POLITICS
Mr Major rushes in where Lloyd George feared to tread
SIMON HEFFER
It is not usual for the Prime Minister's speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet to be preceded by a full consultation of Mr Jim Molyneaux, the leader of the Official Ulster Unionists. However, this year it was. Mr Major used the speech to invite Sinn Fein to renounce violence and come to the conference table. He did so with the full support of Mr Molyneaux, though Mr Molyneaux seemed not to have let some of his red-faced colleagues into the secret. The Unionists, as is well known, are not normally keen for bygones to be bygones where Sinn Fein are concerned. Yet Mr Molyneaux had no public reaction to make to Mr Major's words. 'Whatever it looked as though the Prime Minister was trying to achieve,' a prominent Tory told me, 'things are not quite as they seem.
Mr Major has been under pressure from two sides to get something done about Ulster. First, the European Community is becoming increasingly distressed about this murderous guerrilla war being conducted on the borders of two of its member states. Second, as Lady Thatcher confirms in her memoirs, and as Mr Enoch Powell has been saying (to howls of derision) for many years, the Americans, too, want something done. Not long ago, the American govern- ment refused an entry visa to Mr Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein and sometime IRA pall-bearer. This caused dif- ficulties for President Clinton, who had to calm the nerves of (among others) soon-to- be-ex-Mayor Dinkins of New York. Then, last weekend, arrests were made in a rob- bery case, the proceeds of which crime were said to have gone to Noraid, the IRA's American paymasters. But in return for all this politically incorrect behaviour, Mr Clinton, too, expected progress.
Mr Major's style is by nature conciliatory, but even these incentives to conciliation might not by themselves have been enough. Two further factors, though, helped bring about this week's developments. The first is that Mr Major knows how much he relies on the support of the nine Official Union- ists to help him get measures through the Commons until the next election. Hence, he must be seen to take an active interest in the Ulster question, and preferably one that coincides with Mr Molyneaux's. The second is that Mr Major — to give him credit — genuinely wants to solve a prob- lem that proved insoluble to Gladstone, Lloyd George and Thatcher before him.
`He's handling it very well,' says a whip. `It needs a whip-like mentality to do it. If anyone can pull it off, he can.' But what is `it'? And how does 'it' fit in to the matter of Mr Molyneaux being content with Mr Major's overtures to Sinn Fein, overtures that sent enraged Unionists spluttering to microphones on Tuesday morning?
`I've never seen Jim so confident,' says one of Mr Molyneaux's friends. 'He really is in charge of this, because the Govern- ment needs the Unionists' votes so much.' So what are he and Mr Major up to? The Prime Minister's offer on Monday did enough to propitiate those forces in Europe and America about which the For- eign Office is so concerned. However, the pressure on Sinn Fein to respond to his offer can only help the Unionists, which is why Mr Molyneaux is so happy with the line being taken. Even if some of Sinn Fein's operatives feel pacific — as Mr Adams seemed to be when he entered into talks with John Hume earlier this year the movement's militants will not accept a cease-fire. When his offer is repudiated, Mr Major can at least say he has acted in good faith. As a minister put it to me: 'He can say, look, I've gone as far as I can go. I've told Sinn Fein they can take their place as a constitutional party. They've refused. So it's forward with the Unionists.'
Mr Molyneaux's confidence stems from his belief that this is exactly what will hap- pen. He knows how Sinn Fein operate, and he cannot, according to friends, see them falling for this one. Mr Major, having shown his desire for peace, and having been rebuffed, can then formalise a deal with the Unionists, granting them conces- sions about the government of Ulster. Each party can keep the other happy, at least up until the next election, with honour (loosely defined) satisfied on all sides.
And, if Sinn Fein did try to tempt the Government into something offensive to the Unionists, Mr Molyneaux has the weapon of withdrawing his nine vital votes from the Government lobby. He should also secure his Select Committee — it is assumed he will chair it — on Northern Ire- land, which will prevent the civil servants of the Northern Ireland Office conducting discussions with inimical groups like Sinn Fein without being questioned on them in a parliamentary forum. There is talk of Sinn Fein publishing a policy document outlin- ing, at last, the hitherto secret proposals that arose out of the Hume-Adams talks. `The proposals aren't really secret at all,' a Unionist told me. 'They're basically about joint sovereignty, and that's not on. Even if Major didn't depend on us to keep him afloat, he couldn't get that past the Conser- vative Party.'
Yet this brings us to the ill-thought-out aspect of Mr Major's gamble. If sovereignty is not negotiable, what is he expecting to talk about at that mythical time when the IRA drop off their armalites in bins outside RUC stations, and Sinn Fein go to the con- ference table? Because if there is no ele- ment of sovereignty on offer, that confer- ence — or at least Sinn Fein's participation in it — would be rather short. He would then be faced again with the only realistic options he and his predecessors have been faced with when dealing with the IRA: kill or be killed, surrender or slaughter.
Some Tories are furious about Mr Major's overtures to Sinn Fein. Renounc- ing violence would not, in their view, wipe the slate clean of the murders, maimings and other atrocities perpetrated since 1969. There is, they argue, no comparison between dealing with the likes of Mr Adams, who has a constitutional option open to him but chooses not to use it, and dealing with former terrorists like Nelson Mandela, who had no such option. To many in the Tory party Sinn Fein are crimi- nals, and nothing they can say or do should excuse them of the need to be treated like criminals when and if there is evidence against them. Mr Major, however cynically, is holding out to them the offer of special treatment if they promise to play by his rules; there are probably quite a few other criminals in the United Kingdom who would welcome such an opportunity.
This semi-moral offer is not really a gam- ble for Mr Major. If he fails, he will be in good company. Few would hold it against him. Indeed, there is so much else already held against him that Ulster, about which most people could not care less, will hardly merit a look-in. Yet, if he did end the vio- lence in Ulster without surrendering sove- reignty, his place in history would be safe. However, whether securing a place in history is enough to win re-election — and several of his predecessors will have interesting views on that — only the voters can decide.
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