POLITICS
The worst threat of all is the empty one
SIMON HEFFER
Because the Downing Street Accord you remember, the master plan to bring peace to the troubled island of Ireland looked from the start to be grounded in fantasy, it is hard to appreciate how deeply some intelligent Tory MPs were impressed by it. 'Don't be unfair. You should give him credit for this,' one of them told,me at the time, sticking up (almost unprecedentedly) for Mr Major. 'It really is a brave attempt by him to do something.'
Now those same MPs, as they see how much they, and perhaps the Prime Minister too, were taken in, are becoming angry. It was obvious to many, though perhaps not to Mr Major, that Sinn Fein were never going to play. The greatest achievement of the accord was the Prime Minister's success in convincing the Ulster Unionists not to repudiate it from the start; now, though, the Unionists are sunk in disillusion, angry that they, too, were persuaded to co-oper- ate with what many of them thought to be the appeasement of terrorists. A period of recrimination is now beginning.
Mr Major, badly in need of a publicity coup, overplayed his hand. Had Sinn Fein, in response to the accord last December, renounced the armed struggle, he would have seemed a great Prime Minister. Fleet Street would have been strewn with the corpses of pundits. So tired are British and Irish politicians after a quarter-century of terrorism that the will for the accord to suc- ceed was immense: so immense that it blinded normally realistic people to the unrealism of the Irish Republican Army giving up the murderous habits of several generations purely because a couple of politicians asked them to do so. Messrs Major and Reynolds thought they could call the terrorists' bluff. Instead, they have allowed the terrorists to call their bluff. Both leaders failed to understand that, when you recognise no civilised limits to your behaviour, you do not have to worry about offending public opinion.
At the cabinet meeting last week, one minister raised an apparently innocent, but explosive, question. If the accord was to make tactical sense, Messrs Major and Reynolds had to have a sanction prepared if the terrorists did not choose to play. What was that sanction? and when would it be used? By that afternoon Westminster was full with murmurings of agreement. An easy way to solve the problems of Ulster had been offered to the terrorists, and rejected. If Mr Major were not to endure a blow to his credibility, he had to devise and implement the alternative, hard, way.
Before more thought could be given to the question — Mr Major was immediately preoccupied with preparations for his visit to Washington to meet Gerry Adams's patron, President Clinton — the patience of the Official Unionists ran out. They felt the deadline offered to the terrorists for a decision should have been days rather than weeks. As it became months, with the British and Irish governments slowly realis- ing the embarrassing nature of the hole they had dug for themselves, the Unionists gave up. Mr Molyneaux, their leader, had always had trouble reining in his followers to buy the 'three-strand' approach to the Province's future. One strand was the British, the second the Northern Irish, input into the future of the Province. The third strand, which allowed the Irish gov- ernment a say (or, as the Unionists put it, a veto) was always unacceptable to them.
The Government's refusal to slam the door on the terrorists earlier, despite the games Sinn Fein were playing with Mr Major, left leadership in the matter up to the Unionists. Faced with open dissent from his party, prompted mainly by fear that Mr Paisley's Democratic Unionists were stealing support from them by their uncompromising line on the accord, Mr Molyneaux finally gave way. On Monday he announced that his party would have no more truck with 'three-strand' talks. This effectively means that the Unionists will have no more truck with talks about peace in Ulster, for the only talks available are those of the 'three-strand' variety. In an attempt to propitiate the Unionists, the Government hinted that the long-awaited Ulster Select Committee would be set up 'So you've been released back into the community . . soon. This will not, though, be enough.
Once the Eastleigh by-election is over the Government's majority in the Com- mons will be 15. The nine Official Unionist votes become ever more crucial to the Gov- ernment when it is trying to avoid defeats in the Commons. Thus, the Unionists are in a strong position to make demands. They announced on Monday that they want the Government to ignore Dublin and get on with governing Ulster properly; and this means an Assembly in the Province. 'Our AGM is on 19 March,' says a prominent Unionist. 'That's the time for us to push for an Assembly. We are in the process of toughening Jim [Molyneaux] up. He's been used by this Government and they've given him nothing in return. We want him to go in with the entire parliamentary party to see Major and tell him that unless there's an Assembly, he'll pull the plug.'
If Mr Molyneaux gets his Assembly — a decision that would not help the Major- Reynolds relationship — the Unionists would continue to support the Tories. If he does not, then the next time there is a close vote in the Commons — like on the Euro- pean Community Budget, to name one pos- sible source of contention — he will have to deliver on his threat to defeat the Govern- ment. 'I could live with a Labour govern- ment,' says a Unionist, looking ahead. 'After all, a Labour government has never said it had no strategic interest in Northern Ireland.' The Unionists' distaste for Labour that prompted them to support the Gov- ernment over Maastricht in last July's cru- cial votes stemmed from personal loathing of Mr Kevin Macnamara, Labour's nation- alist-inclined Ulster spokesman. 'If Labour win power, it will be by the narrowest mar- gin,' another Unionist told me, 'and they'll need us even more than the Tories do. Macnamara won't be Ulster Secretary in a Labour government.'
'Major's got to go in hard and placate the Unionists,' a Tory Privy Councillor told me after Monday's reopening of hostilities. 'Otherwise I can see us losing vote after vote.' Mr Major may just be realising that overselling the accord has caused him new trouble. He may be forced, for personal and political reasons, to start to govern Ulster as the Unionists would want. If he chooses to continue to appease nationalists instead, he will find it is not only the terror- ists who make life difficult.
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