Iron Lady saw the NI job as ‘punishment’
MARGARET Thatcher never appointed anyone who showed promise to the role of Northern Secretary because she simply hoped to keep things ‘ticking over’, newly released archive papers show.
‘An illustration of her pessimistic approach to Northern Ireland is that she will never appoint as Secretary of State anyone with a promising political future, eg John Major,’ a former British adviser told an Irish official.
At the time, Tom King was Northern Secretary and the North was seen as a punishment for Tory politicians. In the Channel 4 TV series A Very British Coup, shown in 1988, a government official is appointed as Northern secretary as a punishment for plotting against the prime minister.
And in July of that year, at a lunch meeting, Ferdinand Mount, a former head of the Policy Unit at No. 10, told an Irish official that Mrs Thatcher ‘never focused for very long on the Northern Ireland problem, despite the assiduous efforts of [her adviser Charles] Powell and [Peter] Utley over the years to interest her in it’.
According to the notes, written by the Irish official to Dermot Gallagher, assistant secretary at the Anglo-Irish Division, and released under the 30-year rule, Mr Mount, who worked on domestic and economic issues but also had an interest in Irish affairs, said Mrs Thatcher had ‘very modest expectations’ about her chances, or any other prime minister’s chances, of bringing about a ‘fundamental improvement on the situation’ in the North.
The letter added: ‘When the draft [Anglo-Irish] Agreement was put to her, she accepted it, but, had it not been, she probably would have steered clear of any initiative on Northern Ireland during her period in office.’
Having committed herself to the agreement, she will not ‘rat on it’, the official noted Mr Mount as saying. At the time, Mrs Thatcher was under huge pressure from unionists to drop the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which government ministers from North and South met to discuss security, tourism and other cross-border issues.