16: Tony Blair: Taking insults, swallowing pride, and negotiating with both sides

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2:10Welcome to The Restless Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. We're about to interview Tony Blair and four listeners who are not absolutely on top of the Northern Ireland peace process. We're going to have a very, very intense half-hour conversation, which I think people are going to love, but just a very, very quick introduction to some of the terms that we're going to be looking at. So essentially, Northern Ireland exploded at the end of the 1960s, and it exploded in a conflict between the Unionist community, predominantly Protestant, very attached to the United Kingdom, who comprised about two-thirds the population in Northern Ireland, and the Republican community, predominantly Catholic, who comprised about one-third of the population or none.

2:59And it had been a trouble that had been brewing in increasing amounts since the 1930s. And a lot of it initially was about civil rights. The Republican Catholic community felt discriminated against in terms of housing, in terms of voting in local council elections, in terms of employment. And above all, they didn't have proper participation in government. The place was run by unionists, the police, the judiciary, the members of parliament, the government. And in this brief conversation with Tony Blair, we're going to go through his early memories of this. Tony Blair was born in 1953. And as he's going to explain, he came from a family which had connections back to Ireland, connections back to the Orange Order.

3:43And the Orange Order was the fundamental, I suppose, spiritual heart of unionism. It was a movement very closely connected to the unionist parties that celebrated Protestant victories in the late 17th century that led marches through streets that had a network of orders and lodges throughout Northern Ireland. And he's going to talk a little bit about that, how his grandmother came from that tradition. He's going to talk about how in the 1960s, the Unionists, which had had a stranglehold on Northern Irish politics and which had been dominated by the kind of people that wind up Alastair. So the leader in the 1960s was a classic Old Etonian Irish guards captain.

4:25They get everywhere. They get absolutely everywhere. Captain O 'Neill had tried to do an opening up. He'd tried to compromise. This was the era of Kennedy and Wilson. He was trying to bring employment and new jobs. He was talking about delivering civil rights to the nationalist community. And as often happens with a revolution, those first moves towards reform, instead of improving the situation, in fact, accelerated the drive towards conflict. And by the end of the 1960s, real extreme violent conflict into which the British Army was dragged in the late 1960s, and increasingly the Republican community, some of whom were grateful when the British Army initially arrived, began to see them as much too closely connected with unionism as prejudiced against the Republican cause.

5:15And as part of defending those communities and increasingly defending the Catholic nationalist cause, the re-emergence as a real force of a group called the IRA. Terrorist force that ultimately is letting off bombs in Canary Wharf, attacking Downing Street in the mainland of the United Kingdom, killing army officers, killing police officers. And on the other side, terrorists on the unionist side, killing Catholics, mounting attacks, so that by the end of the period, over three and a half thousand people have been killed and 50 ,000 injured. The streets through the 1970s, unrecognizable horrors of piled barricades and buses and no-go areas.

5:58And my father was involved in this in the British government with Edward Heath in the early 1970s. But I joined the Black Watch in 1991, and the Black Watch Scottish Regiment had been in and out of Ireland continually through the 70s and 80s. I remember very, very difficult conversations with soldiers who had pictures of the Red Hand of Ulster up in their barrack rooms and were much too closely connected to the Unionist communities. many of our soldiers remembered people being killed had been involved in very violent confrontation so that was part of my early life as a as a young army officer aged 18 and tony blair will take us through that whole period and during this interview he will touch on o 'neill the old eutonian he'll touch on the emergence of ian pacey this radical figure in the 1960s, Presbyterian clergyman who becomes the real representative of the hardline unionist position against any form of compromise, the emergence of David Trimble, who represents the more moderate wing of unionism, and finally bringing in these iconic figures of the Republican nationalist movement connected to Sinn Féin and the IRA, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who eventually participate in the Good Friday Agreement.

7:18And by, as he says, the mid-2000s, a situation where Martin McGinnis and Ian Pacey are sitting down on a sofa. And in the middle of all of this is you, Alistair, and Tony Blair. And I think an opportunity to hear Tony think very, very creatively and thoughtfully about how a prime minister and a politician deals with this situation. So here we go. Here's our interview about the Northern Ireland peace process with Tony Blair.

7:47Welcome to The Restless Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alex Campbell. And we're very, very lucky today because we are in Belfast and we have as our guest, Tony Blair. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. And I just wanted to start with a sense of how you came to understand this conflict. I was reading an article which appeared in the Jordan Times. You may not have written it exclusively for the jordan times but that's where i read read your article this is an article supposed to be by by me was written by you i read it last week and in it you had a rather lovely line you said um participants in the conflict often felt that the problem with outsiders is they didn't understand all the history and you said sometimes that's quite important to have outsiders who don't understand everything and it's one of the ways to make progress and i did write that by the way you did write that now i remember i want to just follow up on that and see if i can get you to be because we think a lot about politicians and statesmen honest and open about what in retrospect you didn't really understand if we go back to before becoming prime minister so maybe the early 90s what didn't you understand about northern island that you had to learn when you were really getting into it i think the most important thing was was the the depth of the mistrust that each side had its narrative in which the other side was the aggressor and one of the most important things about a peace process is you get both sides to understand, even if they don't share or fully empathize with the other side's pain.

9:14And one of the things that we did that was really important, I don't think we'd ever got this peace process off the ground, if I hadn't been prepared to sit down with Jerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. And obviously, you know, in the 1980s, we were in the UK, for example, Adams wasn't allowed to appear on our television screens. It was actually was blocked. And it was when we decided that we would have the meeting with him and Martin McGinnis. I mean, obviously, there were a lot of people who were very shocked by this. And a lot of people appalled by it, because these were people responsible for conducting the IRA campaign.

9:52And so I think if we hadn't done that, though, we would never have got them to understand that we were prepared to listen to their narrative, even if we didn't agree with it, which we didn't, but we were prepared to listen to it. I do remember you read an awful lot. You'd go away on holiday and you'd come back and have read Gladstone and trying to get the thing sorted. Related to that, your family history, just tell us a little bit about your family history insofar as it relates to Ireland. So my mother was brought up in Donegal. Her father was a Protestant, but living in the South. Her mother, my grandmother, was staunchly orange.

10:32And I always remember my grandmother saying to me, this is in the 1960s. Son, there's a great savior that's arisen in Northern Ireland, and his name is Ian Paisley. And she was a huge fan of his, which I told Ian Paisley about later. And, you know, so I totally got the unionist side of it. And, you know, one of the reasons, I guess, which did play a part of my own interest in trying to solve the situation in Northern Ireland, I remember very vividly at the end of the 1960s, when the tone of the correspondence that we would have with our relatives in Ireland changed from, you know, everyone gets along to these people are our enemy.

11:16And it made a big impact on me because I was just, I was a teenager at the time. One of the figures that I'm fascinated by is Captain O 'Neill, who was the leader in 63 onwards. And he often looks in retrospect as though he was trying to do the right thing. So Unionist leader making gentle moves towards trying to include the nationalist community, address civil rights. And yet it was under his watch that actually everything went terribly wrong. And the Unionists split. And as you say, Ian Pacey ends up representing a radical faction. Do you ever think about him in terms of lessons for politicians about the sort of contrast between policies that seemed on the surface right, but an outcome which was completely catastrophic?

11:57Yeah, 100%. I mean, there are a lot of lessons in political leadership in this, and in particular, with the elements of unionism that came to be represented by David Trimble, who, you know, to his own political and personal cost, really shifted unionism in favor of the Good Friday Agreement. and and all the way through you had people on both sides i mean john hume was a classic case on the nationalist side i mean john was the politician that that understood that in the end you had to accommodate republicanism even if you were fighting it at the same time and you know the the interesting thing about all of those all of the people who made a difference on the good friday agreement all of them were prepared to say no to their own supporters which i always think is the big test of leadership george mitchell when he spoke at the start of the 25th anniversary event at Queen's University of Belfast said that without John Hume, there would have been no peace process.

12:45And without David Trimble, there would have been no peace agreement. Of all the different characters that were involved, would you accept that David Trimble had the most difficult job, the most pressured position? I think so, probably, because it would have been so easy for him to have been hostile. And had he been hostile, by the way, probably a section of the Conservative Party in the uk would have gone with him uh but you know jerry adams and martin mcginnis they also as they used to say to me if we get this wrong we're it's our lives are at stake and i think for for them also i mean they they were having to pull republicanism away from a position that said you can never trust the brits you can never trust the unionists and you know i i hear this a lot when you see disputes around the world i mean it's very although the context is very different even in the israeli Palestinian context you hear the same two things you hear first of all no one understands this conflict like we do and we understand the other side better than they understand themselves neither of which turns out to be true really and secondly that the other side is never going to change and your naivety and believing that they will or that they will in some way accommodate us is is just is just false so why did they why do you think David Trimble did ultimately make the decision that he made to go with it, knowing probably that it would lead to his own political decline.

14:09Because I think that he could see that without it, Northern Ireland was just going to be stuck in the past. And, you know, for all the problems, this is why the interesting thing, when you look at Northern Ireland today, and you see, for example, how the technology sector has developed here, Belfast is actually a very thriving European city, the economy's doubled in the last 25 years um you know people come and invest here it's i think after london was it the second fastest growing region of the uk i mean david for all and you you and i know this well because you were intimately involved alison and all these negotiations david could be a very difficult person to deal with but he understood that and also i i'm struck rereading it how he had to make some very cunning difficult and pretty controversial political decisions i remember there's a moment just after you came in 97 98, where he walks into a big meeting, accompanied by two unionists who've been convicted of terrorist murder attacks on either side of him to reassure the unionist community that he isn't selling out.

15:12And I guess all these people were having to do that kind of stuff all the time. None of them were quite the sort of pure vision we have of Nelson Mandela that they could be saintly all the time, they had to be perpetually signaling to their more radical supporters that they weren't selling them out. Yeah, for sure. And all of these things are always their journeys of imperfection in many ways. And actually, because I knew him quite well, Mandela would tell you a similar types of situation that he'd been in. Yeah, David Trimble was doing that. You remember, Alistair, when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness every so often, they would ask us to see what was called a wider group of people, pretty obviously, the people who were actually involved in the violence.

15:55And they would come in. And if you remember, Gerry and Martin would really talk at us, but in a sense for the benefit of those other people, describing the iniquities of the British government and what needed to be put right and so on and so forth. And then they're all trooped back out again. I remember when four of them knocked on the door to ask whether I would care to clarify the briefing I'd just done. Would you care to clarify? Which I duly do. But the interesting thing is that, you see, that's the other thing about a process like this, which is that you have to end up being able to have with the participants what I call a strategic conversation.

16:33In other words, and that requires them, by the way, to have the intelligence and the farsightedness to have such a conversation. But the strategic conversation is to say, look, I understand what you've got to do tactically, but here is the biggest strategic objective. Now, how do we get there? So I would often get briefings from the UK intelligence services that would say to me, look, you know, we've picked up, you know, the Jerry Adams, Martin McGinnis and other people from the leadership of Shin Thane are saying to their own supporters, look, this is, you know, this is a sense of tactical move.

17:07You know, don't worry. You know, we're still on the same cause and so on. And they would say to me, that's evidence that they're not sincere. And I would say to them, I don't think it is. I think it's precisely the opposite. I think it's evidence that they're saying what they need to say to their support whilst they're still moving in our direction. But I only knew they were moving in our direction because I was having that direct conversation with them. So you had a direct understanding of this because you understood even as Labour leader how important it is dealing with your supporters, your party, saying no to people.

17:36You'd had to do that over Clause 4 and other things. But the person I find most mysterious in this is Ian Paisley because he had made his political career as the arch populist. He destroyed other unionist leaders. He'd been always on the most radical, uncompromising, aggressive end of things through the late 60s, 70s, 80s. He'd understood that there's no such thing as bad publicity. And yet somehow at the end, in the 2000s, he actually joins the government and he starts talking about peace. How on earth do you understand that evolution? Well, I think in his case, actually, it's a more simple thing.

18:12And he explained it to me. He said to me, this was around about 2006 or early 2007. And when we did the Good Friday Agreement, he had been literally outside and his people with placards saying the deadline. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, saying betrayal, essentially. But he said to me then, he said, I've been, you know, in my community, I've been listening to people. And I think it's time to move. And it was very I was quite taken aback. Now, the truth is, even then, by the way, he would have found support if he said, I'm not moving. You know, I'm going to stand up for what we really believe, et cetera, et cetera.

18:49He could have he could have done that. So he obviously I think to a degree he he mellowed somewhat. But but but also, again, we'd created a process in which there was a perpetual conversation. So he didn't feel there wasn't any time when he couldn't come in and say that. I mean, occasionally he would be pretty insulting about us in public. And I used to say to my own folk, it doesn't matter. I don't care. You know, just when we're together, I'll find out what he really thinks. His son, Ian Paisley Jr., dearer was at last night. He reminded me of when, I think you were first meeting with Paisley in Stormont, and Ian Paisley Jr.

19:26was with him. And Paisley came in and read you the riotat for about 15 minutes and quoted various passages of the Bible at you and basically told you what a terrible human being you were and you were condemned, et cetera. and then waited for you to reply. And as you started to reply, the fire alarm went off, to which you jumped up and said, what's that? Ian Paisley said, it's the lie detector. Yeah. Which did happen. But you developed a sort of, I think, quite a strange fondness for Ian Paisley, given that through the process he had given you a lot of difficulty. Yeah, yeah. I think he called my wife at one stage a painter Jezebel.

20:05which i said i reckon that's quite a compliment um yeah but because he i understood where where where he was coming from and you know unionism is always important to under to to understand it it came from a profound sense that really this is the thing with unionism that it's part of the uk but it's still immensely distrustful of all the institutions of the uk and in particular the British government. And a Tory government or a Labour government, by the way, in that sense, they don't discriminate. And I think that, you know, with Ian, what happened in the end was that, and he was a religious man.

20:42I mean, you know, a lot of people would say, oh, it was a front or something. It wasn't. He was a deeply religious man. He came to the conclusion in the end that this was the right thing to do. When he was, I mean, was it helpful dealing with people who used a lot of religious rhetoric, that you were more comfortable in your faith, that you understood biblical references? Was that something that you could actually use in negotiating? Yeah, you had to be careful with it, though. There was one time when I remember Ian Paisley actually asking me, do you think this is the will of God that I do this thing?

21:16And I thought about it for a moment, and I said, I can't really say that. And I think that was important, because I think if I'd said yes, no, I'm sure, really.

21:29just hang on a minute i'll get clarification uh no i think he would have he would have you say yeah you had to be careful with it but martin mcginnis by the way was also a someone who's of the catholic faith would go to mass and i think that because the the oddest couple in the whole show was really paisley and mcginnis sitting together i mean that was If you told me when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s and 90s, if you told me that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley would be sitting together on the same sofa, swapping jokes with each other, I would literally say, well, it's never ever going to happen.

22:06That is a wild and amusing fantasy. Tony, Rory, we'll take a quick break and back in a minute. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. In America, half of every dollar spent on brand medicines goes to entities who don't make them.

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24:15One thing that I'd love to get a sense of for you as a very practiced communicator, how do you then and now deal with the issue of the victims? Because there is a risk always that that this is very triumphalist, that we're celebrating all the achievements in the piece. How do you find the language to acknowledge victims? How would you talk about that in this context? Yeah, it's a very good question, and it's a constant problem, because the truth is when you're celebrating something,

24:48it's easy to have that come across to the people who were the victims of these troubles, and there were thousands and thousands of them as completely insensitive. and I always found with the families of the victims that they divided into two categories. Those who simply couldn't forgive what we were doing, you're literally sitting down with my child's murderers, and others who would say, I don't like what you're doing, but if you can tell me that by doing this you'll stop other families being in the same position that we're in, then okay, you go and do it, but make sure you do it properly. I went to see the play the other day, Agreement, which sort of told the last few days of the talk.

25:23So I know it's difficult to order them because they all came together, but what would you define as the most difficult issues towards the end out of that list of policing decommissioning uh but where would you sort of put the hierarchy of difficulties and just tell us a little bit i think we'll be interested in this what you were saying to which parties about prisoner release and how you were trying to get them to a position that they could all live with and did you have to do what's become known as a bit of constructive ambiguity to get that over the line well you had to yeah you had to be pretty pretty tactically cute at some points for sure i think prisoners was the most difficult thing and that's back to your point about the victims and and we we actually underestimated that because there had been some release of prisoners before i think in the 1970s 1980s um when when things to move forward at that time but then it all stopped again and and so releasing the prisoners naturally when the prisoners came out and i remember they they the prisoners first prisoners getting released this was before the referendum um to to make the agreement and it was just that was a bad moment because the ira were obviously celebrating their release and the victims felt completely traumatized by the fact that here were these people now greeted as heroes who'd killed their loved ones so that that was the most difficult thing but it's the one thing in the in the course of the agreement i mean everything was difficult policing criminal justice all of it was difficult and all of it was difficult because you have to remember once you make a formal agreement that's not the end of it because that's the technical or legal part of the piece the the spirit part of the piece has to come later that's about people getting rid of the mistrust and the dislike and the hatred and the sectarianism that all takes a long long time and we're still dealing with that today and so in in anything that emotionally puts the pain of it back right in front of people which the release of prisoners did was that that that was the most difficult thing very very briefly because you don't want to get stuck on this but you you went from this extraordinary achievement to be the Middle East peace envoy.

27:43And I'd be interested in whether you took lessons from that and what works and what didn't work. And what did you learn in the process of going from one peace negotiation to another about why this works in Israel, Palestine didn't? Yeah, so I was involved in, in fact, still am in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And I have very clear views. I mean, there's a whole other broadcast as to what would work and and what hasn't worked and why it hasn't worked. But the things that were absolutely necessary for any peace process to work is first of all, you have an agreement that people consider fair, right?

28:19So both sides, it's an actual, there's an intellectual part to this and that agreement has to be fair. But secondly, you've got to have leaders on both sides who've decided they really want to make peace and that they're prepared to take risks for it. And then thirdly, you've got to then, And because normally these peace processes involve external players, the external players have got to keep working at it the whole time. And, you know, you've got to be able to then just to, you know, when you hit the obstacles, because how many obstacles do we hit after the Good Friday Agreement? It was nine years of the additional negotiation.

28:54And I often think had there been maybe a change of government in that period, it would have been much, much more difficult. Either side of the Ireland or UK. Yeah, absolutely. So we were very, very lucky that we had that stability. But the single biggest difference is that you had a politics on both sides in Northern Ireland, which decided we're exhausted with this conflict. We want to make peace. And you had the leaders with the intelligence to work out how to do it. And I'm afraid that is where in the Middle East case, it's, well, I could explain all the reasons, but those elements that I've been describing, they're just not present.

29:35But also, if we bring it back to Northern Ireland now, the situation now, the truth is we're all here celebrating this quarter century achievement, but the institutions aren't up. Rishi Sunak has brought forward his Windsor framework, which the DUP is still talking about, and it kind of feels stuck again. Now, people aren't killing each other, but in terms of the process, it feels stuck. So what would you think could be done, should be done now to try to get it moving? You've got to sit down and work it out. You remember, we had these problems constantly. I mean, I bumped into General de Chasteland last night, who was the Canadian general we brought in to do the decommissioning of the IRO weapons, which is an inordinately difficult thing, and which was, oh my God, the trouble we had over it.