Dean Godson

Lord Godson is director of Policy Exchange and the author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism (2004)

Saturday

Dean Godson

Paying the price of peace

From our UK edition

Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential. Jonathan Powell was the most durable of Tony Blair’s inner circle — and, in the affairs of Northern Ireland, much the most influential. He remained in post long after the other Blairites de la première heure such as Alastair Campbell, Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson had departed the scene. The most important career civil servants, such as Sir John Holmes and Sir David Manning, did their stints and rotated out. Powell thus became ‘last man standing’ and was a key player in the triumphant denouement of May 2007, as Martin McGuinness finally lay down with Ian Paisley.

Saturday

Dean Godson

‘They know the extent of our reach’

From our UK edition

John Grieve, the long-time head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, observed shortly after the conviction of the IRA men who bombed South Quay in 1996: ‘It’s great — but every time we have one of these long trials, we give the men of violence a free masterclass on how we go about protecting the public and how they can try to get around us next time.’ On the day after the triumphant conclusion to the ‘Crevice’ trial, I asked Peter Clarke — Grieve’s lineal successor — about this in his 15th-floor office at New Scotland Yard. Clarke takes the point. But the pluses of taking this case through the courts still massively outweigh the minuses.

Saturday

Dean Godson

A tribute to Ulster’s A.J.P. Taylor

From our UK edition

Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots’ successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, had been elevated to the peerage. Far from being the cue for an orgy of resentment, the news was greeted with almost universal pleasure. Until 15 years ago, Bew was an obscure Marxist historian at a provincial university. Today, he is the A.J.P. Taylor of the Northern Ireland peace process. He has become well-nigh ubiquitous on the airwaves and in the corridors of power — on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Wednesday

Dean Godson

Rifkind could be deselected

From our UK edition

Is Kensington and Chelsea, that jewel in the crown of Conservative parliamentary seats, becoming the Bermuda Triangle of Tory politics? Thanks to the little-noticed workings of the Boundary Commission, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, could soon find himself in a battle royal to remain in the Commons. The local precedents are not good for Sir Malcolm. When Kensington was amalgamated with Chelsea in the run-up to the 1997 election, Dudley Fishburn stood down in favour of the Chelsea MP, Sir Nicholas Scott. The following year, Scott (by then suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s) nearly crushed a child while parking his car and was then too drunk to attend his association’s party at party conference. He was promptly deselected.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Terror camps in the Lake District

From our UK edition

Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, occupies one of the two hottest seats in British policing today. Since it emerged that all four British suicide bombers of 7 July came from his patch, he has scarcely drawn breath. Cramphorn’s only relaxation in that fevered week came after his surgeon — who has been treating him for prostate cancer — called on the day of the police raids in Leeds and Dewsbury with the bad news that the tumour had spread to his spine. The consultant dispatched Cramphorn straight to the MRI scanner. ‘I stuck on my earphones, lay back and listened to Vivaldi,’ he recalls with customary matter-of-factness.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Will Dublin turn on Gerry Adams?

From our UK edition

Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most popular politician in the Irish Republic. His party seemed set fair to make huge gains in the next Irish general election and he was being widely talked of as the next president of this state. Even the foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, spoke of the republicans as potential partners in a future coalition. Southerners have historically afforded the republican movement a degree of latitude in operating up north.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Labour’s forgotten army

From our UK edition

If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean the hard Left: indeed, this largely working-class group constituted the Bennites’ staunchest opponents. The old Labour Right tended to be patriotic and conservative on social issues, whilst remaining firmly wedded to the welfare state. This wing of Labour was allied to (but culturally had little in common with) those middle-class ‘revisionist’ intellectuals who are the true spiritual forebears of Blairism.

Saturday

Dean Godson

How a coalition of the willing could save Blair — and Howard

From our UK edition

Could terrorism turn the British political landscape on its head, much as it has done in Spain? Government sources naturally give this scenario short shrift. They argue that Tony Blair faces no comparable electoral test here any time soon. They add that the war in Iraq, though never popular, has never been quite as universally loathed as its detractors on both Left and Right have made out. Indeed, one famously robust Labour minister from a Midlands manufacturing constituency even claims that because of the war, support for the government has actually gone up among the much vaunted C1s and C2s — the cream of the upper-working classes and lower-middle classes whose support the Tories must regain if ever they are to return to power.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Meeting of the extremes

From our UK edition

That's another fine mess you've gotten me into,' quipped David Trimble with black humour as he bounded in to meet with Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Lady Grey Room at Hillsborough Castle last Saturday. As well he might: for the first time, Ian Paisley's anti-Agreement Democratic Unionists had won more seats than the moderate Ulster Unionists in a Stormont election. The drift away from the parties of the centre ground in last Wednesday's poll was even more dramatic on the nationalist side, where Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein inflicted a 'Redmond moment' upon the Social Democratic and Labour party led by Mark Durkan.