Strange tale of an extremist, a Prince and the not-so saintly Maggie

It was ironic to see the pictures of Prince Charles, tea cup in one hand, using the other for an apparently cordial handshake with Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland and for many on this side of the water, one of the great bogeymen of all time.

The Prince and the Extremist
Extraordinary cordiality

He repeatedly leaned forward towards the Prince, apparently exchanging not merely remarks, but confidences. This is particularly surprising because they both have bitter history against the other, as Adams made clear yesterday: he blames the British paras for the terrible killing of fourteen people on Bloody Sunday, in Derry, in 1972, and the Prince is the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment. However, Adams did also recognise that Charles had “been bereaved by the actions of Republicans”, in a reference to the IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India and a relative to whom Charles was particularly close (his “honorary grandfather”).

None of this was half so ironic, for me, than the contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s attitude when she was Prime Minister. She famously talked about the need “to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend”. That led to one of the more risible aspects of her long and painful reign: she banned the voices of extremist organisations being heard on British TV.

This meant that for six years, we could see Gerry Adams on our TVs, we could see his lips forming the words he was pronouncing, but we couldn’t hear his voice pronouncing them: instead, an actor would dub them in over the picture. Exactly the same words, mind you. The “oxygen of publicity” denial didn’t affect his message, only his voice.

This is one of the less well-remembered aspects of the Thatcher years. I always remind her fans of it, when they present her as some kind of secular saint, as they regularly do. It was an entirely pointless act, and damaged only Britain: you can imagine how difficult it made it to argue against freedom of speech limitations in other countries.

The ban kept running after Thatcher fell, perhaps out of deference to her memory. But finally, in 1994, her successor John Major dropped it. The only people who regretted its passing were the actors who were called on to dub the voices: it had been a nice little earner for them.

Today, that same Gerry Adams met and chatted for a few minutes to the next in line to the British throne. With every appearance of cordiality. No actor was on hand to repeat his words for him. And the earth didn’t fall into the sky.

In fact, what the incident did was to strengthen the growing bonds between erstwhile adversaries in Northern Ireland, as the Queen herself did three years ago, when she met Adams’ colleague and the current Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuiness, and shook his hand.

Rather underlying the fact that if you want to bring peace anywhere, it’s a lot more effective to come to terms with your resentments, however deeply held they may be, however justified, and listen to your adversary. A lot more effective than spreading further hatred by labelling him a terrorist and extremist. And then trying to shut him up.

And if it turns out you actually can't, it’s laughable as well as ineffective

The popular pastime of foot-shooting

If we conjure up a mental image of a target, I suppose most of us think of some kind of disk with rings of alternating colour around a bull’s eye at the centre. Perhaps a more appropriate image would be a human foot, since shooting yourself in the foot is the traditional metaphor for a self-inflicted wound. And it’s extraordinary how often we inflict them on ourselves, with decisions taken without properly considering all the facts, leading to months or years of regret as we struggle to correct them.

Picture a bridge across a river on which the calm of a late afternoon in September is beginning to settle.

On the bridge, there’s anything but calm. In the middle, carpenters have built a square enclosure, with doors facing either bank. Two men with ten companions each are due to meet here to try to overcome their mutual antagonism and unite against a third. The negotiations should have started at 3:00 and it’s a measure of their mutual distrust that they’re already two hours late.

In the event, the meeting takes minutes. One leader makes a gesture which someone who wants to pick a fight could interpret as threatening. There’s a shout and a man moves in and strikes a fatal blow with an axe. Contrary to the agreement, his side has left its door unlocked so more men pour through and the fighting becomes general.

The year was 1419 and the murdered leader was John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The man he had come to meet was his cousin the Dauphin or Crown Prince of France, later Charles VII. The third figure was one of England’s more successful soldier kings, Henry V, whose forces were at the gates of Paris.

The Dauphin had stood by while the assassination took place, and he had plenty of time to regret his inaction. The war ended with a French victory, but it took another 34 years. Why so long? He had forfeited the support of Burgundy which instead sided with England against him. Killing John might have seemed an expedient move to rid himself of a dangerous rival, but it cost him decades of struggle against an implacable enemy.

A century after the murder, King Francis I visited Burgundy where a monk showed him the skull of John the Fearless and pointed to the wound made by the axe. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘this is the hole through which the English entered France.’

Roll forward some centuries. The Saville enquiry recently reported on the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civilians by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. The objective was to arrest troublemakers, which is a police job. Paratroopers are highly trained and fully equipped for one job only, killing people, which they do extremely well. Use paratroops instead of police and you really have no excuse for being surprised that the result is dead bodies.

The outcome of these events is summarised perfectly by the Saville report:

‘What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.’

Someone thought that teaching these people a sharp lesson was a good idea at the time. Looking back at the quarter century of violence that followed, we can see that perhaps it wasn’t that bright.

In Britain today, we’re living under a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Now it has to be understood that the Conservative or Tory Party is the natural party of government here. They provided Prime Ministers for nearly two-thirds of the twentieth century, Labour and the Liberals having to share the rest. So the Tories define British politics: you vote for them or you vote against, which generally means either Labour or Liberal Democrat.

But by joining the Conservatives in government, the Liberal Democrats have closed off one of the options for an anti-Tory vote. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that their standing in the polls has collapsed and previous Liberal Democrat voters are flocking to Labour.

Joining the government may have seemed a great scheme to get close to power for the first time in ninety years. But right now it’s looking like a suicidal move from which it may take a generation for the party to recover.

It isn’t just the great and the good, or at any rate the historical and incompetent, who engage in this kind of foot-shooting.

Some years ago, while we were still living in Strasbourg, I persuaded my sales colleagues to hold a meeting there. Everyone had a great time. However, we were in a hotel some twenty minutes drive outside town. On one occasion, we drove there in a convoy of three cars that I was leading. It was pouring with rain and pitch black, and I was chatting away to my passengers so I missed my turning.

Now the obvious solution was to do a U-turn and get back onto the right road. What was the worst that could happen? I’d have had to admit that I’d made a mistake. Clearly the sensible option. For reasons that remain obscure to me, I didn’t take it and kept on driving, sure that I’d find another way that would avoid my blushes.

I didn’t. We spent the next two hours driving round Alsace, the region to which Strasbourg belongs. To be strictly honest, we weren’t even in Alsace all the time: at one point I realised that we had driven right into Lorraine, the region next door. By the end, my passengers were gasping to relieve themselves, but I wasn’t prepared to stop for fear of being lynched by the people in the cars behind.

My decision to press on had seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. I’d hoped to avoid embarrassment, but in fact I only made it worse. Like the Dauphin, like the men who sent in the paras on Bloody Sunday, like the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories, what looked like a shortcut to success proved absolutely the opposite.

See what I mean? Bang – wow, that’s a couple of toes gone. Just let me take aim again: next time I might be able to take out the whole of the instep.