First Confession by Chris Patten

Author:Chris Patten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241275603
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

7

Crazy Irish Knots

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

Winston Churchill

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

Seamus Heaney (2008)

My first ministerial job introduced me with all the thunderous reverberation of a Lambeg drum to the violence that identity politics often breeds. One particular incident (which I will describe later) combined the prosaic with the stomach-turning. How did it come about?

After re-election in Bath with a much increased majority in the 1983 General Election, I was offered a junior job in her government by Margaret Thatcher. In my first four years in Parliament, I had blotted my copy-book with party managers by occasionally speaking out against some of the more bruising, ideological aspects of the government’s economic policy, as described in a previous chapter, especially the quasi-religious reverence for reducing the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. The odd abstention vote or slightly coded but critical article or speech, and a pamphlet written with my closest political friends, had caused some teeth-sucking in Downing Street. While originally tapped for rapid promotion, I had plainly been relegated to the slow lane on account of being a trifle too independent-minded, even ornery. So in my first Parliament I saw members of my peer group taking their first steps on the ministerial ladder well before me. Was I jealous? Yes, a bit. But I think I understood that you had to lie on the bed that you had made. It was simply not in my constitution – maybe vanity or naivety came into it – to lickspittle my way to the top, or just play cautiously ‘shtum’ from time to time. Before the 1983 election, Alan Clark, who seemed to think that he had spotted a fellow anarchic rebel with few conventional careerist instincts, suggested that we should organize a lunch after the election for all those like us who had been passed over. Somewhat to our embarrassment, come the lunch, Alan and I found that we had been invited to take on junior posts in the government. The truth is we were both more ambitious for office than we let on.

The call from Downing Street in June 1983 sent me to what wags called, rather revealingly for what it said about national priorities, the Siberian power station: Northern Ireland. This seemed to have become a place to which those whose Thatcherite sympathies could not be wholly trusted were exiled. The Secretary of State was Jim Prior, one of the last ‘wet’ critics of government economic policy left in the administration; his deputy was Nick Scott, an attractive, left-wing Conservative, once tapped for great things. It was suggested that since I was keen on public spending, I should be given lots of money to distribute in Northern Ireland before being weaned off it with some future return to a domestic, mainland department.

This fairly cynical approach to the Northern Ireland Office rather bore out the contention of the Irish Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, that the British government and public did not take the issues that Northern Ireland had to confront sufficiently seriously.

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