PM told how to avoid Adams: Hide behind a potted plant

FOR years, Gerry Adams was deemed such a political pariah that even his voice was banned from being broadcast on British television and radio.

But when Bill Clinton was due to become the first serving American president to visit Northern Ireland and meet the Sinn Féin leader, it was decided that John Major may have to employ the subtle art of “pot plant diplomacy”.

Just a month before Mr Clinton and his wife, Hillary, began the 1995 UK tour, staff at the Northern Ireland Office were desperate to explore what could happen if Mr Major accompanied the president to Belfast.

In a letter to No 10, a senior civil servant warned how the prime minister was likely to meet the Irish politician and may have to shake his hand.

The declassified letter suggests Mr Major could be forced to hide behind pot plants to avoid Mr Adams, potentially handing the political wing of the IRA a publicity coup.

“We cannot see a way of the prime minister avoiding Gerry Adams without reverting to the undignified hiding-behind-potted-plants scenario, which creates almost as valuable a news story as the first handshake,” the letter says.

It went on to say that “there is a real

‘There is a real risk of political damage if the prime minister is too closely associated with the meeting’

risk of political damage if the prime minister is too closely associated” with Mr Clinton meeting Mr Adams, adding that “the unionist community still mistrusts the president, and the nationalist community will be ready to make capital of perceived slights”.

Other released Cabinet papers show how eager the government was to use the president’s trip to London in November that year to “ensure, so far as possible, that US involvement [in Northern Ireland] remains balanced, constructive, and helpful”.

The British government was still reeling from Mr Clinton’s decision a year earlier to grant Mr Adams a temporary visa to visit New York, where he appeared on prime-time television.

At the time, Mr Major’s private secretary, Roderic Lyne, wrote to the White House explaining “the movement in which Gerry Adams has long been a leading figure has murdered not only thousands of its own countrymen, but also one member of our Royal family, one Cabinet minister’s wife, two close advisers to Margaret Thatcher and members of Parliament, two British ambassadors – and small children in our shopping centre”.

It was eventually decided that Mr Major need not travel to Belfast, in part because he would play host to the Clintons in London.

During the president’s Belfast tour he was photographed shaking hands with Mr Adams in the Falls Road. The picture was taken by a passerby and broadcast around the world.