Lord Merlyn-Rees: Lord Merlyn-Rees, who has died aged 85, may have been the perfect example of the British politician who imagines he brings superior understanding to Northern Ireland but makes things worse, not better.
As Secretary for State, his creation of confusion about British intentions at a chaotic period injected further instability. The confusion was in part deliberate policy but also a function of his own vacillating nature.
His lasting monument in the eyes of moderate unionists and nationalists alike was his dithering response to the loyalist workers strike of 1974, which brought down the first experiment in powersharing.
The widespread conviction that he capitulated first to loyalists then to republicans fed the anxieties of the time. His 2½ years in Belfast were marked by no political advance and no reduction in violence. Indeed, both IRA and loyalist paramilitaries stepped up violence after reports that British officials had encouraged IRA leaders to believe in an imminent British withdrawal. Rees deliberately refrained from dispelling such suspicions, believing that "constructive ambiguity" would produce beneficial results.
Merlyn Rees - he changed his name by deed poll to Merlyn-Rees on becoming a life peer in 1992 - spent most of his 30 years in the House of Commons on the front bench, either in opposition or government.
He left Belfast to become Home Secretary, where he took an unexpectedly hard line against crime. In conflict with general British Labour Party thinking, he once said he had never been against the idea of the "sharply administered wallop" for vandals. As an elderly backbencher, he became active in the campaign to prosecute alleged Nazi war criminals living in Britain.
However his Northern Ireland stint defined his career.
Born in Cilfynydd, south Wales in December 1920, he was a bright grammar school boy who supported Labour while still at school. His education was interrupted by war service in the RAF, where he became a squadron-leader at the age of 25.
He became an MP at 43, having first taught in his old school, his early mentor Jim Callaghan. He served under Callaghan in the Home Office as race relations minister and in opposition became his number two as home affairs spokesman. He took over in Belfast in March 1974 with the powersharing executive, negotiated at Sunningdale and led by former unionist premier Brian Faulkner and the SDLP's Gerry Fitt, already in existence.
It already looked doomed because that year's general election left Faulkner with a tiny minority of the unionist vote. While the organisers of the loyalist strike geared up, Merlyn Rees was entirely sceptical about Sunningdale and unsure of prime minister Harold Wilson's own disposition towards powersharing.
When the strike began in May, Faulkner was unimpressed by Rees, writing later that he "just seemed to have gone into a flap". He added that during the strike "Rees's information appeared to be largely inaccurate and he kept producing maps and pointing out roads claimed to be free of obstruction but which I knew to be blocked."
Garret FitzGerald, then minister for foreign affairs, wrote in his memoirs that the British administration "spectacularly failed to tackle the extreme loyalists". Rees refused to talk to the strikers or to move decisively against them, and dithered about orders to the security forces. The RUC was reluctant to move against loyalist intimidation.
He was further undermined when British army general officer commanding Sir Frank King made it clear that soldiers would not break the strike by removing barricades or helping to restore electrical power.
King said years later that Rees was told at the outset that army engineers could generate only a small amount of power but not distribute it and that loyalists might sabotage generators with disastrous results - "sewage bubbling in the streets, perhaps cholera, no bread, no milk, no power for the hospitals".
The loyalist bomb attacks on Dublin and Monaghan three days into the strike had a higher death toll than in any other single day in the Troubles, and compounded the impression of a drift into anarchy.
Few would have played down his difficulties but the Rees habit of chewing interminably over every proposition alienated both officials and the leading powersharing politicians. By the second week, some thought within days, it was clear that power had shifted from Rees and the executive - Faulkner, Fitt and John Hume as minister for commerce in particular fuming at the spectacle - to the strikers.
One participant in meetings with him was said to have observed at the time: "I don't mind Merlyn wrestling with his conscience, but does it always have to be a draw?"
Years later, in his memoir of Northern Ireland, Rees wrote tellingly of returning late one evening to his accommodation in the Culloden hotel in affluent, largely Protestant, north Down and walking through the plush lounge. "The cry of 'traitor' came in unison, a spontaneous response of anger.We, the Brits, were the outsiders."
In a television documentary he insisted: "I didn't let them win. They were going to win anyway. The police were on the brink of not carrying out their duties and the middle class were on the strikers' side. This was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland rising up and it could not be shot down."
In cabinet papers released at the end of last month, an account by senior foreign affairs official Seán Donlon records Fitt calling Labour policy "absolutely disastrous". Rees gave the impression "of being close to a nervous breakdown. At times he was almost incoherent."
Since the fall of the powersharing executive, despair had overtaken the minority community while the majority were "in the grip of euphoria, confident that they have the economic and industrial power needed to get their own way". Rees made peculiar statements which nobody understood, Fitt complained.
For instance, the Ulster Workers' Council, which ran the strike, appeared to feel after meeting him that he would tolerate the existence of a "third force", a loyalist militia.
Rees and Wilson, who had once toyed with the idea of Irish unity, had concluded that Protestant power could not be confronted. They made efforts to get local politicians to work together in a "constitutional convention", alongside secret talks with republicans and loyalists principally in a large government-owned mansion in north Down, Laneside. Rees legalised Sinn Féin and the UVF and funded a number of republican "incident centres" to monitor a patchy IRA ceasefire The dual approach spread much alarm.
Bob Fisk's authoritative contemporaneous account - Point of No Return - recorded that "at least one of Rees's civil servants was widely rumoured in Belfast to have told the Provisionals that if the loyalists won a majority in the convention (and therefore produced a 'solution' which Westminster could not accept), then the London government would consider 'disengagement'."
Garret FitzGerald has since revealed that Dublin was so worried about the possibility of a precipitate British withdrawal that, as foreign minister, he lobbied US secretary of state Henry Kissinger to help prevent it.
His 2½ years in Belfast were harrowing for Rees, as Harold Wilson's press secretary Joe Haines described: "Northern Ireland wore out Merlyn Rees. He ached, and looked as if he ached, with tiredness after his first 15 months in office." Haines saw him as "a good, kind and able minister, who had become trapped by his office and was too exhausted to realise he had little more to offer."
He is survived by his wife, Colleen, and three sons.
Merlyn Rees (Lord Merlyn-Rees): born December 18th, 1920, died January 5th, 2006