Will Peter secure peace in Ireland?

David Trimble and his advisers have long hoped for Mandelson to replace Mowlam, but the reality may surprise them, argues John Lloyd

Peter Mandelson regarded his grandfather, Herbert Morrison - who was the minister in charge of the creation of the 1951 Festival of Britain - as an inspiration for him when he was in charge of the Millennium Dome. Will he do the same in his new post? Morrison was never "in charge" of Northern Ireland - but as home secretary and one of the most powerful members of the cabinet, his views carried great weight, and he was strongly unionist.

Before the war - in common with most Labour people of the time - he had "instinctive prejudices against unionists", according to his biographer Bernard Donoghue. But the experience of the war, where the Ulster Protestant community distinguished itself and the Irish Republic remained neutral, coloured his perceptions.

After the war, "Morrison wrote a memorandum for the cabinet in which he advocated total support for partition whatever the consequences for Britain's relationship with the Republic", writes Peter Rose in his recently published book about Ireland and the Labour Party, How the Troubles Came to Northern Ireland.

Mandelson could not follow that line, even if he wished to. Indeed, his manner of working would be at least to appear to do the opposite. The Irish public relations adviser and journalist Eoghan Harris, a keen admirer of Mandelson, sees him as a dialectician - who poses a thesis and an antithesis before he goes for the synthesis. On that view, says Harris, he is likely to prove his good faith with the nationalists and republicans in order to show he is no Ulster Unionist stooge.

But the Unionist leader, David Trimble, is unambiguously pleased. His relationship with Mo Mowlam was not always terrible, but it was generally bad. They did not help each other much, especially in the past year, as the Belfast Agreement has strained at its limits to keep the Ulster Unionists talking with Sinn Fein.

In welcoming the Patten report on the Royal Ulster Constabulary last month, Mowlam proved again to unionists that she was unable to grasp what to them is a central moral issue - that the RUC was the defender of civil society for 30 years, has suffered more than 300 casualties and is now to be radically reconstituted under a new name and with new insignia without an adequate recognition of that role. They saw her, at root, as a nationalist.

Trimble and his advisers have long hoped for Mandelson to replace Mowlam - believing that his closeness to the Prime Minister and his instincts on the province will mean that their efforts to reform the Unionist Party into a modern, non- sectarian force that can work with nationalists, so long as they have no private armies on which to call, will get the recognition lacking so far.

Trimble has no real supporters in the upper echelons of Labour apart from the Prime Minister; he hopes now to have two.

Yet he may be disappointed. There are two competing views on Northern Ireland in Labour governing circles - which are, however, rarely discussed openly. The first - and probably most popular - is that governing the province is a holding exercise; that Irish nationalism is the coming political force, but that it must be civilised and channelled along democratic paths and persuaded to wait until either demographic change or unionist apathy allows a referendum on the future of the province to be won in favour of unity. While this is going on, republicans must be induced to stop bombing, especially on the UK mainland.

The second view is that Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK for an indefinite period and that the main business of both the British and Irish governments and the province's parties is to ensure that political and social life is opened to all, and that remaining discrimination is stripped away.

On this view, the border will become less important because it is observed; politics will gradually cease to revolve around its existence; and cross-community politics, based more on economic than on clan interests, will slowly emerge.

Mowlam was unclear on many things, but she was clear enough on this. She was part of the first view. Nothing she said or did gave any indication at all that she wished to see Northern Ireland remain British. As Northern Ireland Secretary, she could have articulated the kind of inclusive society that new Labour was proposing in every other part of the UK; and could have made war on the anomalies between the province and the mainland in the interests of making all its people feel they had a real stake in it.

She could, for example, have counselled lifting the ban on the Northern Irish joining the Labour Party. She did not.

She acted, however, under the Prime Minister's direction. Few cabinet ministers have been more comprehensively upstaged by their leader than she. The Belfast Agreement of April 1998 was the work of Tony Blair and his aides; the efforts to keep it going in spring and early summer were also overseen by the Prime Minister, in an extraordinary display of micro-management.

Blair has, recklessly, according to some of his aides, put himself at the head of the project to bring a lasting peace; now, with his main lieutenant in the post, he may be able to step back.

But not too far. This will still be a Prime Ministerial show, as it has been since the beginning. Trimble put a good deal of faith in Blair. It has been strained recently, as he has felt under increasing pressure to enter an executive with Sinn Fein before he receives any guarantees on arms decommissioning. He looks to the new Northern Ireland Secretary to grasp his dilemma: that participation in such a cabinet while the IRA remains a private army in the wings is politically undeliverable, that this is the largest impasse in Northern Ireland, and that its resolution depends on Sinn Fein being clear on its commitment to democratic means.

Trimble wants Mandelson to bring the Prime Minister back to what he appeared to unionists to have begun office with - a real commitment to making the Union work, for all.

There is no question that Peter Mandelson can grasp this dilemma. But will he wish to? Or will he take the same view as Mowlam - that the Union is, in the long run, dead? Will he be the Northern Ireland Secretary who finally sees that only through a fully democratic Union can peace come, eventually? Or will he go for a quicker fix?

Morrison, now, is little help; the war is history for much of the province, as it is for the mainland; and loyalty, patriotism and the Union are all seen as rather odd. The great moderniser must see for himself the modern importance of Northern Ireland - that old feuds and past miseries cannot outweigh the imperatives of a settled border, a democratic settlement and a recognition of pluralism within a stable state. These are large issues; he can rise to them, if he wishes to.

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