Political commentary

Dr Paisley's laughter

Ferdinand Mount

They have taken up their seats early, in the front row of the upper side gallery. From there, they can glare down at the Prime Minister opposite and wink at the press gallery to their right. These days MPs rarely sit in and never speak from this gallery, although it counts as part of the House. Mr Paisley and his henchmen chat like a family of farmers in from the country for Sunday morning services; Peter Robinson, the fresh-faced whippersnapper barely turned 30. John McQuade, stone-faced and doddery, looking old enough to be his grandfather.

Down below, the tributes to the Rev Robert Bradford, the second MP to be murdered in this Parliament, proceed on their restrained way.

End of restraint. Mr Paisley rises and salutes the memory of 'a very great Ulsterman.' It was in my home that he made the decision. We who have been elected walk with death. Little did we think that he would be the first to go. Before Christmas there will be others. Tomorrow, the people of Northern Ireland, in a demonstration never before seen . . . '. The religious tope, the menacing prophecy, the homely detail, the promise of a huge turn-out — P. T. Barnum and Elmer Gantry live on.

End of mourning. Beginning of rough stuff. Mr Prior recites the story of the killings and then begins his low, sonorous appeal for calm. Paisley: Nonsense. Robinson: The blood of Ulster is on your hands, you are the guilty man. McQuade rises and roars on in a voice like an old chain saw about guilt and blood and dying.

Down below, the protests rise. The Speaker suspends the sitting for ten minutes. MPs begin to wander about the chamber. Mr Powell and the little band of official Unionists sit disconsolately, fearing that Mr Paisley is condemning the entire Loyalist population as alien savages in British eyes.

Up in the gallery Paisley chats to the other two. Then he begins to laugh, not hugely, but in the relaxed style of farmers leaning over a cattle pen on market day. He is having a good time and he doesn't care who knows it.

Then he gets bored of laughing. There are still a couple of minutes to fill before Mr Speaker suspends them. He spots Lord Gowrie sitting in the peers' gallery diagonally across from him. He points a huge finger: 'There he sits, Gowrie, the guilty man who wants union with the republic.' Lord Gowrie shakes his head and smiles. But we are all in it now. This is total theatre. The verbal restraints of parliamentary procedure, the ropes and carved wooden barriers dividing actors from spectators, all crumble under the assault. This is the Lamentable Tragedy of The Red Hand of Ulster, as performed by Mr Vincent Crummles and his troupe.

Names are named. But instead of tamely withdrawing from the chamber and taking their five-day suspension lying down, the three of them bellow No when Mr Pym, the Leader of the Commons, calls for the House to approve their suspension. Down below, the enraged MPs prepare to vote. Now Paisley leans over the side of the gallery and begins talking to reporters. Any moment he'll be having a press conference in our midst.

Then he leans over the railings and calls down affably to Mr Stan Orme, a former Labour Minister in Northern Ireland, 'tell 'em it's off, Stanley.' The vote is cancelled, because Paisley produces no tellers.

Still they won't leave. The Sergeant-atArms is ordered to remove them. Again there is a theatrical pause, while the Sergeant-at-Arms leaves the chamber and takes his sword up the stairs outside to reappear in the gallery. Even now Mr McQuade refused to follow Mr Paisley and Mr Robinson out of the gallery door. He is a dismal spectacle, the stubborn old man, a little confused, who won't be moved on.

Down below, the great mass of MPs have drifted over to the Government side of the House where they can look up and shout 'Get out! Get out!' All unconsciously, they are acting their parts to the letter.

How clearly they show their loathing not merely of Paisley and his cronies but of the whole incomprehensible business. Get out, go away, do not trouble us with your tired old quarrels. How can a man be laughing a minute after mourning his friend?

For a long time now, it has been clear that the British political elite has been Up to Something. They wish, in one way or another, to be rid of the problem of Northern Ireland. They would like to scuttle. They are undercover members of Troops Out. Yet there is a kind of un-serious petulance about the whole impulse — 'strategy' would imply a plotted sequence of logical steps which seems to be conspicuous by its absence.

To give a constitutional guarantee to the Unionists is at one stroke to destroy the whole idea. A guarantee really is a guarantee when it is not the guarantor but the guaranteed party — the loyalists — which has the power to enforce it.

I use the vague term of 'British political elite' to cover everyone involved from Mrs Thatcher downwards. To single out Lord Gowrie, say, would be grotesquely unfair. Junior ministers have no power to initiate policy. If the policy were practicable, my dear old friend would be more skilful than most at implementing it. But the policy is not practicable.

And in order to avoid considering the central contradiction in it, the elite has been forced to resort to all sorts of deceptive ai.d self-deceiving devices. The most bizarre was the plan to build up none other than Mr Paisley as the leader of Ulster who would, when granted plenipotentiary powers, immediately, by some obscure miraculous process, come to an amicable settlement with the Republic. What did the authors of that ,plan think of Monday's antics?

The rapprochement with the Republic, which is an essential ingredient of lasting peace in Ireland, is being misused for the same reason. Co-operation on nonconstitutional things — pipelines, ferries and voting rights — is being misrepresented both by Dr FitzGerald and the Loyalists as if it were something quite different.

Mr Paisley is probably the most widely disliked man in Great Britain. That is scarcely surprising. But we should remember that, long before Mr Paisley came into prominence, there was scarcely any greater sympathy on this side of the water for the respectable Unionism of Craigavon and Brookeborough. They represented an historical inheritance, the embarrassment of which was rendered tolerable only by obscurity and neglect.

If Mr Paisley returns from suspension and continues to manhandle Parliament, if he now succeeds in carrying out his threat to make Northern Ireland 'ungovernable', this is commonly said to be 'playing the IRA's game.' The Unionists' best hope of gaining a sympathetc hearing was thought to be that dignified parliamentary remonstration of which James Molyneaux, the leader of the official Unionists, was such a paragon. Yet Mr Molyneaux was an unsung paragon and now he too is talking of a 'Third Force' — within the law and yet somehow supplementary to the security forces, in other words a revival of the B-Specials. It is, alas, a logical progession. The success of the IRA in changing the direction of British government efforts does suggest that force is the only language the British understand.

And yet it seems to me that it would be a comparatively painless business to reorient British policy to regain some of the confidence of the Unionist majority without slowing or reversing the improvement in relations with the Republic.

Mrs Thatcher has made a start by publishing the results of the official studies. Her next step should be to expand on the consitutional guarantee to include an institutional guarantee; she should promise that each fresh arrangement between the UK and the Republic will take into account the interests and feelings of the majority.in Northern Ireland; that there will be no tiptoeing to Irish unity. Such a pledge not to play grandmother's footsteps with Unionist opinion would indeed change the underlying aim of British policy. But because that aim is both impractical and unspoken, there would be no loss of face in changing it.