. It's over. Got it? Over. Listen. David Trimble won't even keep his seat.