20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists

27:52Small number of hauliers trying to blockade the fuel depot. It's because the price of fuel had gone up, because we had put tax up on fuel, you know, as part of environmental measures and tax raising measures and what have you. And we thought that the police would easily get this under control, because you wouldn't have thought a few hauliers would just be able to shut down all of the fuel terminals across the country. And I remember Tony went off on a regional tour and he said, if I have to come back for this, I'm going to really sack you. You just manage this and get rid of it. And so I thought, it's not going to be too hard.

28:19and we talked to the police and we talked to the people around the fuel depots. And as the clock ticked away, we had John Prescott there. And as the clock ticked away, things got worse and worse. And the police weren't able to open up the fuel terminals. And people started running out of fuel. We were actually, at the end of it, within hours of having to invoke Emergency Powers Act because there was no money in the cash points. Hospitals were running out of fuel and didn't have generators to back up. And we really thought we were in trouble. And then we managed to finally break it at the last moment.

28:48I remember Jeremy Haywood, who was our principal private secretary at the time, and I holed up in a little room in the cabinet office. And we got in all the number twos from all the oil companies. And we're all there just working the phones until we got this thing moving. How did you break it? In the end, I think it was the Exxon fuel terminal in Essex that finally the management managed to get some trucks out. And once that started, it fell. I'll tell you the other thing that happened though was that the the media which had been turning into particularly the wretched Daily Mail promoting panic buying and rather than explaining there was no need for it and I remember Alan Milburn coming over who was the health secretary and saying that if this carried on like this they wouldn't be able to run the health service and that once that fact was out there the mood sort of turned because the oil companies up to that point had been absolutely useless they had but the police had also been very strange about They could actually have easily opened up these terminals if they wanted to, and they chose not to.

29:43And there's one time that we fell behind the Tories in the opinion polls. It happened very, very quickly. And the one thing people expect is the government can run things properly. And if you start not being able to do that. Police is a very interesting thing, isn't it? Because obviously police are vital to so much, so rawly connected to the public. And a real challenge about how much political control there should be of the police or shouldn't be. And of course, we're talking here in Belfast, where the question of how much control the politicians had over the conservatory here was a very, very raw part of the troubles through the 60s, 70s, 80s and onwards.

30:19What was your sense of the way that politicians relate to the police? How easy would it be to reform? Let's say that people felt there were some fundamental problems in the metropolitan police. Corruption, discrimination, sexism. How would you set about fixing that with the way our government works? It's not easy because of this theory of independence of the police that we have, which is not true in all countries. But we want to have the police independent because we don't want them to act as instruments of government. And yet, as you say, here in Northern Ireland, they did act as instruments of government by trying to maintain the security situation.

30:52So working very closely with the army, the police were always in charge, always the first on a patrol, etc. etc so i think it is very there is a reason that the police have not been reformed is it's really difficult to do firstly the power of the fed is very very strong their power to resist change is very very strong and secondly the third thing the police union the police federation which is a very strong trade union indeed and most politicians don't want to take on the police in those terms so that makes it very difficult to go about reform but then actually coming up with the right answer now people are talking about breaking up the met but then you may end up with a really difficult problem if you have lots of different sorts of policing going on in different parts of london and of course in scotland they went the opposite direction they created a single police force they've taken away all the regional police forces and many senior police officers will tell you actually it's ridiculous having the very small police services all over the uk you should really amalgamate them all into one so i don't think there's a very easy answer if you look at united states and other countries but they have different problems with the police but very serious problems as well so fuel protests foot and mouth similarly awful but then on the international front i guess 9 11 well actually it was kosovo that was the proper crisis 9 11 and then iraq so well even before kosovo we had the first iraq war if you remember with clinton well that wasn't a crisis that well it was a crisis it was because he chucked the inspectors out uh and clinton wanted to bomb uh iraq we were concerned because it was the time of monica lewinsky concerned exactly what the motivation was for this bombing but we went along with it which is why people when they question whether we believe he had weapons of mass destruction or not the reason we bombed in the first time in 98 along with bill clinton was we believed he had weapons of mass destruction he was hiding them by kicking out the inspectors now the reason why i would say i would say that was not necessarily a crisis in the way that iraq became a crisis subsequently because actually that was you know it didn't convulse the government in a way that subsequently his definition of a crisis is something that's going to overwhelm the whole so it's a political crisis rather than international crisis it's certainly an international crisis and it was questioned at the time by people in the uk it was not exactly um seen as uh no but nothing i mean there's the scale of questioning and the scale of controversy surrounding what subsequently became no no it wasn't that kind of controversy nor was kosovo kosovo also was questioned when the bombing campaign took off and it didn't succeed you know it managed to hit the chinese embassy and a bus full of um refugees and so on uh that was a real problem and then tony was pushing really hard for ground troops and eventually persuaded clinton sort of really that extraordinary conversation he had with clinton while clinton was on air force one and speaking to him on the phone with sandy burger the national security advisor patched in and i can't think the secretary of state was also patched in uh and he was a really part of the debate about whether you should have ground troops in kosovo and he managed to win the argument and get them in although then of course clinton was furious when he saw the new york times article which he assumed you Alistair had briefed, saying that he was a wimp and Tony had had to force him to be a real man and send Grant Cruz.

33:52He wished for the record I had not. No, you didn't. Of course you didn't. But he didn't believe that at the time. He was quite on the angry side. How did the New York Times get that story? I don't know. I don't know. I guess somebody has spoken to him. I don't know. So somebody in your team had tipped him off. No, no. It could well have been someone in Washington. I've almost certainly someone in Washington had talked to them. Now, Alistair raised the question of Iraq. Obviously, I've interviewed Alistair about Iraq and I've interviewed Tony Blair of Abarok. And both of them are pretty clear that their views haven't dramatically changed, although Alice is maybe a little bit more nuanced over time.

34:22Are you like them? You're very much still in the same position you were in in 2003? I'm not in the same position I was in 2003, no. But I am still wrestling with the idea. I'm actually reading through my diaries at the moment about it because I want to try and write a book about it. Because what I do think is people who've drawn the lessons from it have drawn the wrong lessons from Iraq. I think Iraq was pretty clearly a big problem. You know, we went in, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't that we were lying. there just weren't any and that was a real a real problem and what's happened in iraq afterwards because of the failure to install security after we got in there was a really big problem and then the failure and then the pulling out before we sorted out the problem between the sunni and the shia leaving a civil war between the two effectively was also a big problem so i think there are big problems about iraq but the lesson we seem to have learned is in libya that we should only intervene from the air we're going to bomb but then we're not going to go on the ground and i went in as David Cameron's envoy after the war.

35:15Everyone in Libya said to me, why on earth did you help us by bombing from the air, but you didn't actually come and help us build institutions? We never had institutions. Why didn't you come in and do some state building here? And then in Syria, the lesson we drew was, let's not intervene at all. Let's let this horrific thing happen. So is Syria somehow better than Iraq after what's happened in Syria all this time? That wasn't the right answer either. So as I say, I'm wrestling what the right answer is on Iraq. Clearly what happened in Iraq is not good. The outcome is not one that one would want.

35:40But I think that people focus on the wrong issues, trying to find some sort of hidden secret agenda that proves malfeasance rather than actually what the real lessons are. I'm not on the hidden secret agenda. Where I suspect I do find a big disagreement with supporters, and I've very much changed my mind on it, is as somebody working on the ground, I think people are very naive in their belief that they could have done it properly. So one of the great things I hear from defenders, particularly in the US is the problem wasn't the invasion. The problem was we didn't do the post-invasion right. If only we'd built the state properly, if only we'd stayed long enough to sort out the Sunni Shia.

36:17And I guess I would say that, certainly from my perspective, working on the ground in Iraq, it seems completely implausible to me that we ever had the knowledge, the legitimacy, the power to resolve Sunni Shia conflict, build the state. What's the alternative to the policy as pursued by us at the time? not to intervene no that's not a policy that's a decision not to do anything well i'm a strong supporter of the intervention in bosnia and kosovo and i'm an opponent of the intervention in iraq no so what's your policy but what do you do to deal with the problems that we were containment that wasn't working that's the trouble we're containing it was it was actually splintering at the time we don't want to get drawn down that but i think um had we longer I would strongly, strongly...

37:06Why was it okay to intervene in Bosnia and okay to intervene in Kosovo, not okay to intervene in Iraq? And why didn't we intervene in Rwanda? Okay, so let me push back. Because you're unable to distinguish the prudential from the ideological. Ought implies can. You do not have a moral obligation to do what you cannot do. The stupidity of your position is that you think it's enough to make a moral argument in Rwanda or Iraq and say that the question is, what difference is there in moral terms between Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq? The fundamental difference is you couldn't do it in Iraq. And doing something that you can't do causes untold misery.

37:39And you were not focused enough on the practical. You believed provided you were righteous, you could say stupid things like containment was fracturing when it is entirely to me apparent that containment would have been infinitely preferable to what happened. Saddam Hussein did not pose an existential threat to global security. You did not need to intervene in 2003, and the world would have been better off had you not done it. I'm not making a moral difference. I'm saying, how would you know in advance that you were going to be able to sort out Kosovo, that you were going to be able to get rid of Milosevic, that you actually haven't really sorted out Bosnia, even now.

38:15Bosnia is still a complete mess, as you know. So I'm not making the moral. In fact, one of the five tests that we drew up at the time of Kosovo with the help of Laurie Friedman was exactly that. Is it practical? Can you make it work? The question then is, how do you know that until you've actually tried it? Because you don't know whether you can help rebuild something. Should we not have gone into Afghanistan for the same reason in your view? Well, I think first thing I would say is that that was a wonderful example of how calm you are. So I was getting cross and you responded in an extremely calm and measured way and you didn't get wound up at all.

38:40So I can see why you are. That's why I spend my time talking to terrorists. Very good, very good negotiator. That was very, very impressive. I think you're also right that it is extremely difficult in advance to know whether things are going to work or not. And because we don't know very much about these countries and so much uncertainty happens after we intervene. Nonetheless, I think there are things that might lead you to believe that you are less likely to face an insurgency in Bosnia or Kosovic compared to Iraq or Afghanistan. There are things that might lead you to believe that a slightly smaller country might be easier than a larger country.

39:17There might be reasons to believe that the light footprint in Afghanistan was preferable to the latest state building project and that probably Brahimi and in a different way Rumsfeld were right about Afghanistan, and Ashraf Ghani and the people who supported the surge were wrong. But in the end, that's, I think, what political judgment's about. It's about deep, deep knowledge of those countries. And we ought to have been able to get to understanding that Iraqis would be grateful that we'd got rid of Saddam Hussein, but very, very rapidly would have perceived our presence as illegitimate because they would have felt they were fighting for Iraq and Islam against the foreign military occupation.

39:53I'm not sure about the size of country think about libya for example you know we failed comprehensively in libya and it's still in a state of absolute crisis after the intervention and that's quite a small country we're a very small population what i think is the case is there's a sort of cycle in this stuff what happens is we don't intervene so after vietnam the u.s didn't intervene anywhere that's why it didn't intervene in rwanda for example not the practicality is because the lesson they drew from vietnam is never intervene and then they geared themselves up eventually to bosnia rather late in the day to intervening uh and when a lot of the damage had already been done so and then what happens is you then overreach.

40:24So we'd had the success in Kosovo. We'd had the success bombing Iraq. We'd had the success in Sierra Leone. We had what appeared to be a success in Afghanistan. And then we came to Iraq. So you get in the cycle, and then you don't intervene anywhere, like in Syria, and you end up with an even worse disaster. So that's the problem, I think. We need to learn. It's like Goldilocks. You want to have the porridge, which is not too cold, not too hot. You've got to get it just right. Right. Back in a second. Just going to a quick break. In America, half of every dollar spent on brand medicines goes to entities who don't make them.

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41:21I want to talk about what you do now. which is your charity intermediate so you you and a lot of that based on what we did here in northern ireland and in particular you sort of becoming chief negotiator and as you say negotiating quite a lot of time with terrorists and you're now doing that in different parts of the world so what have you taken from what happened in northern ireland to some of the stuff that you're doing now and tell us a little bit about what sort of parts of the world you're working well for me northern ireland actually changed my life you know as i described a pretty conventional sort of middle class diplomat and going into government the thing that i did that i felt proudest of after the event because at the time it was extremely painful was flying over here once a week or once every other week to meet with adams and mcginnis in safe houses and then meet with trimble or meet with paisley so when i left government that's what i wanted to do to see if i could take some of the lessons we'd learned from northern ireland and apply them somewhere else now northern ireland is completely different from these other conflicts it really is and the solution is very different but it's interesting what parallels there are to how you approach these negotiations We'll be talking today, for example, here in Northern Ireland about the reason the Good Friday Agreement worked was because there were inclusive negotiations.

42:26All the previous times we tried to exclude the extremes, not just Sinn Féin, but the loyalists on the other side. That's why Sunningdale failed in 73. Anglo-Irish Agreement, just the two governments, likewise Downing Street Declaration. So what I wanted to do is try and apply those lessons. And sometimes it works. I worked in Colombia for eight years with President Santos, and you came out very kindly to help with that when we had a referendum, which we managed to lose, thanks to your help. But it was very, very satisfying to try and share the lessons. Actually, Santos was very interested in Northern Ireland.

42:53He'd been the representative of the coffee trade in London for eight years. He'd been blown to the ground by an IRA bomb, along with his ambassador outside in an art club on Piccadilly. So he wanted to know about Northern Ireland. And then we helped him draw up a strategy at the beginning of the process, learning lessons from Northern Ireland, lessons from previous negotiations, failed negotiations in Colombia with the FARC. Likewise in Mozambique with the RENAMO. So that's what I do. And I love doing it, although as I get older, it's more and more painful to get on more and more overnight flights.

43:19But yes. Jonathan, one of the things that seems to be happening in the world of peace building is a movement against the idea of outsiders coming in. There's increasing, certainly, rhetoric in the UN system around grassroots movements, civil society. Insider-mediators. Absolutely. And I just spent two quite painful years on a commission on principles of inclusive peace. And very interesting, in the whole two-year period talking about peace building, people no longer really talk about, at the moment, about peace negotiators and external actors. The entire focus now is on grassroots civil society actors.

43:58How do you get the balance on that? How do you think about that? It's a very interesting question how you actually get the balance right between up-down approach negotiations and the down-up approach. So in Colombia at the moment, for example, under the new president Petro, who's come in, he's trying to do both things at once. He's trying to use civil society to negotiate with the criminal gangs in Colombia, at the same time negotiate top-down with the LN, the Marxist guerrillas. So trying to combine these two things is something that hasn't really been tried before. It probably should have been tried properly in Afghanistan, where you should have tried to build from the bottom up, as well as trying to negotiate from the top.

44:32And it's also true that the role of UN as mediator has basically died off. The UN isn't really able to work as a mediator anywhere now, apart from in completely failed states where they can go in. So I think it's not about mediators. What we do is we try and help the different sides. So we'll go in and help a president or help a guerrilla leader to try and make the negotiation work. So we try not to appear. We try to be below the radar. So you feel the UN's been marginalized. Why is the UN being marginalized? Why are they not central? It's interesting because the UN didn't have a role during the Cold War in many of these cases because it was a zero-sum game.

45:03Either the Soviet Union was going to win or the United States was going to win. It briefly got a role when the Cold War came to an end. So it played that role in Angola, in Namibia, in El Salvador, for example. The UN went in, Guatemala was the mediator. Now governments won't tolerate the UN trying to work on internal conflicts, external conflicts between countries, maybe. although actually almost never there either but in internal conflicts they're not going to so unless it's a failed state um someone like like sudan was for example you're not going to get that's kind of external media just before i go down so it strikes me that northern ireland is interesting from that point of view because the british government was comfortable with the us getting quite involved in what britain might have thought was an internal issue not to start with we were incredibly resistant to any international interference in northern ireland for 40 odd years Well, actually, you can take it back to the Treaty of Versailles, where Lloyd George got very worried that Woodrow Wilson was going to insist on self-determination for Ireland and wanted to avoid that at all costs.

46:01But we absolutely ruled out any, there were lots of attempts at international mediation right through to the John Major period. Then we finally very carefully introduced an Australian mediation, St. Neon Stephen, who had been the governor general. That didn't work out so well. And then they brought in George Mitchell. Bringing in George Mitchell was not that simple. At first, he was not accepted by the Unionists as even-handed. It took real effort to persuade them that he was. And because of his nature and because of who he was, he was able to do that. And as he was seen as a fair media, as we had made clear under the Tory government before, under John Major, that we did not have a selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland, we didn't mind as long as both parties could agree.

46:39So having someone from outside who was accepted as a fair referee was fine with us. when george mitchell left and we had to then spend the next nine years getting the agreement implemented that required us to be inside a mediator so i and the irish government spent those nine years desperately trying to work to get the good friday implemented which we finally did um in 2007 when the chuckle brothers took over now jonathan i want to ask you why your very first decision as chief of staff the newly elected prime minister i know what this question is going to be was to commission a special box embossed chief of staff to the prime minister why did you do that entirely so you and tony could mock me everywhere i went with it so i tried it i was actually alex allen who was our principal private secretary to start with who'd worked for john major and he said you're not gonna be principal private secretary and i have my little box of principal private secretary you should have one saying chief of staff so i got this made and i I took it on a first trip at Alistair and Tony, it teased me mercilessly.

47:36And so I had to give it… Was it a beautiful sort of red box? It wasn't a red box. No, I didn't have a red box because I wasn't a minister. So it was a black box with lovely gold lettering saying Chief of Staff. And a lead line, a sort of big heavy thing. It was quite heavy. It wasn't a lead line, but it was… How was it? It cost the tax bear, that little vanity. I have no idea because it was never used. It was stuck under my desk and probably still there somewhere. Give us a sense of the difference between politicians and a Chief of Staff. What is it that makes, because obviously our show is called The Rest of Politics, what is it that makes a great politician?

48:05What's the skill that differentiates a great politician from a great civil servant? A great politician needs to have a vision of what they're trying to do. They need to be like a great general. They need to know where they're trying to get to, but not expect to be able to do it all themselves. If you have a politician that doesn't have a vision, is simply managerial, it's not going to work. They're not going to get elected. They're not going to get reelected. And they won't be able to govern very effectively. They also need, ideally, not to be able to try to micromanage. So the problem with Jimmy Carter, for example, when he was president, was he tried to micromanage everything, including the booking of the tennis court at the White House.

48:38And that doesn't work. So you need someone who can do that and then who can rely on someone else to make things happen. The reason I invented the job of chief of staff here was exactly I saw this gap when my brother was in Downing Street. There was no one who brought together the political side, the media side, the foreign policy side altogether. So the prime minister had to keep intervening. John Major had to keep intervening. and there was a competition between people on a Friday evening to get the last memo in the box for the Prime Minister to read, to be the one on top, so people would stay very late on a Friday evening.

49:04By having the job of Chief of Staff, we were able to make sure that didn't happen, that the Prime Minister got one lot of advice that was averaged out between what people wanted within the building. But your personality was incredibly important to that because you didn't ever feel, it seemed to me, that yours had to be the thing on the top of the pile. It had to be you were working out what was going to suit his interest best in terms of the flow of paper. And I do think, I mean, I honestly do think it's one of the achievements of the Blair government is that you had some very, very powerful characters in there, lots of us, but very, very little of the sort of ego stuff that you read about and hear about with this lot the whole time.

49:40Yeah, there was no Marcia Falkender or anything of that from the Harold Wilson time. And I do think it's because people were complimentary in terms of actually doing very different sort of things. I do notice that no one's abolished the job of chief of staff since, and they're never going to. You know, Mrs. Thatcher tried to introduce it right at the beginning in 79, she had Lord Wilson come in to be a chief of staff. The civil service assigned him a room on the third floor in the front. And he wasn't allowed to read any confidential papers. And he gave up after three months very sensibly. Because I had been in the civil service, I saw that coming.

50:06And I think it was quite awkward for Robin Butler. But I have to say, he played very fairly by it in the way that he handled it. He did think I wanted to be the principal private secretary, which I never wanted to be. But now the chief of staff will always be there. And it will vary from prime minister to prime minister, because prime ministers have different skills, different needs, but there'll always be a chief of staff. Yeah, well, Jonathan, thank you for giving us so much time. Thank you for putting up with, I think that's the first time I've seen Rory almost lose his temper. I was very impressed by how calm he was.

50:32Oh yeah, it was all that. It was just a test. It's one of those interrogator things. It's been a pleasure talking to you. It was a pleasure working with you for all these years. I'm sorry that I lost you the referendum in Colombia. I'm not going to take that and not sleep tonight because of that veiled slight. But thanks for all your time. Thank you. I thought it was wonderful. And also, I'm going to take a real lesson for how calm you were there. It was beautiful. It totally disarms me. I've never had anybody respond to an angry outburst with such extraordinary calm. First interview I did after I left government, because I never did any interviews in government, was with Jeremy Paxman.

51:03And he suddenly was going to really get me. So he started with a long, really tough, angry question about Iraq and saying, aren't you ashamed? And I said, no. And he didn't have a follow up. He was completely sure he had to move on to another subject. So I think part of the trick won't just be the word. It would have been the tone of voice you said it in. You just very calmly. Yeah. Very good. Thank you. Thanks a lot. My pleasure.

51:27Now, Rory, I think you, what's our motto for this podcast? We disagree agreeably. And I think you were getting perilously close to crossing into disagreeability there. As you said to me at breakfast this morning, I was out of order. But you said it three times at breakfast. You clearly felt it very strongly. Well, I just, I just think it was, I think something got right under your skin. That was, I think. It's called the Iraq war. It gets under a lot of people's skin. It gets a little old skinner, but you didn't react like that when we did our two-hour deep dive. Yeah. Well, I know you much better.

51:56And so I give you more of the benefit of the doubt. No, I mean, you don't need me to tell you that if you're looking for a triggering moment, the Iraq war for many of us is the moment that drives us over the edge. Yeah. I've got to say, I think Jonathan is one of the most impressive people I've ever worked with. And I've worked with a lot of impressive people. And you saw some of it, actually. I said right at the start, his utter unflappability and his ability always to stay focused. And I think what he was doing is a technique I sometimes try to use in television interviews with limited success at times.

52:30It's where, but this is what I tell other people to do when they're doing interviews. If somebody is getting angry or rude, don't listen to the tone, listen to the words. And that's what he was doing with you. So when he came straight back at you, he basically answered the point that you were making. and it's like the point you made about jeremy paxton when jeremy paxton asked if he was a shame he said no he had a lovely lovely answer didn't he i i agree his superpower is that it preternatural calmness but if you actually heard what he said to me he said he said it's it's fine rory um i'm used to dealing with terrorists i thought it was a great answer and he is used to dealing with terrorists we didn't really get into that too much i mean he does spend an awful lot of time I'm now traveling the world talking to some pretty dangerous people.

53:12Well, I think one of the things that I would have liked to get in more is the sense of the strangeness of that small group of you. So we've interviewed David Miliband. We've interviewed Tony Blair. Obviously, you're on the show all the time. And Jonathan Powell is one of the missing elements in that small group of you. The others were Angie Hunter. Angie Hunter, Sally Morgan at various points. Andrew Adonis was head of policy. Peter Mandelson. Peter Mandelson. Who I guess we have to interview, right? We should do, definitely. But at some stage, Rory, you're going to start putting in some guests rather than leaving it all to me.

53:48Yeah, that's right. Well, particularly since it's a bit sensitive interviewing your friends, particularly when I get cross with them. Well, I think if you could tell me who's your closest friend in politics. Get them in and I'll take them apart. Mind, I've got to say, when you talk about disagreeing agreeably, I had the most extraordinarily disagreeable disagreement with one of your former colleagues last night, Mr. Steve Baker. Yeah. Well, that was the other thing I got at breakfast. I got told off about Jonathan Powell and then I got this extraordinary kind of your argument with Steve Baker last night.

54:15OK, well, onwards and upwards. And just don't be so disagreeably disagreeing the next time, Rory. Thank you, Alistair.