Tag Archives: Deerek Mooney

From top: US President Lyndon B Johnson (right) and with his Supreme Court choice Abe Fortas, June, 1968, :  Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Thornton Manor, Cheshire last Thursday

Visitors to the Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) presidential library in Austin, Texas get to have their photos taken against a life size photo of the 6’ 4” LBJ leaning over them, appearing – figuratively – to bend them to his will. It is called “The Johnson Treatment”.

The original photo featured LBJ’s soon to be US Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas. It is just one of many photos of LBJ applying the eponymous “treatment”, once described by the pre-eminent Washington political columnist, Mary McGrory, as…

an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favours and future advantages.

In a fascinating interview at the John F Kennedy library, LBJ’s speechwriter (and husband of the great presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin), the late Richard Goodwin tells how LBJ worked his “treatment” on the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace after the Selma marches. Wallace had come to the White House, Goodwin recounts:

“…Wallace comes in, and of course Wallace is about 5 feet 2 and Johnson is 6 feet 4, and so he’s got a big edge on him. And so, he says, “Governor, come in.” So then Johnson sits him down on the couch, where he sinks another three inches, and Johnson sits on the edge of a rocking chair, and leans over until he’s about one inch away from Wallace… he knew the beauty of invading someone’s space, and he did it.”

As Goodwin explains, LBJ set to work on getting Wallace to allow greater voter registration for Black Americans in his State. LBJ finished up saying:

“I don’t want you to think about 1964, I want you to think about 1984. We’ll be dead and gone then. Now you got a lot of poor people down in Alabama, a lot of ignorant people, a lot of folks that need different jobs. You could do a lot for them, George, what do you want after you go? Do you want a great big, marble monument that says, “George Wallace: He built?” Or do you want little piece of scrawny pine laying there across the soil that says, “George Wallace: He hated.”

LBJ gets up and leaves. Wallace is then given the statement Goodwin has prepared announcing what LBJ wants him to do. Wallace dutifully gives it to the press corps, later saying: “[If] He had me in there another hour, he [would have] had me coming out for civil rights.” He was incredibly overwhelming.

Though not remotely in the same league as LBJ in terms of ability, substance or persuasiveness, those who have met Boris Johnson remark on how effusively personable and charming he is face-to-face.

Like many modern politicians Boris Johnson hates to be hated. He desires to please and impress the person in front of him, be it by flattery or self-deprecation.

Where LBJ used his power as well as personal skills, traits and experiences to bend others to his will, Boris Johnson has just one tool: charm. A charm that the former editor of the Daily Telegraph Matthew d’Ancona, described as

“…a confection, a stage act with roots in his true nature but with many affectations and contrivances. He is, one should never forget, “Al” (for Alexander) to his loved ones. “Boris” is a persona: it is his populist Conservative version of Ziggy Stardust, The Rock or Borat. It is a means to an end – and a potent one.

One of those potent ends was getting into Number 10 and it has so far worked. A sad reflection on the state of UK politics today but, as the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins puts it, “charm is politics’ deadliest weapon”.

Boris’s charm has not only landed him the top job, it has obscured many to the reality that Johnson (in the words of Simon Jenkins):

“…emerges from his biographical record as incompetent, lazy, dissolute and a liar, yet the public’s response is that he is “our kind of liar”.

While there are rumours about what Boris said to Leo when they met alone in Cheshire last Thursday, including tales of a one-page note produced from Boris’s inside jacket pocket that set out the British proposal, only two people know for sure.

That said, I do not think it is too unreasonable or far-fetched to imagine that the full 90 minutes was not taken up with the finer points of customs union systems or consent mechanisms.

While Leo Varadkar can claim a decent grasp of such detail, it is a boast the British Prime Minister cannot make. This is the same Boris Johnson, after all, who was caught bluffing dreadfully about trade tariffs on live TV by Andrew Neil.

It is therefore difficult not to suppose that those 90 minutes of private talks focussed less on specifics and more on the general politics of their two situations.

How could it not? Here were two politicians, leaders of centre right parties who have assisted each other in the past, each now facing an election. How could they not discuss and explore the politics of what they each face, especially when it is so intertwined and dependent on what happens with Brexit.

Though some Irish pundits were wary of Leo’s heading to the meeting, it was Johnson who had the most to lose. Boris Johnson went in on the backfoot, especially after the debacle of a “senior Downing Street source” (i.e. Dominic Cummings) briefing The Spectator that the UK government was ready to punish those EU countries who back an extension beyond October 31 and that the Taoiseach “doesn’t want to negotiate”.

Besides this briefing being politically illiterate (an extension beyond Oct 31 requires EU unanimity, so any threat to punish those who backed it means all 27) it also wrong-footed the British government’s own efforts, even if they are only about avoiding blame for a no-deal.

Johnson went into the Leo encounter with no choice other than turning the charm up to a spinal tapping 11. From Boris’s less nuanced perspective he would be sitting alone with the one man who held the key to unlocking his Brexit difficulty.

Johnson (wrongly) sees Irish support for the Backstop as the main obstacle to his securing a withdrawal agreement he can get through the House of Commons. Wrongly, because binning the Backstop is not in Ireland’s gift. The EU believes in the Backstop’s purpose, the avoidance of a border across Ireland, as much as we do.

The task Johnson set himself was enormous. Charm Leo to backing down on the Backstop. If he could do that then he could offer to help ease Leo’s political woes through the removal of the threat of a hard-crash-out-Brexit.

Leo arrived under no such pressure. Unlike Boris, who did not grasp that they could not simply talk the Backstop away, Leo absolutely knew they couldn’t. His mission was twofold. Deny the Brits any chance to blame him for refusing to talk and just listen to what Johnson’s officials had to say and appraise Brussels.

This Leo and his officials did. But he did just a little bit more. He came out looking and sounding way too happy. While their joint statement was broadly positive and talked of possible pathways, it was still bland. So, where did all the post meeting hype and press talk of significant movement from British side and changing the picture substantially come from?

Was it just Irish political optimism stemming from what the officials discussed or did the Boris attempt at his own Johnson treatment have some impact? Did Leo succumb, even briefly, to Johnson’s charm and blandishments?

Even if he did, there was never any risk of it turning into anything real, though his excess of positivity did briefly deflate the hopes of those in the UK wanting a second referendum, as well as grossly inflating the desires of those in Leinster House wanting a snap election.

But while charm may be a weapon, it is not a currency. Something confirmed by the briefings coming from Brussels last night and this morning.

The signals, so far, are that no significant progress has been made and that the Brits need to move further on Northern Ireland to secure a Withdrawal Agreement by week’s end. Johnson has backed himself into a corner from which charm alone cannot release him.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010.  His column appears here every Monday. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

Pics: Getty/Noel Mullen via Rollingnews

 


From top: John  Hume, Bertie Ahern and Gerry Adams following the IRA ceasfire in 1997; Derek Mooney

By the time you get to read this I will be in Belfast attending one of several special events to mark 20 years of the Good Friday Agreement.

One of those, at Queen’s University entitled: Building Peace, and organised by the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at QUB, is described as:

“…the only one of its kind to gather together so many of the key influencers on the Good Friday Agreement to mark its 20-year anniversary.”

It is not an idle boast.

The former US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, and recent star of RTÉ One’s Ray Darcy Show, will be joined by former US President Bill Clinton, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, as well as many other key players including: Seamus Mallon, Gerry Adams, Jonathan Powell, David Trimble and Peter Robinson.

It is a stellar and fascinating line up of those both in front of and behind the scenes. It is an opportunity to recall the huge efforts of the leaders who drove the process and to at last pay tribute to those countless men and women behind the scenes who did so much of the heavy lifting, including the many dedicated civil servants on both sides who worked so diligently to get the process across the line.

We rightly recall the huge endorsement the Agreement received both North and South of the border: 71% in the North and 95% in the South, but it is also important to reflect on just how close to failure this process came, right up to the final hours and days.

This is something we should bear in mind as we bemoan the failure of this generation of political leaders, particularly those in the DUP and Sinn Féin to either sustain and re-establish the institutions that were handed to them via that 1998 sovereign decision of the people, North and South.

Sadly, declining health means that the event will be without the principal designer and imaginer of the architecture and form of the Good Friday Agreement: John Hume.

In a blogpost yesterday, RTÉ’s Northern Editor, Tommie Gorman put it succinctly:

More than any other individual – living or dead – John Hume managed to put a stop to the awful killing. The Good Friday Agreement is testimony to the genius of his imagination, the wizardry of his words and the generosity of his spirit.

If anything, Gorman’s words are an understatement.

The three-stranded structure of the Good Friday Agreement, that recognised the three distinct, yet interconnected, strands of relationships between (1) the two communities in the North, (2) the two parts of this Island – North/South and (3) our two islands – East/West, was a key element of Hume’s analysis and provides the framework around which the agreement is built.

Hume recognised, as others had done before him in conflicts across the globe, that all conflict is about difference, whether that difference is race, religion or nationality.

As he said in his December 1998 Nobel Lecture:

“The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity.

The peoples of Europe then created institutions which respected their diversity… but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest.

They spilt their sweat and not their blood and by doing so broke down the barriers of distrust of centuries and the new Europe has evolved and is still evolving, based on agreement and respect for difference.”

The European visionaries Hume refers to here are the founding fathers of the European Union, men such as Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, Paul-Henri Spaak and – though it might upset the Tories and their DUP cronies – Winston Churchill.

These men had learned that the only way to get diverse, even polarised, communities to stop focusing on their differences and identities was to shift that focus to their common interests.

That is what Hume strove to do and, in that work, he had many partners, though not all as willing or even as nuanced in their thinking.

There is a reason why Hume took so much of his inspiration from the story of post war Europe. While his slogans and rhetoric come from the American Civil Rights movement and the charismatic leadership of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the structures and institutional frameworks he favoured were distinctly European.

Hume was a great believer in Europe and the EU and saw in it and in Ireland and the UK’s joint membership of the EU, a way to gradually dismantle the border.

As the member states of the EU slowly came together to work in closer cooperation and partnership and to form a single market and a customs union, the borders between those members states started to come down and that included Ireland and the UK.

He also saw, as did both governments, that joint membership of the EU (originally the EEC) since 1973 helped the two governments develop and improve day-to-day working relations, as ministers and officials from both interacted in Brussels in pursuit of common interests.

Personal and political relationships grew, not least those between John Major and Albert Reynolds, as they served together on the EU’s ECOFIN council of Finance Ministers. T

he development of that relationship led directly to the Downing Street Declaration, which in turn paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement.

Anyone who tells you that the EU is not central to the Good Friday Agreement clearly does not know what they are talking about, especially those who repeatedly assert that the words: ‘Europe’ and the ‘European Union’ do not appear in the Agreement. They do, several times.

This juvenile effort to use Brexit to run a coach and four through both the spirit and the letter of the Agreement is their response to the way that Britain’s Article 50 Brexit negotiations have floundered. The Agreement has done more to stymie the talks than almost any other issue, even money.

But once again the Brexiteers miss the beauty of the basic architecture of the agreement. As Bertie Ahern, Colum Eastwood and countless others have pointed out recently, the
Agreement is still relevant today as we struggle to cope with the fall out of Brexit.

The three-strand approach that underpins the Agreement can also be a template for how the North (and the South) can avoid some of the harder consequences of Brexit.

This is what has informed Micheál Martin’s call for Northern Ireland to become a Special Economic Zone (NISEZ), a call he first made in early 2017 and has repeated several times since.

Some months ago, I helped put together a discussion paper, with a colleague, on how it might operate, based on how it has worked successfully elsewhere. An example, to use Hume-speak, of how you focus on common interests not different identities – the antithesis of how the UK is pursuing Brexit.

It is right this week that we take time to commemorate the achievements of 1998. Sadly, we cannot celebrate it as we might wish as the institutions are not up and running now and it has not always delivered on its potential but, we can still remind ourselves what is possible from all sides and almost all parties, when we focus on common interests and have the vision to look just a bit beyond the next electoral cycle.

While it is tempting to wish we could have another Hume or Mallon today, it is not necessary. The strength of their vision and the skill of them and others from Sinn Féin, the UUP, Alliance, the Women’s Coalition and all the other smaller parties, remain available to us via the architecture of the Good Friday Agreement.

So, let’s enjoy the commemorations this week and when they end, let us return to making what we have just commemorated, work.

Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Tuesday Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney

Eamonn Farrell/Rollingnews