A Classless Society

15 Adventures

‘I can’t imagine the world without me’

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value.

Tony Blair (1997)

I felt sick to the stomach to have to order that rescue mission by the SAS in Sierra Leone. As a father I was so very aware that the young guys being sent off to fight and perhaps die were somebody’s children.

Tony Blair (2001)

I am not going to be the first prime minister in a hundred years to lose a war.

Tony Blair (1999)

‘We will pursue policies on defence and foreign affairs which will make Britain a force for good in the world,’ read the foreword to the manifesto of the SDP/Liberal Alliance in 1987, setting a tone for the aspirations of the left. Ten years later, almost to the day, when Labour took power, the same phraseology was again to be heard. Robin Cook came to the Foreign Office promising that Britain would ‘once again be a force for good in the world’ and that ‘Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other people for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves.’

Summarised by the department’s press officers, that declaration of intent became a pledge to operate an ‘ethical foreign policy’. This wasn’t quite what Cook had said, and it seemed to offer a hostage to fortune, for foreign affairs were notoriously susceptible to considerations beyond morality. Nonetheless, the phrase captured something of the faith that was placed in Cook’s ability to uphold the internationalist principles traditionally espoused by the Labour Party; more than any other figure in the new government, he was the one to whom the liberal left looked for a moral lead. Much was expected of the man who had led the assault on the Conservatives during the Scott Inquiry.

It was not merely the arms-to-Iraq story that lay behind the pledge. The divisions over Europe that had so badly damaged the Conservative Party had a knock-on effect of ensuring that John Major’s government had little time or energy left for international engagement. The successful completion of the Kuwaiti War had not been followed by further such commitments overseas, largely for reasons of housekeeping rather than any Little Englander sentiments. Most strikingly this had been apparent in the Yugoslav wars of 1991–5.

The manner of Yugoslavia’s collapse as a unified nation was one of the great world tragedies of the decade. Slobodan Milošević had come to power in Serbia, the largest and most powerful of the constituent republics in the country, on a platform of aggressively defending Serbian dominance over the delicately balanced federation, and his policies had prompted several of the other states to assert their independence, starting with Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, followed the next year by Bosnia-Herzegovina. The conflicts that ensued were bewildering in their complexity. Serbia’s war with Croatia began with the aim of keeping the latter within Yugoslavia, but soon became a battle to determine borders and to establish authority over areas of the new country that had substantial Serbian populations. In Bosnia too there were large numbers of Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić, who took up arms against the Bosnian separatists. Meanwhile Franjo Tudjman, the equally nationalist president of Croatia, had allegedly come to an agreement with Milošević over the division of Bosnia, so that the future sovereignty of that state was even further imperilled. Milošević

The divisions were ethnic, nationalist and religious. They were also rooted deep in a history of which most in Western Europe were ignorant. The humanitarian consequences of the conflicts, however, were easier to grasp, and within months the world was witnessing on television the sight of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from the Serb forces, while stories were circulating of war crimes and atrocities committed in the name of ethnic cleansing.

Initially the international response to the developing crises centred on an effort to keep Yugoslavia together as a single entity, but in December 1991 the newly reunited Germany announced it was recognising Croatia as an independent nation. It was argued that a basic principle of self-determination was at stake, though Germany’s position was perhaps rooted in an instinctive solidarity with the Croatian Catholics in their struggle with the Eastern Orthodox-influenced Serbia, while the presence of large numbers of Croatian migrant workers in Germany also played its part. Whatever the cause, the move was counter to the wishes of the United Nations and of Britain, but once enacted, it set a pattern duly followed by most of the world. A UN peacekeeping force was sent into Croatia in February 1992, but was able to make only a token attempt to help humanitarian aid get through to the refugees.

Britain contributed to the humanitarian effort, though the decision to do even this proved controversial within the cabinet and the Commons, as well as in the country beyond, which remained unconvinced that anything constructive could be done in the chaos of these civil wars. A large-scale commitment of troops would have been unpopular, while diplomacy seemed like a futile endeavour. ‘How were negotiators supposed to negotiate when the twisted logic and self-interest of Yugoslav leaders was in favour of bloodshed?’ reflected Major.

As the bloodshed continued, however, the calls for some sort of action grew louder on both the left and the right. This was, argued Chris Mullin, analogous to the Spanish Civil War, and there should be international intervention, just as there should have been in the 1930s. ‘Those paying the price of George Bush’s and John Major’s dithering incompetence,’ wrote Peter Mandelson, ‘are Bosnian Muslims, seeing their homes burned and their women raped by Serbian and Croatian militia alike.’ From the other side, Margaret Thatcher – who had been lobbying hard in private for action against Milošević – gave a television interview in 1993 in which she said that massacres were happening ‘in the heart of Europe’ and that the conflict ‘should be in Europe’s sphere of conscience’. Britain, and the EU more generally, she said, ‘were like an accomplice to massacre’. The defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, dismissed her comments as ‘emotional nonsense’.

Instead the British government steadfastly refused to become embroiled in the conflict. In international circles, the creation of a force to defend Croatia was proposed, a no-fly zone in Bosnia was suggested, air strikes against Bosnian Serbs were put forward. Britain objected to all, with the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, singled out as the stumbling block to further intervention. ‘Any time there was a likelihood of effective action,’ observed Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Polish prime minister and now a UN emissary to Bosnia, ‘a particular Western statesman intervened to prevent it.’ He didn’t need to spell out who he meant.

When he came to write his memoirs, Hurd himself, while conceding that mistakes were made, remained insistent that the policy was right: ‘Britain had no substantial commercial or strategic stake in Croatia, Bosnia or the other states which had made up Yugoslavia.’ He also rejected an analysis that suggested there was a simple moral division between the various forces, adding that as ‘I grow older I become more suspicious of the straightforward, violent solution to international problems’. Others were not of the same mind, seeing the conflict as a war of aggression in which the Serbs were the culpable party. The memory of Britain standing on the sidelines was to play a major part in subsequent actions.

By the time a peace treaty had been drawn up, in the shape of the Dayton Agreement in December 1995, an estimated total of up to 200,000 people had died, and perhaps another two million had been displaced. For all the violence that had gone before, the borders established by that agreement did remain intact.

Hurd’s assessment of British interests during the Yugoslav wars – described in American circles as ‘hyper-realist’ – was very much in the mind of some Labour figures as the party took office and began talking of an ethical foreign policy and the need to be a ‘force for good in the world’. Henceforth it would be a matter of principle that evil should not be allowed to go unchecked, wherever it manifested itself.

An opportunity to demonstrate that commitment soon presented itself. The situation in Indonesia, where President Suharto had come to power in a military takeover in 1967, was not one that excited widespread public interest in Britain, but it had been a long-running concern on the left. In particular the invasion and illegal occupation by Indonesian forces of East Timor in 1976 had been condemned, as had Britain’s supply of armaments to Suharto. The issue had received some publicity in July 1996 when four women were prosecuted for causing £1.5 million of damage to Hawk jets that were due to be exported to Indonesia; their defence, that their actions were the lesser of two evils, had successfully won over the jury, and the women had been acquitted.

Asked before the election whether he would end arms sales to Indonesia, Robin Cook had declined to offer any such assurance, but it seemed scarcely credible that he could countenance the continuing trade that saw the export of water cannon and tear gas, clearly destined for use in suppressing pro-democracy demonstrations in both Indonesia and East Timor. Shipments of such materials, as well as armoured cars and a further seventeen Hawk jets, were scheduled for export shortly after the election. The ethical dimension, however, did not seem to apply in this case and – apparently on the instructions of Downing Street – the exports went ahead. The argument coming out of the Foreign Office was that the sales had already been agreed and that cancellation would mean that the government was liable for compensation: ‘We are not going to pay for the previous administration’s mistakes.’ Undoubtedly it was a difficult decision to make, but the subtleties of the argument may have been lost on the people of East Timor. And if the practice continued as before, there was at least a new transparency to the process; Cook felt able to boast that Britain ‘now had the most open system of arms sales of any country in Europe’.

What proved somewhat easier was the more symbolic practice of issuing apologies for historical wrongs. There had been some high-profile examples in recent years, as when the Catholic Church in 1992 admitted that it had been wrong to persecute Galileo Galilei three and a half centuries earlier for his insistence that the Earth orbited the Sun. Since the Church claimed some sort of authority in matters of the afterlife, there was an internal logic to the posthumous absolution. Less obvious was the campaign by Outrage! and other gay activists to have an official pardon issued to Oscar Wilde in 1995, that being the centenary of his sentencing to two years’ hard labour for homosexuality. Quite properly, Michael Howard rejected the demand. Wilde had been tried and sentenced in accordance with the laws of the day, and anyway the idea that redemption for a maverick, anarchist genius might be within the gift of a Conservative government was seen by some as an insult to his memory. Instead the centenary was marked by the unveiling of a stained glass memorial in Westminster Abbey.

The idea of historical apologies being in the air, New Labour took to it with enthusiasm. In June 1997 Tony Blair apologised for the nineteenth-century potato famine in Ireland, blaming it on ‘those who governed in London’, and later announced that Britain would be donating money to a memorial for the victims. (‘If it was just the potatoes that were affected,’ observed Alan Partridge, less sympathetically, ‘at the end of the day, you will pay the price if you’re a fussy eater.’) Blair went on to apologise to the US Congress for Britain’s burning of the books of the Library of Congress in 1814, and in 2006 the government offered a posthumous pardon to 306 soldiers executed, mostly for cowardice, during the First World War.

To the surprise of some, this gesture was not universally welcomed. Already observance of Yom HaShoah was in decline and there was a debate within British Jewry about whether the continuing focus on the Nazi genocide was proving counter-productive, alienating younger generations with negative images of victimhood. ‘Some Jewish people,’ explained David Cesarani, a professor of modern Jewish history, ‘think it is wrong to concentrate on destruction and death when there is so much that the Jews should celebrate.’ Rabbi Jonathan Romain argued that Yom HaShoah itself should be abandoned, subsumed into Tishah B’Av, the annual day of mourning, while Rabbi Yitzchak Y. Schochet called for better education in schools, rather than the addition of a day to the calendar. Stephen Smith, director of the Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Centre, was particularly scathing. ‘We have created a soundbite society in which we reduce difficult issues to trivial clichés,’ he commented, and wondered whether the new commemoration would ‘reduce twentieth-century mass slaughter to the status of National No Smoking Day’.

These issues were safely in the past. When it came to wrongdoing for which apology and reparations to the living might be applicable, there was not always such enthusiasm. In 1966 the Labour government of Harold Wilson had leased the British colony of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to America for use as a military base, a move that involved the eviction of the 2,000 inhabitants and their relocation in Mauritius. The status of Diego Garcia had been the subject of questions in Parliament by Robin Cook as far back as 1975 – his concern was the possible development of nuclear facilities on the base – but when the issue returned to public notice in the late 1990s, he appeared less interested in the historic injustice done to the islanders. A court case in 2000 ruled unequivocally that the evictions of what were termed at the time ‘a few Tarzans or Men Fridays’ had been an ‘abject legal failure’, yet the islanders’ right to return to their home had still not materialised by the time the Labour government left office ten years later.

Slightly more convincing was the apology issued by Ron Davies for the way that £150,000 had been taken – on the authority of an earlier Welsh secretary, George Thomas – from the relief fund for the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in order to pay for clearing up after the catastrophe, even though it had been occasioned by the National Coal Board’s negligence. Here, at least, restitution was made and the money returned. ‘It was a wrong perpetrated by a previous government, a Labour secretary of state,’ admitted Davies. ‘I regarded it as an embarrassment. It was a wrong that needed to be righted.’ Nonetheless, the repayment of the stolen money made no attempt to adjust for inflation, let alone for interest.

Despite this patchy record, there was progress in various areas of international relations that had long been cherished causes on the left. The ethical dimension to foreign policy also sought to wipe out the memory of the Pergau Dam affair and other dubious examples of overseas aid, with the creation by Labour of a separate Department for International Development, hived off from the Foreign Office and given a seat in cabinet.

The appointment of Clare Short as the secretary of state was widely welcomed, though she was not always surefooted in her early days in office. Aid was provided for the British territory of Montserrat after its devastation by a volcano in 1997, but Short somewhat blotted her copybook with her accompanying comments on the island’s leaders. ‘Their answer to an emergency is to demand more and more from Britain,’ she moaned. ‘Their approach is “give them all golden elephants”.’ She subsequently apologised for that remark, and more generally was regarded as one of the success stories of the first Blair government.

It was also to Britain’s credit that it was in the first wave of countries to ratify the Rome Statute of 1998, creating the International Criminal Court that followed on from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (itself a UN initiative instigated by Germany). The new court was intended to try cases of alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, though its efficacy was inevitably compromised by the list of countries that refused to sign up, a collection of curious bedfellows that included the USA, Iraq, Israel and China.

Perhaps more important, in terms of international law, was the case of Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, who visited London in October 1998 for medical treatment and promptly found himself under threat of extradition to Spain, where he was wanted on charges of torture and genocide. ‘This is going to be one helluva story,’ remarked Jack Straw, on hearing of Pinochet’s arrest in Britain. It proved to be an accurate prediction.

There were to start with questions about what business it was of Spain’s in the first place, since the alleged crimes had been committed on Chilean soil. Then there was the matter of whether Pinochet was covered by the principle of sovereign immunity that protects heads of state from criminal prosecution. And finally there was an argument made by many on the right, including most notably Margaret Thatcher, that Pinochet had been a good, loyal friend to Britain, particularly during the Falklands War, and that the persecution of a sick 82-year-old displayed a distinct lack of hospitality. There was a suspicion that the whole thing was politically motivated and an act of leftist spite.

This latter accusation contained a grain of truth. The American-backed military coup in Chile in 1973 that had overthrown the socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed Pinochet at the head of a military junta had long been a burning issue on the left, so much so that, for some, it transcended their more recently acquired reformism. Peter Mandelson had been a student at the time of the coup, having only just left the Young Communists, and now greeted the news of the arrest by calling Pinochet ‘a brutal dictator’ and describing his claim for immunity as ‘pretty gut-wrenching stuff’.

The claim of sovereign immunity took its time to work through the British courts, ending up in the House of Lords, which found against it. In the words of one of the Law Lords: ‘international law has made plain that certain types of conduct, including torture and hostage-taking, are not acceptable conduct on the part of anyone.’ The case returned twice more to the Law Lords, firmly establishing the principle that torture was an international crime and could therefore result in charges in any country that was a signatory to the UN’s Convention against Torture, as Britain and Spain – and indeed Chile – were.

Legal hurdles having been cleared, the decision whether to approve the extradition to Spain came down to Jack Straw, who had taken scrupulous care to observe every letter of the law in a case that had the potential to cause major international embarrassment, and who had resisted attempts by prime ministers past and present to intervene. ‘There’s no Third Way,’ he explained. ‘I either say Yes or No.’ Eventually, after Pinochet had been under house arrest for more than a year, the medical reports proved conclusive: he had suffered such extensive brain damage from several strokes that he was not fit to stand trial. In March 2000, he was allowed to leave the country and return to Chile.

Many on the left were unhappy at the outcome, including Straw himself, who wrote in his memoirs: ‘Pinochet was one of the worst dictators of the post-war era and it is an enduring source of enormous frustration that I was not able to lead him to the dock.’ Those on the right were equally unhappy at the humiliation heaped upon the man during his protracted stay in Britain. It was perhaps a muddled outcome but, as Straw made clear in his Commons statement after Pinochet’s departure, the case ‘established, beyond question, the principle that those who commit human rights abuses in one country cannot assume that they are safe elsewhere. That will be its lasting legacy.’

It was an important principle, though again it laid Britain open to a charge of operating double standards when it came to that ethical dimension. For human rights abuses were obviously never going to be the sole criterion on which foreign policy was based. The grubby reality of power meant that when dealing with, say, Jiang Zemin, the president of China, other considerations took precedence, despite that country’s less than perfect human rights record and the running sore of the occupation of Tibet. In a meeting with Jiang just before the handing over of Hong Kong, Blair ‘slipped in a very brief mention of human rights’, though in a subsequent encounter, in London in 1999, not even that token nod was given. ‘The press reported that Tony had raised the issue of human rights,’ noted Clare Short, ‘but I was at the meeting and he had not done so.’

That visit by Jiang to London was marked by what The Times called ‘zero tolerance towards human rights and Free Tibet demonstrators’. The police uncovered a long-forgotten law prohibiting demonstrations in royal parks and used it to prevent even the display of banners by protestors on The Mall (technically a part of St James’s Park) in what was hardly an advert for liberal democracy. The Economist linked the occasion to Pinochet’s detention, pointing out of the latter that ‘His sins were many. But they were fewer than those of Mr Jiang.’ On the part of the authorities there was perhaps some residual embarrassment from the state visit of the Emperor Akihito of Japan the previous year, when hundreds of Second World War veterans, proudly wearing their medals, lined The Mall so that they could turn their backs in silent protest as the son of the wartime emperor passed by.

Questions of human rights, historical wrongs and ethics were not, however, what Tony Blair’s government would ultimately be remembered for in foreign policy. Rather it was a willingness to engage in armed action overseas, and a determination to stand by America at all costs.

The latter trait had already been seen before the election, when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1996, and found ready support not only from John Major’s government but also from the opposition. It was evident again in August 1998 when, in retaliation for terrorist attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, American forces bombed targets in Afghanistan, where the group al-Qaeda – held responsible for the attacks – was based, and Sudan, where a factory was destroyed. The factory was said to have been producing chemical weapons, but it turned out that the intelligence was flawed, and that it was actually a pharmaceutical plant making antibiotics. ‘Everyone knew that what Clinton was doing was wrong,’ explained one of Blair’s circle, ‘but we also knew that supporting him was right.’ Robin Cook, at least, was not so impressed and ‘refused to go on the Today programme’ to defend the action.

Faulty intelligence was to prove a contentious issue in the later years of Blair’s premiership, much of the controversy centred on the question of weapons of mass destruction. The phrase had been in circulation for some time: ‘Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?’ worried Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1937. But it had gained greater currency in the years after Hiroshima, referring specifically to nuclear weapons, and then extended to include chemical and biological weapons, though not cluster bombs or massive ‘conventional’ bombs like the BLU-82 (nicknamed the daisy cutter). The phrase had become particularly associated with Saddam Hussein, whose government boasted of possessing weapons of mass destruction and threatened their use during the Iran–Iraq War in the mid-1980s. ‘Some Western military attachés discount the Iraqi claims as propaganda,’ it was reported at the time, but mustard gas – a primitive form of chemical weaponry – was used during that conflict and again against Iraqi Kurds in 1988.

The real fear, though, was that Iraq would develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, as part of the conditions imposed upon the country in the wake of the Kuwaiti War, a Security Council resolution authorised UN weapons inspectors to monitor and examine the Iraqi weapons programme. Within a few months of becoming prime minister, Tony Blair was making it publicly clear that he couldn’t rule out military strikes against Iraq, and was privately telling Paddy Ashdown that he had seen intelligence reports that were ‘pretty scary’; Saddam was, he said, ‘very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction’. Whether that were true was hard to evaluate, for the inspectors were thrown out of the country in November 1998 and, although they were then allowed to return, the decision had already been taken in Washington and London to bomb Baghdad.

This was Blair’s first war and it was undertaken, he told his aides, only with ‘a heavy heart’. The advice he was given suggested that ‘2,500 people would die and UK planes and bombs would be responsible for about 250 of them’. The bombing was preceded by discussion in cabinet and by a Commons debate in which a small, and predictable, chorus of voices spoke against the action, including Tony Benn, Edward Heath and Tam Dalyell. The latter dubbed the conflict ‘the war of Clinton’s penis’, suggesting that it was an attempt to divert attention from the sexual scandals then besetting the president. Also speaking against was the eloquent Labour MP George Galloway, who compared the operation to a crusade led not by ‘Richard the Lionheart, but Clinton the Liar’. Galloway’s moral authority, however, had been somewhat compromised by a visit to Iraq in 1994, when he had been seen on television speaking with the dictator, using words that he was not soon allowed to forget – ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability’. The Daily Mirror was prompted to denounce him as ‘the mother of all idiots’.

The objective in this instance was simply that of punishment. Blair talked of the need to ‘degrade the ability of Saddam Hussein to build and use weapons of mass destruction’, but since the UN inspectors had been unable to locate sites that were being used for this purpose, it seemed unlikely that those determining the targets of the air strikes would be any more successful. There was also, though, the stated long-term desire to oust the current Iraqi government, even if regime change wasn’t currently achievable: ‘It’s a broad objective of our policy to remove Saddam Hussein,’ Blair told the Commons.

The 1998 bombing campaign was primarily an American operation and attracted very little support elsewhere, save in Britain; France was particularly vocal in its disapproval of the action. Nonetheless, in a round of interviews immediately afterwards, Blair pronounced himself satisfied with the results, though he couldn’t help exaggerating the truth, as Alastair Campbell noted: ‘he said we hit every target, when we hadn’t.’

If Saddam remained the ultimate bogeyman, he was briefly rivalled by Slobodan Milošević. The Dayton Agreement had brought peace to the Balkans and was still holding, but it had left Serbia with control of the province of Kosovo, a tiny, landlocked enclave mostly populated by ethnic Albanians, and here there remained problems. During the earlier wars of independence, a separatist movement calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in terrorist attacks on Serbian government forces and on Serbs living in the province. With the other conflicts now resolved, the KLA stepped up its campaign and was met with a harsh response by the Serbian government. By the spring of 1998 reports were emerging of gross human rights abuses by the state, and the civil service were suggesting to Blair that he ought to be aware of the issues. ‘You’d better give me a note on it,’ he replied. ‘Starting with: where is it?’

The ignorance was understandable. Few in the West knew anything about Kosovo, let alone of its enormous emotional significance in Serbian history, dating back to the Battle of Blackbird Field in 1389, when Serb forces had fought the might of the Ottoman Empire and sustained heavy losses. Indeed Yugoslavia itself had been largely a closed book until recent years. When Paddy Ashdown had first begun to take an interest in the region – he went on to make it his own specialist subject – he had started by asking a colleague ‘to show me maps as I didn’t even know where all the countries were’. The media were not much better informed, and focused instead on photogenic images of suffering Kosovars; little attempt was made to explain the complexities of context and history.

Those images were significant, for the war that followed was the first time that the media had been largely responsible for British military action. Through 1998 a massive weight of news reports built up a single message: that this was a straightforward case of good versus evil, with the Serbs cast in the role of bad guy. Privately Blair and Cook were clear that ‘the KLA were not much better than the Serbs’, but Blair was also conscious of Britain’s non-involvement in the Balkans in the early 1990s, and determined that what he saw as a shameful mistake shouldn’t be made again. It was, he insisted, ‘essentially a moral issue’. By June he was resolved on military intervention, though it was not until March 1999 that he went to the Commons to announce that bombing of Serbia would commence.

A strike against a sovereign nation without United Nations approval was of dubious legality; ‘we breached international law and took pre-emptive action in Kosovo without UN sanction,’ as David Blunkett later admitted. But UN backing would have been impossible to obtain, since Russia and China were opposed, so that option was simply discounted. Instead the action was carried out under the auspices of NATO, an organisation that was in search of a role in the post-Cold War world. In Kosovo it found a new identity; its function no longer purely defensive, it now became an instrument for controlling domestic policy in non-member countries.

The bombing was expected to last for seventy-two hours, with Milošević rapidly caving in to the demands of NATO and withdrawing Serb forces from Kosovo. There would be no need to put troops on the ground, with all the concomitant risks to British soldiers; the mission would be achieved from the air. That proved to be wishful thinking, and it took seventy-eight days of killing before peace could be declared. Even then it was the result not of the bombing, which had solidified Serbian support for Milošević against an external enemy, but international diplomacy, led by Russia, and – after Blair had talked Clinton into it – the threat of a ground invasion. The government might have done well to listen to the advice of Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader now turned politician, who knew something about the subject, and who pointed out that ‘“bombing into submission” isn’t always a sensible policy’.

Mistakes were inevitably made during the campaign. A cluster bomb aimed at an airfield instead hit a market and killed sixty civilians; eighty-seven Kosovars were killed in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša; worst of all from a diplomatic point of view, a bomb struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (again a case of faulty intelligence). Perhaps most distressing, the original prediction that some 200,000 people might be driven from their homes as a consequence of the war turned out to be a hopeless underestimate; in fact more than a million refugees fled, many of them ending up in the camps on the Macedonian and Albanian borders, which Blair visited himself during the bombing. ‘This is obscene,’ he argued, with post-hoc reasoning. ‘It’s criminal. Just criminal. How can anyone think we shouldn’t be stopping this?’

The terrible pictures that came out from the camps helped to ensure public support for the war, though as the conflict dragged on, much of this melted away. By June 1999, Philip Gould’s focus groups were showing dissatisfaction with the costs of the operation, leaving a petulant Alastair Campbell to ‘wonder why we bothered’ if the public were going to be so ungrateful, and Gould himself to advise Blair to ignore popular opinion: ‘The only important thing is to win.’

In some respects, this was a very different conflict from those that followed and became the defining incident of Blair’s premiership, not least because it attracted the support of much of the left. ‘This was the liberals’ war,’ wrote Mark Steel. ‘“We have to do something,” they screamed at those of us opposed to it.’ A handful of MPs on the old left might have been in opposition, but it was noticeable that Ken Livingstone was in full support. Milošević was seen as a right-wing dictator who had to be fought, a perception only aided by Alan Clark’s typically eccentric take on the war: ‘Those loathsome, verminous gypsies; and the poor brave Serbs.’

In other ways, however, Kosovo set a pattern that was to be repeated, from the characterisation of the enemy as a new Adolf Hitler (Livingstone, as well as Blair, was amongst those resorting to such lazy imagery), through Gordon Brown’s absence from key decision-making and silence in cabinet, to the complete lack of thought about what was to happen if and when the war was won. ‘There was no real clarity about an endgame at the moment,’ wrote Campbell, as the bombing started, and the failure to prepare what was becoming known as an exit strategy became all too apparent when the Serbian forces did eventually withdraw.

The province was put under UN administration, policed by an international peacekeeping force, but that didn’t stop a further wave of refugees as tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of Serbs fled Kosovan reprisals for the safety of Serbia. This was not a stable state but one which, as Clare Short wrote, had been left ‘in limbo, with high levels of unemployment which exacerbate ethnic tension’. Chris Patten, now an EU commissioner, visited in 2004, shortly after a major outbreak of violence directed against those Serbs who remained, and concluded that the prospects weren’t good: ‘the unresolved question of Kosovo’s long-term status – the tensions between the majority Albanian and minority Serbian communities, and the hold of organised criminals over much of what there was of commercial life – deterred the inward investment that the territory still needs if it is to have any chance of picking itself up.’

Little of this seemed to concern Tony Blair, who was received as a conquering hero when he visited Kosovo. Having insisted throughout that this was not ‘just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity’, he celebrated victory in the same terms: ‘war can be necessary to uphold civilisation. Good has triumphed over evil. Justice has overcome barbarism. And the values of civilisation have prevailed.’

Such a frame of mind made it unlikely that lessons would be learned. While the conflict was still continuing, Blair made a significant and influential speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in which he outlined what he called ‘a new doctrine of international community’, based on the right, indeed the duty, of countries to wage war for moral and humanitarian reasons: ‘Intervention to bring down a despotic dictatorial regime could be justified on grounds of the nature of that regime, not merely its immediate threat to our interests.’ This was hazardous territory, offering a justification for the invasion of sovereign countries with no external or objective check on whether such action was appropriate. The one existing body that might have served in such a capacity was the UN, but that had already been bypassed in Kosovo, and its place taken by NATO.

Blair believed, he made clear, in ‘the enforcement of liberal democracy’, which couldn’t help but sound like a contradiction in terms. And there were questions too about the practice of his doctrine. He rejected out of hand concerns about the lack of planning carried out with regard to the post-war settlement in Kosovo: ‘Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider.’ It was a meaningless soundbite at best, downright dangerous at worst.

The key, though, was the set of five tests that Blair argued should be met before action was taken: ‘Are we sure of our case?’; ‘Have we exhausted all diplomatic options?’; ‘Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?’; ‘Are we prepared for the long term?’; ‘Do we have national interests involved?’ These were the lessons he had learned from Kosovo, and they were the bases on which his future decisions should be judged.

Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention was to be tested over the next decade. For now, it provoked some discussion and much dissent. Alan Clark, who – for all his oddities and provocative posturing – was a distinguished military historian, wrote that ‘a huge change of mood infects society and politics [which] has extended out of touchy-feely Diana-caring into a correctness that has become an orthodoxy. So that “human rights” can override all considerations of national sovereignty.’ The political philosopher John Laughland elaborated on the same theme: ‘Human rights are, by definition, antithetical to the concept of national sovereignty. The idea that there can be such a thing as universal human rights implies that there can be a single global system of civil law with NATO playing the role of world government.’ This, he concluded, ‘is not moral: it is megalomaniac’.

There was much in these reservations, but the first new engagement for British forces after Blair’s speech was a rare case of unqualified success. Sierra Leone had been in a state of civil war since 1991, a terrible conflict in which 50,000 were killed, many more left with amputated limbs and up to two million made homeless, all of it the result of a struggle to control the country’s vast diamond wealth. In 1997 the elected government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was overthrown by the main rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and although Kabbah was subsequently reinstated, following international intervention, the war continued.

Officially Britain had instituted sanctions that forbade the export of weapons to the country, though a moment of controversy came in April 1998 when it was revealed that arms had indeed been sent to Sierra Leone, for the use of Kabbah’s forces, with the tacit support of the Foreign Office. For Robin Cook, who had harried the Tories during the arms-to-Iraq debate, this was deeply awkward, though this time there was less negative publicity, with Blair insisting that the intention ‘was to help the democratic regime restore its position from an illegal military coup’. An inquiry into the arms dealing was instituted, but it was never likely to deliver a damning verdict when Blair had already made his position clear, even citing Sierra Leone as a fine example of an ethical foreign policy.

As the position in the country deteriorated, and the capital Freetown came under threat, British troops were sent to the country in May 2000 to support a struggling United Nations mission. The aim, recorded Lance Price, was ‘ostensibly to secure the airport and help to evacuate British nationals, but in reality to do all they can to keep the rebels back from the capital’. Further reinforcements were added in what some feared was, in another new term of the decade, mission creep, an ‘inexorable slide into ever worsening complications’.

Some military engagements were undertaken, most famously in August 2000 when eleven British soldiers were taken hostage by an armed group referred to in the British media as the West Side Boys (though, being fans of American rap star Tupac Shakur, they preferred to call themselves the West Side Niggaz), who were not part of the RUF but a gang of ‘stoned bandits’ operating independently. A rescue operation by British paratroopers and members of the SAS was entirely successful, with just one British fatality, in terms of both freeing the hostages and smashing the gang.

More important than any combat, though, was simply the presence of the British troops on the ground, backed by strong political involvement, which halted the progress of the RUF and inspired a more decisive commitment by the UN to work for a ceasefire. The war was officially declared to be at an end in January 2002, with Britain’s involvement having proved decisive. There had been no reliance on aerial bombing, no attempt to sideline the UN, no talk of regime change. As an example of liberal intervention, the operation could hardly have been bettered.

During the course of these foreign adventures there was broad public support – as there generally is when British troops are sent into action – but they had no great impact on perceptions of the government or on life in Britain. Certainly they meant little compared to perhaps the single most significant development of the decade: the attempt to bring to an end the low-level war within Britain’s own borders in Northern Ireland.

By the time John Major arrived in Downing Street at the end of 1990, the conflict had been raging for two decades and had resulted in the deaths of over three thousand people, mostly in Northern Ireland itself, but also spilling out into the rest of the United Kingdom. In terms of the mainland population’s attitude, little had changed since the height of the Troubles in the mid-1970s. Neither the Republicans of the IRA and Sinn Fein, nor the loyalist majority enjoyed significant support, and there was scarcely more than a weary feeling of ‘a plague on both their houses’. There was too a sense of distaste about the support in some American circles for republican terrorists, while the revelation in the early 1990s that campaigners had been right all along about the wrongful imprisonment of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six merely added the British state to the list of those who had failed.

It was noticeable, though, that those miscarriages of justice were hardly greeted by a wave of outrage in Britain; the film In the Name of the Father (1993), based on the account of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, was better received in America, where it was nominated for seven Oscars, than at home, where it gained just two BAFTA nominations. Meanwhile the twenty-one people murdered by the IRA in the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 seemed to have been forgotten; ‘we asked for justice, but it never came,’ as the Birmingham-born Lawrence sang on a Denim song in 1992.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Troubles was one that attracted virtually no comment: the absence of widespread anti-Irish feeling on the streets of Britain. The far right attempted to stir up hatred, and in 1995 managed to grab headlines by disrupting a football match staged in Dublin between Ireland and England; after just twenty-seven minutes, the game was called off as a hail of missiles descended from the stands housing 2,000 England fans, accompanied by repeated choruses of ‘No surrender to the IRA’. More generally, however, the National Front’s slogan ‘Hang IRA Scum!’ found little or no support in a country fatigued by years of random atrocities.

The conflict had become a seemingly inescapable part of British life, a running sore that disfigured the nation with no hope of healing. Yet change was in the air. In 1990 the world had watched Nelson Mandela walk free from jail after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and the expectation was that South Africa was on the brink of abandoning apartheid, just as Eastern Europe had chosen to turn away from communism. If such progress could be made elsewhere, the possibility surely existed too in Northern Ireland.

In early 1991 Major and his Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, initiated a new series of talks with what were known as the ‘constitutional’ parties, i.e. those who didn’t have an armed wing, but the process was soon derailed by a trivial incident of the kind that had blighted politics in the province so many times. Appearing as a guest on the Irish television programme, The Late Late Show, Brooke was prevailed upon by the presenter to deliver a song; with evident reluctance, he attempted a couple of verses of ‘My Darling, Clementine’, and promptly faced a chorus of calls for him to resign. It was, argued his detractors, in shockingly poor taste to be seen singing on television on the very day that seven people had been murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), even if he had taken the opportunity of his appearance to denounce the bombing.

Despite this false start, the reality was dawning on all parties that the war had been fought to a standstill. Terrorists on both sides were still fully armed, despite twenty years of a British military presence, and were capable of continuing the fight, but the litany of deaths was bringing a solution no closer, and it was clear that the stalemate was merely delaying any possibility of a settlement. The weariness of the people of Northern Ireland, bludgeoned by the years of violence, was matched by the bemused impatience of those on the mainland, for whom the conflict was largely incomprehensible.

In February 1993 the IRA sent a secret message to the British government: ‘The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ They pointed out that they couldn’t announce a ceasefire publicly, since it would be interpreted as a surrender, but said they were prepared to give a private undertaking to that effect.

Wary of what this development actually meant, but determined to explore the possibilities it promised, Major began another series of talks, concentrating this time on dealing with Albert Reynolds, Taoiseach of the Irish Republic. Together the two men issued in December that year the Downing Street Declaration, which made explicit the right of the people of Northern Ireland to determine their own political future, enshrined the principle of mutual consent between the people of North and South as the only road to a settlement, and paved the way for parties associated with terrorism to become part of negotiations if they renounced violence. Nine months later, in August 1994, the IRA officially and publicly declared a unilateral ceasefire.

It was the most important breakthrough since the start of the Troubles in 1969, though a farcical element was not entirely lacking. The announcement of the ceasefire was broken to viewers of ITV in a banner headline running across the bottom of the screen during a broadcast of the film Carry On Teacher; unfortunately it happened to be at the precise moment when a bomb made by pupils in a chemistry class exploded underneath Ted Ray’s desk.

The ceasefire was greeted by Tony Blair with a change of Labour policy. For years the party had argued for Ireland to be peacefully unified, but Blair – without consultation, in his usual fashion – overturned this, letting it be known that henceforth Labour would no longer seek to act as a ‘persuader’ towards unification. The IRA initiative also met with a response from the Combined Loyalist Military Command, the umbrella group of Protestant terrorist groups, who declared their own ceasefire just weeks later.

Unfortunately for John Major, he was by this stage such a damaged figure in the eyes of the public that he reaped no political benefit. The first opinion poll conducted in Britain revealed that people gave most credit for the ceasefire to John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland, to Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein, and to Albert Reynolds. Major trailed them in fourth place.

Nonetheless, he threw himself into an attempt to build on the initiative at considerable personal risk, for as a Conservative prime minister, he was undoubtedly a potential target. Over the years it had been the Tories, rather than Labour, who had been marked out for attack by the IRA; the MPs Airey Neave, Anthony Berry and Ian Gow were amongst those who had been murdered, while there had been assassination attempts on Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and even Major himself. Yet he seemed to derive pleasure from the task, perhaps finding an escape from the travails of Westminster. ‘The cares of the world would fall from his shoulders on our many visits to Ulster,’ remembered his press secretary, Christopher Meyer. ‘To the consternation of police and security men, he plunged into crowds, Catholic and Protestant, and was greeted warmly by almost all. Here he was the bold statesman and natural-born politician.’ There were echoes of Major’s 1992 soapbox appearances, as he worked the crowds even on trips to such potentially dangerous places as the border town of Newry.

By authorising talks between British officials and Sinn Fein, he also put himself in considerable political danger. The Conservative Party had long relied on the assistance of the Ulster Unionists in the Westminster Parliament and, at a time when he was hanging on to power with such a meagre minority, Major risked a crucial loss of support by dealing – however remotely – with the likes of Gerry Adams, a man to whom the Unionist MP Ken Maginnis reportedly refused to speak, even some years later: ‘I don’t talk to fucking murderers.’ And indeed Major did pay a price. In 1995 another Unionist MP, John Taylor, announced that his party’s informal alliance with the Tories was over: ‘It is finished. From here on in the government is in deep trouble.’ The Unionists proceeded to oppose the government in a vote on the EU, though the government just survived since the usual Tory rebels (with the notable exception of Norman Lamont) decided this time not to abandon their own leadership.

Progress in the talks was painfully slow at best and faced obstructions from every direction. Major recorded one meeting with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) – an even less cooperative organisation than the Unionists – in which the two men sat chanting over and over in unison: ‘The people of Northern Ireland alone. The people of Northern Ireland alone.’ In a 1995 radio interview, John Bruton, who had succeeded Reynolds as Taoiseach, expressed his own impatience: ‘I’m sick of answering questions about the fucking peace process.’

Nonetheless, the number of deaths fell that year to just nine, the lowest toll since the commencement of the conflict, and John Cole, the Belfast-born former political editor of the BBC, was cautiously optimistic about the government’s policy. ‘At worst, it has saved lives,’ he wrote, ‘and made the existences of ordinary people in Northern Ireland more tolerable. At best, peace becomes a habit which it is too difficult for either set of paramilitaries to break.’ In February 1996, however, it was broken, when the IRA called off their ceasefire, blaming a lack of progress in the talks. A bomb in Canary Wharf, London, killed two people, and later that year an attack on Manchester, the biggest bomb detonated in mainland Britain since the war, injured over a hundred. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, the annual march by the Portadown Orange Lodge – the route of which went through Catholic residential areas – descended into serious rioting. Clearly no further advance was likely before the forthcoming general election.

Although Major left office without achieving the settlement for which he had worked, he did leave a legacy on which his successor could build. The prospect of peace existed where it had previously been absent; all sides had – to varying degrees – shown a willingness to work for the future; and the assistance of America, in the shape of Bill Clinton, had been successfully solicited. The principle of consent had been established, and a genuinely bipartisan approach had been adopted by the Tories and Labour. Indeed it was one of the few areas in which Major could find anything positive to say about Tony Blair. ‘I could not have asked for more consistent and honest backing,’ he wrote, adding that, as prime minister, Blair had the benefit of a fresh start: ‘he was also unencumbered by the baggage one collects in years of negotiation, and was therefore better able to show tactical flexibility.’

Blair had other advantages too. On a personal level, he managed to bridge the sectarian divide, with a grandfather who had been a Grand Master of an Orange Order lodge and a wife who was a Liverpudlian Catholic of Irish descent, while politically he was the recipient in Northern Ireland of the same wave of goodwill that had greeted him elsewhere in Britain. Within weeks of his election, the IRA ceasefire had been reinstated and a new body – the awkwardly named Independent International Commission on Decommissioning – had been set up to pursue the goal of putting terrorist weapons beyond use. In October 1997 he went a stage further than Major and met the Sinn Fein MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. On a subsequent walkabout in a Protestant area, he was besieged by people waving rubber gloves at him, a symbol intended to suggest that he should have worn protective clothing when shaking hands with men of violence.

Like Major, Blair threw himself wholeheartedly into the peace process, taking the risk that he might squander political capital on an enterprise that was far from guaranteed of success. ‘I was putting my whole prime ministerial authority on the line for a deal,’ he was later to write. Many of the characteristics that distinguished Major – a firm negotiating style combined with a desire to find common ground and an ability to make people feel that he was on their side – were shared by Blair and were nowhere employed more effectively than in Northern Ireland. Equally impressive were the contributions of some of his inner circle: Jonathan Powell proved a reassuring figure for Unionists, while Alastair Campbell’s presence kept the local media on board.

And then there was Mo Mowlam, the new Northern Ireland secretary. During the general election campaign, she had faced some abusive reporting that centred on her weight (she was ‘losing the battle of the bulge’, jibed the Daily Mail) and had responded by going public with the fact that she had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour; the treatment had included a course of steroids – hence the weight gain – and radiotherapy, the resultant hair loss meaning that Mowlam was obliged to wear a wig. The huge wave of public support that naturally followed her revelation carried over into her government appointment, and when she visited Belfast two days after the election, she was already being acclaimed by crowds as the human face of politics.

Her informal style – she would frequently take the wig off during meetings – and her direct language proved particularly successful in her dealings with Sinn Fein. ‘I am not in favour of a British prime minister appointing a secretary of state for Northern Ireland,’ commented Martin McGuinness, ‘but Mo Mowlam must stay. She is really good.’ She proved less popular with the Unionists. She was ‘awful’, said Ken Maginnis, ‘she didn’t understand’. Indeed it probably wasn’t wise to tell Ian Paisley to ‘fuck off’, but she was articulating a sentiment that many millions of Britons had felt over the decades. Even so, she earned respect for her courage with an early visit to the Maze prison to talk to convicted terrorists from both sides of the divide, an initiative that paid dividends when the prisoners changed their position and came out in support of negotiations.

In April 1998 the various negotiating parties convened at Stormont Castle for what was hoped would be the final push to reach agreement on the future of the province. ‘This is no time for soundbites,’ Blair told the media, as he arrived. ‘But I feel the hand of history on our shoulders.’ Even he recognised how ridiculous those comments were, but they weren’t entirely mistaken. Out of those talks, over the course of several days and nights, came the Belfast Agreement, signed on Good Friday, which laid out the terms on which Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would proceed to a lasting settlement, establishing the framework for the creation of a Northern Ireland Assembly and an executive that would be comprised of representatives from both communities. It was an extraordinary moment in British and Irish history, and moved even the most cynical. ‘I felt really quite emotional,’ Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary. ‘I could see in some of the NI hacks too a real deep emotion, and a desire for this to be true. I actually felt like crying.’ Many did.

It hadn’t been a straightforward process, and absurdities continued to manifest themselves. At the last minute it seemed as though negotiations might break down on the issue of language. Irish Gaelic was to be recognised as an official minority language, but the Unionists then declared that they required equal provision for Ullans, sometimes known as Ulster Scots, a dialect that just 2 per cent of Ulster’s population were said to speak. Perhaps it could all be included under the heading of Celtic languages, suggested Alastair Campbell, at which the Unionist leader, David Trimble, was outraged: ‘Ullans is not a Celtic tongue.’

The Agreement had also to be ratified by referendums held on both sides of the border in 1998. While it was carried overwhelmingly in the South, some doubt remained about whether the Protestant community in the North would come out in support, particularly since there was dissent in Unionist ranks, with Ian Paisley’s DUP refusing to have any part of the deal. Blair again demonstrated just how convincing a campaigner he could be, making several trips to the province, accompanied at various points by John Major and William Hague, that helped swing the vote so that both communities voted in favour.

To celebrate what Mowlam called ‘a new period in Northern Ireland history and a new millennium’, a concert was staged in the grounds of Stormont Castle by the newly knighted Elton John, New Labour’s favourite rock star ever since the funeral of Diana. A crowd of 15,000 people, both Unionists and nationalists, came together in a spirit of hope that normality was returning to the province, though a small demonstration was staged outside by the DUP.

There were also some on the Catholic side who disagreed in principle with any negotiation with the British government, and in August 1998 a splinter group calling themselves the Real IRA exploded a bomb in Omagh that caused the greatest loss of life of any terrorist incident in the history of the Troubles. Twenty-nine people were killed and hundreds more injured, provoking such a wave of revulsion that, inadvertently, the attack actually assisted the peace process; some of the smaller terrorist groups took the opportunity to announce their own ceasefires.

The Omagh bombing also revealed the less statesmanlike side of New Labour. Parliament was hurriedly recalled and sat through the night to pass emergency anti-terrorism legislation that allowed the financial assets of terrorist groups to be seized. Membership of named terrorist organisations, specifically the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Loyalist Volunteer Force, was made punishable by ten years’ imprisonment; other terrorist groups, those who had signed up to the peace process, were not included. Some MPs and many in the House of Lords objected to the way that legislation was rushed through, without even any discussion in cabinet, noting that the original proposals had allowed for someone to be convicted of being a member of a prohibited group simply on the word of a senior police officer; this at least was amended in the actual legislation. David Blunkett’s conclusion that ‘making at least some gesture in respect of the horror of Omagh is politically understandable’, merely illustrated the complaint already being widely aired that, for New Labour, legislation often seemed to be more about gestures than reality.

There was, however, a more worryingly illiberal attitude at work as well, which ran counter to the agenda of campaigners in organisations like Charter 88. With the reduced threat of terrorism originating in Northern Ireland, the existing emergency legislation was replaced in the Terrorism Act of 2000 by new permanent laws, which were more draconian than anything that had preceded them. The definition of terrorism was broadened to include damage caused to property ‘for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause’, thereby ensuring that direct action as practised by, say, animal rights campaigners, hunt saboteurs or protestors against genetically modified crops was now officially classed as terrorism. The Act also extended the period of time that a suspect could be held without charge, gave the police substantial new powers to stop and search, and created a new offence of possession of information ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. As Tony Benn pointed out: ‘we are handing over the most repressive powers ever to a future government, which will say they were introduced by the Labour government.’ More such laws were to be passed in the new century.

Meanwhile, Mo Mowlam was removed from her job in October 1999 to facilitate the return to cabinet of Peter Mandelson. He proved to be a strong replacement (‘At least when we talk to Mandelson we know we’re talking to Blair,’ observed a senior Sinn Fein member), but his reappearance just ten months after his enforced resignation seemed a little hasty, and there was considerable disquiet at the whispering campaign against Mowlam that led up to, and continued beyond, her departure from the Northern Ireland office. She had become the most popular politician in the country and, whether rightly or wrongly, some in the Blair camp were believed to be motivated by petty jealousy. A brief attempt was made to parachute her in as Labour’s mayoral candidate for London, once it became clear that Frank Dobson was no match for Livingstone, but she resisted the offer; it was ‘a shitty job’, she explained, and she had no intention of taking it. Instead she was hidden from view as the minister for the cabinet office.

‘She is fed up with being bad-mouthed and done over and resents it bitterly,’ noted Blunkett. ‘She thinks it is because they want to cut her down to size and make sure that she doesn’t become any sort of threat, but I think it’s because there is a recognition that she is becoming more ill and less reliable by the day.’ Even if he were right, Mowlam’s treatment left a sour taste after the euphoria of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Agreement was not the end of the peace process by any measure, and the continued existence of IRA weaponry in particular remained a stumbling block to implementation of the deal. Nearly a decade passed before the power-sharing executive finally found a sustainable form, by which time it was headed by the unlikely alliance of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. The divisions between the two communities, notably in the area of education, would take even longer to heal. But it was a remarkable achievement to have got so far at all, and to have created the conditions where normality might return. In 1998 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two key architects of the Agreement, John Hume of the SDLP and David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party, for putting aside centuries-old differences. It was also a tribute to John Major and Tony Blair, both of whom could legitimately point to the peace process as their most significant political contribution to the nation. It had brought out the best in both men and each had helped to make history.

Unlike the other exercises in passing power from Westminster, this was embraced in a genuine spirit of decentralisation. It helped, of course, that the major Westminster parties were absent from the province, but more importantly, this was something that really mattered; the turnout in the Northern Ireland referendum was over 80 per cent, considerably higher than it had been in those held in Scotland, Wales or London. There truly was a sense of a new day dawning. ‘People did things to each other and to themselves that now we can only look on with a sense of astonishment,’ wrote Blair in his memoirs. ‘For decades, such barbaric atavism defined Northern Ireland.’ To have changed that was the high point of the 1990s.