Born: March 3rd, 1934
Died: May 13th, 2023
Peter Brooke, who has died aged 89, was secretary of state for Northern Ireland in the early 1990s, when he initiated “talks about talks” to secure devolved government. While his initiative did not immediately achieve its aims, it shaped the process that led to the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
While he ought to be remembered for inaugurating the delicate peace process, or even as the founding minister for the British National Lottery, he will also be recalled for briefly singing a song on the Late Late Show on the night when seven Protestant construction workers were killed by an IRA bomb. The singing of My Darling Clementine on RTÉ television shortly after the atrocity, in January 1992, was a mistake for which Brooke apologised and offered his resignation, but the reason given for making it was understandable.
Brooke had had a hard week working in Belfast and had barely heard about the attack in Tyrone. However, he was chiefly disconcerted on the night by being asked unexpectedly about the traumatic death of his first wife, with his new wife sitting in the studio audience – and was then cajoled by Gay Byrne into singing the only song he knew. “My defences were down ... it was patently an error,” he said later.
It was a measure of Brooke’s popularity in the Commons that when he apologised unreservedly in the chamber the following week he received cross-party support, with only Ian Paisley’s hardline DUP demanding his resignation. The prime minister, John Major, supported Brooke at the time, but dropped him a few months later after unexpectedly winning the April 1992 general election. He was brought back into the cabinet as culture secretary that September following the resignation of David Mellor.
Brooke was well liked because he was an old-style Tory, not one of the highly partisan Thatcherite ministers who surrounded him in government. He was emollient, cultivated and charming, with a passion for cricket – and a penchant for using it as a metaphor. Before entering parliament he had been a successful management consultant.
If it was always likely that he would eventually enter politics, he did not do so without difficulty
Peter Leonard Brooke was born on March 3rd, 1934. His father, Henry Brooke, was also a politician and was home secretary under Edward Heath. His mother, Barbara (née Matthews), was a London councillor and had been a vice-chair of the Conservative party for 10 years. Both parents were given life peerages and sat together in the Lords, as Lord Brooke of Cumnor and Lady Brooke of Ystradfellte. The family had its origins in Rathavan, Co Cavan, and was related to the Brookes of Colebrooke, Co Fermanagh – the Viscounts Brookeborough.
He was educated at Marlborough, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Business School. Vice-president of the National Union of Students (1955-56), he was the 1957 president of the Oxford Union. He had earlier served with the Royal Engineers, but was invalided out. Having spent a year as Swiss correspondent of the Financial Times, he joined a firm of management consultants in 1961.
[ Tributes paid to Peter Brooke, 89, who played ‘pivotal role’ in peace processOpens in new window ]
If it was always likely that he would eventually enter politics, he did not do so without difficulty. He applied for nomination in 27 constituencies and stood unsuccessfully in the Labour seat of Bedwellty against Neil Kinnock in the October 1974 election. It was not until 1977, when he was 42, that he was nominated for the safe Tory seat of the City of London and Westminster. Brooke held the seat until his retirement from the Commons in 2001.
He held a number of government posts under Margaret Thatcher, including under-secretary of state for education (1983-85) and paymaster general (1987-89). As a pro-European he was unhappy with the increasingly Eurosceptic party’s campaign against “A Diet of Brussels” on its posters during the 1989 European elections, though he was not influential enough to change it.
As Conservative Party chairman he had opposed the party organising in Northern Ireland, and while he was at Stormont he regarded local Conservatives as a nuisance given their support for integration and his commitment to devolved government.
Brooke’s suggestion that the British government might talk to Sinn Féin if the IRA renounced violence was criticised by unionists, the British Labour Party and some Conservatives
Soon after the elections, he became Northern Ireland secretary – a promotion also greeted with scepticism on both sides of the Irish Sea. Unionists discounted the fact that Brooke came from an old Anglo-Irish family – he claimed to be three-eighths Irish. He clashed with some in government in the Republic over the Ulster Defence Regiment and alleged leaks of security documents to loyalists. His suggestion that the British government might talk to Sinn Féin if the IRA renounced violence was criticised by unionists, the British Labour Party and some Conservatives who said that it encouraged terrorism.
Nonetheless, in deep secrecy, in 1990, “deniable” talks got under way between an MI5 agent and republican paramilitaries. Much more publicly but slowly, Brooke headed moves to bring constitutional parties and the Irish government towards negotiations: “talks about talks”, the so-called Brooke initiative.
[ State papers: Northern Ireland secretary read republican newspaper An PhoblachtOpens in new window ]
The Economist magazine remarked: “Mr Brooke has done more in a few months than many of his predecessors managed in several years and nobody expected it of him.” The IRA’s campaign nevertheless continued, as did that of the loyalists who, with the connivance of the police, shot solicitor Pat Finucane in front of his family in 1989.
In July 1990 he told the House of Commons that controversy over Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution was an obstacle to finalising a schedule for talks. This followed a ruling by the Supreme Court that the territorial claim was a “constitutional imperative”.
Speaking in his constituency in November, he said that Britain had no “strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland and would accept the unification of Ireland should consent be forthcoming. In December he told the Belfast Telegraph that real advances had been made, and spoke of “new thinking about difficult issues, reanalysis of positions and goals, and re-evaluation of the validity of traditional aims in the context of the 1990s”.
In March 1991 he said that political talks would focus on three main relationships – “those within Northern Ireland, including the relationship between any new institutions there and the Westminster parliament; among the people of the island of Ireland; and between the two governments”.
The process would begin with discussions between the Northern parties aimed at achieving devolved government (“strand 1″ of the talks) with North-South discussions (“strand 2″) and Irish-British discussions (“strand 3″) beginning when the secretary of state felt it was appropriate. The results of the talks would form part of a complete package; nothing would be agreed until everything was agreed.
The talks got under way in April during a “gap” in the operation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement that facilitated unionist involvement, but in July, as the gap closed and the marching season loomed, Brooke ended the discussions in order to pre-empt a complete breakdown of the process.
After the Late Late Show debacle, it was always likely that Brooke would be moved, though Major’s excuse that a younger man needed promotion was undermined by the fact that he was succeeded at the Northern Ireland Office by Patrick Mayhew, who was four years older.
Following a short spell on the backbenches, he was appointed heritage secretary, in which capacity he lifted the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin. In 1995, he described Gerry Adams as a “brave and courageous man”.
[ Secrecy and Northern Ireland’s Dirty War: the murder of Pat FinucaneOpens in new window ]
He later revealed that government-sanctioned talks with Sinn Féin began in 1990.
He was in 1997 appointed chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, and was also a member of the British Irish Parliamentary Body. Having stood down as an MP, he was made a life peer in 2001 and took the title Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville.
Brooke married Joan Smith in 1964 and they had four sons, one of whom died in infancy. She died suddenly in 1985 after a routine hospital operation went wrong. In 1991, he married Lindsay Allinson, who was a Conservative Party election agent. She survives him, along with three sons, two sisters, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.