Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Chris Patten shows some Tory NIO ministers were in a different league from the recent batch

Meritorious Tory: Chris Patten
Meritorious Tory: Chris Patten Meritorious Tory: Chris Patten

Get a grip, said more than a million marchers, while Conservatives knife each other to succeed Theresa May and headlines wail that these are ‘the last days of Rome’ while she fiddles and Brexit burns (Daily Telegraph).

Her behaviour has made a party whip cry. Some here could weep black laughter at the DUP calling the EU ‘intransigent’.

Instead of emotionalism, let us keep our sense of proportion and recall from our recent history...a few meritorious Tories.

Some would paint the whole NIO gallery with the same floppy brush. But none remotely measured up to Mo Mowlam, and several have been stinkers. Or plain stumers like the recent batch, beginning with David Cameron’s first offering, the awful Owen Paterson with his bizarrely satisfied smile. Superciliousness mixed with doziness, what a blend.

Others were in a different league. The thought comes from listening to Chris Patten praising Maurice Hayes, a tribute itself worth celebrating. Patten’s recent lecture to celebrate the bequest of Hayes papers to Galway university is worth a read or better yet a listen.

Context was a Hayes speciality, exaggeration resisted, keen eyes hooded so his smile stayed hidden. In his honour, let us recall English politicians stationed here, in the service of daft and undemocratic direct rule, who have nonetheless been neither fools, knaves nor humourless. Even before his recent description of Brexit as a 'crazed ideological jihad', junior Northern Ireland Office minister Patten (1983-85) deserved honourable mention.

He said in Galway that he came to ‘identity politics’ thanks to ‘passing through’ as one of the ‘constantly shifting cast of NIO ministers’. He threw in his own background, an identity pointed up for him by a growing friendship with Hayes, who stood out for Patten in Stormont, as a native Irish-speaker and a Catholic. For himself, he thought his Galway audience should know he was a ‘suburban schoolboy and oh, I’m also a cradle Catholic.’ His great grandfather, born in Roscommon in 1829 ‘chose not to starve to death in Boyle’ and moved to the north-west of England.

He arrived in Belfast as an anti-austerity ‘Wet, mildly Bolshy’, under secretary of state Jim Prior. A friendly local recalled him ‘dispatched by Margaret Thatcher to join Prior in his watery exile and clear up after Humphrey Atkins and the hunger-strikes.’ Official papers released in 2012 showed Prior’s deputy and prisons minister Lord Grey Gowrie interceding with the mothers of two hunger-strikers, on John Hume’s recommendation, then with further relatives.

If the strike ended, Gowrie promised, the government would not ‘crow’ and thereafter he could ‘improve the prisons regime for all’. The strike did end days later.

Prior’s ‘rolling devolution’ was a clunker but his juniors made their mark in ways that pleased nationalists, infuriated unionists. Nick Scott made the first grant to an Irish-language medium school, Patten signed off on renaming Derry council. His tribute to Maurice Hayes included a passing tribute to lawyer Peter Smyth, ‘a good, brave’ man, the David Trimble-nominated member to the 1998 commission on re-making the RUC that Patten directed. In addition to Smyth, Patten had Hayes as scribe and draftsman at his right-hand.

Northern Ireland ministers have included arrogant show-boaters as well as diligent beings. A few show-boaters were also diligent. Douglas Hurd (1984-5) had hopes of separating Peter Robinson from Ian Paisley. ‘At one time I had hopes of Paisley's young deputy, who had a sharper mind. I invited him to dine alone with me in the hope that hospitality would unlock a closed spirit. He accepted, but would not touch wine or whisky and I got nowhere,’ the Hurd memoirs record.

Over the years there were doubtless similar efforts at political seduction, often in the splendid surroundings of Hillsborough Castle, with no significant successes.

Peter Brooke and Sir Patrick Mayhew had similar Anglo-Irish landlord antecedents, plummy voices. Very different men, in the pre-ceasefire days they were both players. Brooke approved of the secret talks with republicans. Mayhew his successor disliked and tried to disavow them.

Northern Ireland secretary is one of the least desirable cabinet posts. Some have been ‘enthusiastic publicity hounds’, says a Troubles scholar, ‘determined to make the best of a bad job, very obviously putting their own advancement ahead of the general good. But after setbacks most settled for holding the fort.’

Most are also barely remembered, including Shaun Woodward (Paterson’s predecessor), Theresa Villiers and James Brokenshire, even though Brokenshire departed only last year. And even in comparison to them Karen Bradley is gormless. Replacing her is probably not part of the plot.