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Jonathan Powell

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2023-05-29

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2023-05-29

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1. “First interview I did after a left government because I never did any interviews in government was with first interview I did was with Jeremy Paxman and he decided he was going to really get me so he started with a long really tough angry question about Iraq and saying aren't you ashamed and I said no and he didn't have a follow up”

   2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Yeah, there was no Marcia Fork endor or anything of that from Harold Wilson time. And I do think it's because people were complementary in terms of actually doing very different sort of things. And I do notice that no one's abolished the job of Chief of Staff since, and they're never going to. Mrs. Thatcher tried to introduce it right at the beginning in 1979. She had Laura Wilson come in to be a chief of staff. The civil service assigned him a Roman, the third floor in the front, and he wasn't allowed to read any confidential papers. And he gave up after three months very sensibly. Because I had been in the Civil Service, I saw that coming. And I think it was quite awkward for Robin Butler, but I have to say he played very fairly by it in the way that he handled it. He did think I wanted to be the principal private secretary, which I never wanted to be. But now the Chief of Staff will always be there. And it will vary from Prime Minister to Prime Minister because prime ministers have different skills, different needs, but there'll always be a chief of staff.”

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3. “For staff, we were able to make sure that didn't happen, that the Prime Minister got one lot of advice that was averaged out between what people wanted within the building”

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4. “A great politician needs to have a vision of what they're trying to do. They need to be like a great general. They need to know where they're trying to get to but not expect to be able to do it all themselves. If you have a politician that doesn't have a vision is simply managerial, it's not going to work. They're not going to get elected. They're not going to get re-elected and they won't be able to govern very effectively. They also need ideally not to be able to try to micromanage. So the problem with Jimmy Carter, for example, when he was president was he tried to micromanage everything, including the booking of the tennis court at the White House. And that doesn't work. So you need someone who can do that and then who can rely on someone else to make things happen. And the reason I invented the job of chief of staff here was exactly I saw this gap when my brother was in Downing Street. There was no one who brought together the political side, the media side, the foreign policy side altogether. So the Prime Minister had to keep intervening. John Major had to keep intervening. There was a competition between people on a Friday evening to get the last memo in the box for the Prime Minister to read, to be the one on top, so people would stay very late on a Friday evening. By having the job opportunity.”

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5. “It was quite heavy, it wasn't lead line, but it was No idea because it was never used. It was stuck under my desk and probably still there somewhere.”

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6. “Entirely so you and Tony could mock me everywhere I went with it. So I tried it. I was actually Alex Allen, who was our principal private secretary to start with, who'd worked for John Major. And he said, you're not going to be Principal Private Secretary. And I have my little box of Principal Private Secretary. You should have one saying Chief of Staff. So I got this made and I took it on a first trip at Alistair and Tanya treated me mercilessly. And so”

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7. “Not to start with, we were incredibly resistant to any international interference in Northern Ireland for 40 odd years. Well, actually, you can take you back to the Treaty of Versailles, where Lloyd George got very worried that Woodrow Wilson was going to insist on self-determination for Ireland and wanted to avoid that at all costs. But we absolutely ruled out any, and there were lots of attempts at international mediation right through.”

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8. “It's interesting because the UN didn't have a role during the Cold War in many of these cases because it was a zero sum game. Either the Soviet Union was going to win or the United States was going to win. It briefly got a role when the Cold War came to an end. So it played that role in Angola, in Namibia, in El Salvador, for example. The UN went in, Guatemala, was the mediator. Now governments don't tolerate the UN trying to work on internal conflicts, external conflicts between countries maybe, although actually almost never there either. But in internal conflicts, they're not going to. So unless it's a failed state, someone like South Sudan was, for example, you're not going to get that kind of external media.”

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9. “It's a very interesting question how you actually get the balance right between up down approach to negotiations and the down-up approach. So in Colombia at the moment, for example, under the new president Petro, who's come in, he's trying to do both things at once. So he's trying to use civil society to negotiate with the criminal gangs in Colombia, at the same time negotiate top-down with the LN, the Marxist guerrillas. So trying to combine these two things is something that hasn't really been tried before. It probably should have been tried properly in Afghanistan, where you should have tried to build from the bottom up as well as trying to negotiate from the top. And it's also true that the role of UN as mediator has basically died off. The UN isn't really able to work as a mediator anywhere now apart from in completely failed states where they can go in. So I think it's not about mediators. What we do is we try and help the different sides. So we'll go in and help a president or help a guerrilla leader to try and make the negotiation work. So we try not to appear. We try to be below the radar.”

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10. “Beak with a Ronamo. So that's what I do. And I love doing it, although as I get older, it's more and more painful to get on more and more overnight flights. But yes.”

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11. “But it's interesting what parallels there are to how you approach these negotiations. We're talking today, for example, here in Northern Ireland about the reason the Good Friday Agreement worked was because there were inclusive negotiations. All the previous times we tried to exclude the extremes, not just Sinn F ⁇ n, but the loyalists on the other side. That's why Sunningdale failed in 73. Anglo-Irish Agreement, just the two governments, likewise Downing Street Declaration. So what I wanted to do is try and apply those lessons. And sometimes it works. I worked in Columbia for eight years with President Santos and you came out very kindly to help with that when we had a referendum, which we managed to lose thanks to your help. But it was very, very satisfying to try and share the lessons. Santos was very interested in Northern Ireland. He'd been the representative of the coffee trade in London for eight years and he'd been blown to the ground by an IRA bomb along with his ambassador outside in an outclub on Piccadilly. So he wanted to know about Northern Ireland. And then we helped him draw up a strategy at the beginning of the process, learning lessons from Northern Ireland, lessons from previous negotiations, failed negotiations in Colombia with the FARC. Likewise, in Mozambique,”

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12. “For me, Northern Ireland actually changed my life. As I described, a pretty conventional sort of middle class diplomat and going into government, the thing that I did that I felt proudest of after the event, because at the time it was extremely painful, was flying over here once a week or once every other week to meet with Adams and McGuinness in safe houses and then meet with Trimble or meet with Paisley. So when I left government, that's what I wanted to do, to see if I could take some of the lessons we'd learned from Northern Ireland and apply them somewhere else. Now, Northern Ireland is completely different from these other conflicts, it really is. And the solution is very different.”

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13. “Sure, about the size of country. Think about Libya, for example. We failed comprehensively in Libya, and it's still in a state of absolute crisis after the intervention. And that's quite a small country, a very small population. What I think is the case is there's a sort of cycle in this stuff. What happens is we don't intervene. So after Vietnam, the US didn't intervene anywhere. That's why it didn't intervene in Rwanda, for example, not the practicalities, because the lesson they drew from Vietnam is never intervene. And then they geared themselves up eventually to Bosnia rather late in the day to intervening, and when a lot of the damage had already been done. And then what happens is you then overreach. So we'd had the success in Kosovo, we'd had the success bomb in Iraq, we'd had the success in Sierra Leone, we had what appeared to be a success in Afghanistan, then we came to Iraq. So you get into cycle, then you don't intervene anywhere, like in Syria, and you end up with an even worse disaster. So that's the problem, I think. We need to learnlocks. You want to have the porridge, which is not too cold, not too hot, you've got to get it just right.”

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14. “I'm not making a moral difference. I'm saying how would you know in advance that you were going to be able to sort out Kosovo, that you were able to get rid of Milosevic, that you actually haven't really sorted out Bosnia even that. Bosnia is still a complete mess, as you know. So I'm not making the moral. In fact, one of the five tests that we drew up at the time of Kosovo, with the help of Laurie Friedman, was exactly that. Is it practical? Can you make it work? The question then is, how do you know that until you've actually tried it? Because you don't know whether you can help rebuild something. Should we not have gone into Afghanistan for the same reason in your view?”

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15. “Why was it okay to intervene in Bosnia and OK to intervene in Kosovo, not okay to intervene in Iraq? And why didn't we intervene in Rwanda?”

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16. “Didn't you come in and do some state building here? And then in Syria, the lesson we drew was let's not intervene at all. Let this horrific thing happen. So Syria somehow better than Iraq after what's happened in Syria all this time. That wasn't the right answer either. So as I say, I'm wrestling what the right answer is on Iraq. Clearly what happened in Iraq is not good. The outcome is not one that one would want. But I think that people focus on the wrong issues, trying to find some sort of hidden secret agenda that proves Malfasance rather than actually what the real lessons are.”

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17. “I'm not in the same position I was in 2003, no, but I am still wrestling with the idea. I'm actually reading through my diaries at the moment about it because I want to try and write a book about it. What I do think is people who draw the lessons from it have drawn the wrong lessons from Iraq. I think Iraq was pretty clear a big problem. We went in, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't that we were lying. There just weren't any. And that was a real problem. And what's happened in Iraq afterwards because of the failure to install security after we got in there was a really big problem. And then the failure and then the pulling out before we sorted out the problem between the Sunni and the Shia, leaving a civil war between the two effectively was also a big problem. So I think there are big problems about Iraq. But the lesson we seem to have learnt is in Libya that we should only intervene from the air. We're going to bomb, but then we're not going to go on the ground. And I went in as David Cameron's envoy after the war. Everyone in Libya said to me, why on earth did you help us by bombing from the air? But you didn't actually come and help us build institutions. We never had institutions.”

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18. “No, no, it always wasn't that kind of controversy, and nor was Kosovo. Kosovo also was questioned when the bombing campaign took off and it didn't succeed, it most hit the Chinese embassy and a bus full of refugees and so on, that was a real problem. And Antony was pushing really hard for ground troops and eventually persuaded Clinton, a really extraordinary conversation he had with Clinton. Well, Clinton was an Air Force one and speaking to him on the phone with Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor, patched in. And I think the Secretary of State was also patched in. And he was really part of the debate about whether you should have ground troops in Kosovo, and he managed to win the argument and get them in, although then, of course, Clinton was furious when he saw the New York Times article, which he assumed you Alistair had briefed, saying that he was a whimp and Tony had had to force him to be a real man and send grand troops into Persia.”

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19. “So it's a political crisis rather than an international crisis. It's certainly an international crisis. And it was questioned at the time by people in the UK. It was not exactly seen as...”

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20. “It was a crisis, it was because he chucked the inspectors out and Clinton wanted to bomb Iraq. We were concerned because it was the time of Monica Lewinsky, concerned exactly what the motivation was for this bombing. But we went along with it, which is why people, when they question whether we believe he had weapons of mass destruction or not, the reason we bombed him the first time in 1998, along with Bill Clinton, was we believed he had weapons of mass destruction, he was hiding them by kicking out the inspectors.”

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21. “Many senior police officers will tell you actually it's ridiculous having the very small police services all over the UK. You should really amalgamate them all into one. So I don't think there's a very easy answer. If you look at the United States and other countries, they have different problems of the police, but very serious problems as well.”

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22. “It's not easy because of this theory of independence of the police that we have, which is not true in all countries. But we want to have the police independent because we don't want them to act as instruments of government. And yet, as you say, here in Northern Ireland, they did act as instruments of government by keeping trying to maintain the security situation. So working very closely with the army, although the police were always in charge, always the first on a patrol, et cetera. So I think it is very, there is a reason that the police have not been reformed is it's really difficult to do firstly the power of the Fed is very”

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23. “Had, but the police had also been very strange about it. They could actually have easily opened up these terminals as they wanted to and they chose not to. And it's one time that we fell behind the Tories and the opinion polls. It happened very, very quickly. One thing people expect is the government Run things properly. And if you start not being able to do that”

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24. “In the end, I think it was the Exxon Fuel Terminal and Essex that finally managed, the management managed to get some trucks out. Once that started, it fell.”

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25. “Break it at the last moment. I remember Jeremy Haywood, who was our principal private secretary at the time, and I hold up in a little room in the cabinet office, and we got in all the number twos from all the oil companies. And we're all there just working the phones until we got this thing moving.”

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26. “It's because the price of fuel had gone up, because we had put tax up on fuel as part of environmental measures and tax-raising measures and what have you. And we thought that the police would easily get this under control because you wouldn't have thought a few hauliers would just be able to shut down all of the fuel terminals across the country. And Tony went off on a regional tour and he said, if I have to come back for this, I'm going to really sack you. You just manage this and get rid of it. And so I thought, it's not going to be too hard. And we talked to the police and we talked to the people who ran the fuel depots. And as the clock ticked away, we had John Prescott there. And as the clock ticked away, things got worse and worse. And the police weren't able to open up the fuel terminals. And people started running out of fuel. We were actually at the end of it within hours of having to invoke emergency powers act because there was no money in the cash points. Hospitals were running out of fuel and didn't have generators to back up. And we really thought we were in trouble. And then we managed to finally...”

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27. “I wasn't feeding her. I can't remember how Sarah, my wife must have been feeding her. I think it's maybe Sarah came in too, but we couldn't leave because I was the only one at a car or something. I can't remember what the answer was now. It was memorable that we ended up stuck there. The fuel crisis was a very memorable one because we really didn't believe it was going to happen. It's a good example of how these things can get out of hand very, very quickly. So this protest started.”

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28. “Or you think bigger than me? But no, is that first one? Not least because I said I bought this infant daughter into Downing Street and know Spare Nappies because I thought I was only going in for half an hour. And sort of 24 hours later, I left with a very smelly baby. And that stayed in my mind. No, obviously the fuel crisis really stays in my mind a lot because that's...”

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29. “has given a million pounds to the party Impresario who'd given in opposition had given us a substantial sum of money a lot of money and then had come to see Tony and talked about changing the rules for tobacco advertising and we got ourselves completely in a twist about it and actually a classic example of what you need to do in those circumstances is get all of the stuff out as soon as you can before you”

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30. “Well, the first was I find fairly scarring, which you remember was the Ecclestone thing, which was just as my first daughter had been born. I was on my paternity leave, which I had a day and a half. And halfway through the second day, the Ecclestone thing broke.”

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31. “I'm not suggesting it should happen. I always think it's again a false idea that somehow you could move government somewhere else because all the interesting bits are going to stay in London and all the people want to work in the interesting bits”

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32. “No, because then this myth that people have been chasing since the time of Harold Wilson that we're going to move government, all that happens is people move the back office stuff up to Eastkill Bride or whatever it is. They're never going to move because ministers don't want to move. Ministers refuse to move. So then all the staff congregate around the minister.”

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33. “Much place than that, I remember it being built, it's the 1980s and 1990s, I think, and it's on the corner of Parliament Square. But what it has is great big open plan offices. We've been talking here in Northern Ireland about castle buildings and how awful that was where we negotiated. That was a 1960s building and that was awful. But the QT Centre will be Queen Elizabeth II's conference center on the corner of Parliament Square would be absolutely ideal for a government office.”

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34. “I don't think it matters what it's called, just somewhere where you could work in a modern office would be sensible if you want a modern government.”

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35. “They wouldn't make coffee either. We bought a coffee machine and brought it in, but they refused to make modern newfangled coffee. So we had to stick to tea. But it was, yeah, they were great. The places are completely inappropriate place to run a government from. It's absolutely ridiculous. You had John Burt working out of a broom cupboard on the third floor and sort of... Massively overcrowded, and we had a terrible problem that the electric risers were overheating the whole time because there were too many people and the whole building was going to burst into flames. But when we tried to close it down and repair it, this was quite late on.”

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36. “To start with, there was a problem of no food. If you remember, we came in, there was no cafe, there was nowhere to get anything to eat at all, which is why I lived on a... Diet of Mars bars for the first year of working that. What was really good about number 10 was the staff, the permanent staff, the people who had been there their whole lives, who opened the doors, made the tea, cleaned the rooms, looked after things that were fantastic.”

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37. “Yeah, that is exactly the problem. It's the sort of leftover from imperial times, if you like, that it's the great amateurs. It's Kipling-type approach to government. And it doesn't really work in the modern world. It's not to say that you need to have a bunch of technocrats or experts, but if you're going to have a discussion about something that is quite technical, it would be good at least to have in the room those people who understand the technicalities of it rather than leave it to a bunch of people who really are not that interested in the subject. And if they have something to say, it's been written for them by civil servants from their department who probably don't know much about it. So yes, there are real problems. And I think that applies to National Security Council as well as the Cameron.”

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38. “Had this discussion, and then Tony had to leave. There was some event he couldn't get out of. He had to leave before the end of the discussion. So he left, and John Prescott took over as Deputy Prime Minister. He said, look, we all disagree with this, but Tony wants to do it. So that's what we're going to do. And that was the conclusion of the cabinet. So that wasn't ideal cabinet government, I admit. But I also think a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about discussing some issue they don't really have much to say on is not the right way to make policy. You'd be much better off having experts in the room who can talk to you about how this could work and how this couldn't work. You need to have the ministers too, but your Scottish Secretary isn't necessarily going to help you if you're considering what to do with some particular aspect of foreign policy.”

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39. “Two or three hours is not a very long cabinet meeting under Labour in the early 70s. They could last two days because they were so divided on issues. Our cabinet meetings would certainly last two or three hours. Sometimes they'd be shorter than that, but it wasn't that kind of peremptory exercise. I mean, the one I remember best was about the dome, the Millennium Dome, where we had a long discussion of Millennium Dome. And I have to say, pretty much no one in the cabinet was in favor of the Millennium Dome. But Tony had decided we were going to do it. Maybe John Reed was.”

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40. “Exactly. The Prime Minister shouldn't be able to just have his will and have his will implemented. He should sit and discuss these policy issues at length with cabinet. The only trouble, this thing is it's not something that's ever happened. It certainly under Mrs. Thatcher sometimes happened in the 1970s. Labour governments in the early 1970s, because they were so split, did have all-day meetings.”

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41. “There's a myth of cabinet government that people like Robin actually, Robin Butler or Richard Wilson had, which was that Britain is governed by a primus into Pares and that the Prime Minister is just one cabinet minister.”

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42. “Well, actually, what happened was there was no money in Tennys when I came in. I had to go and raise the money to pay the salaries and leader of the opposition's office. And when I raised the money, Gordon summoned me over to his office and said there was an agreement he would take half of everything I raised. And I burst into laughter. And after that, for some reason, didn't seem to think I was his best friend.”

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43. “Yeah, they would see their job as pointing out the elephant traps to a minister. They've seen all these problems a million times before, and the minister is proposing something that's completely daft and didn't work last time. So let's give them a chance of talking himself out of the decision he's just made. Now, the trouble is it then is seen by ministers as people who are not prepared to implement anything. And ministers want things who can get things done. That's why they increasingly depend on political appointees, because I think they'll get things done, even if the civil servants don't.”

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44. “Handle it, but I mean, I agree with you. She was a great detail merchant, so it's hard to believe that really ever happened. But that was his vision of how this should work.”

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45. “Yeah, she would say, here's a problem we need to deal with. I mean, not the poll tax, but something like that, and then pass it over to the COVID officer. They would work on it.”

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46. “That was his vision of it from his time in the cabinet office. It's not the vision I got from my brother working on foreign policy who was nearly all of the work was done inside Danube Street. That was the problem, was the division between what they were doing in Danube Street, what's happening in the foreign office, for example. There was no articulation between it. So I'm not sure who was right about management style, but that was his vision.”

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47. “Richard was Robin's choice. I can't remember the process we went through to appoint him now. He was very keen to help and he had a vision in his mind of what the Cabinet Secretary should be. He'd been working in Mrs. Thatcher's number 10. He'd worked in the Cabinet Office in the Domestic Secretariat. And he had a vision that she would pass all the problems over the Cabinet Office and they'd sort them out. Tony Blair had this vision that he was going to be managing the civil service. What he wanted, you remember the scars on my back was his particular dig at the civil service, the same as Cameron's dig later and others”

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48. “I think when we started in government, we had a problem integrating into the civil service properly. I remember Tony complaining to me that the government machine felt like a Rolls-Royce park just outside Dining Street and he was never allowed to have the keys. And there was some element to that. And I certainly managed to rub up the wrong way with Richard Wilson, the second cabinet secretary after Robin left. And we had trouble integrating the government machine properly. But I think after about six months or a year, we finally worked out how to do that. And on the whole, the civil servants enjoyed that. They certainly managed the transition. I think Robin Butler was very keen to do was to stay on and be the person after that long period of Tory rule to manage transition to a Labour government. And he did it very well. And so did the Civil Service as a whole. They were keen to have people who were going to be activists coming in a new, fresh broom, fresh ideas, and they liked that.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Ron Butler has subsequently admitted, who was the Cabinet Secretary at the time, that this was a mistake. They never needed to have this order in council. He blamed it on his civil servants in the ethics part that they had been too tidy-minded about it. There was no need. And I always pointed out to them there was no need because previous political appointees in Dom Major's office, Sarah Hogg, for example, had civil servants in her team and managed them and told them what to do. There was no reason, there was nothing had changed. But it made it into a symbol, which was a real problem, I think, because it then led to this notion there were millions of special advisors knocking around number 10. But if you think about it now, we had a tiny number of special advisors by comparison with the number in government at the moment. So it's quite different from that point of view.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Well, again, I think it's complementarity. What Tony had was a remarkable vision and people sort of play down the vision thing, but actually it's crucially important for a politician, as George Bush Sr. revealed in the end, not having the vision thing was his downfall. And he didn't try and do the rest. In other words, he had this vision, but he didn't try and be the day-to-day tactician. People like Peter would be the strategist. Gordon Brown, I always thought was the sort of day-to-day tactician. And you were the brilliant communicator. So he had a team of people who complemented his skills rather than trying to do everything. And you quite often find with prime ministers a nice prime minister like John Major. He tried to do everything and that doesn't work. You've got to actually work out what your role is as leader and what the role of others is.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source