Unlike many reporters during the 1970s, broadcaster and author Gavin Esler had, as a BBC correspondent in Belfast at the height of The Troubles, a good relationship with the late Ian Paisley, which surprised him.
“He was generally very, very delightful to me. We had cups of tea. I had lunch with him a couple of times, and he would always pass the time of day,” says Esler.
Surprised by the welcome, Glasgow-born Esler one day asked him why he was being so nice, given Paisley’s long-standing antipathy towards the BBC, and, indeed, most journalists.
“Half my voters are Eslers,” replied Paisley, proving that all politics, as always, is local. Though a Scot, Esler’s connections with Northern Ireland were – and remain – strong. His grandmother was from Bushmills, Co Antrim, and he has relatives in Randalstown, just north of Lough Neagh.
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Today, Esler, who has written Britain Is Better than This, which reflects despairingly on the state of today’s United Kingdom, maintains his interest in Northern Ireland, one that began in the mid-1970s when he got a job with the Belfast Telegraph.
Back then, the Telegraph’s owners, Thomson Regional Newspapers, also owned The Scotsman in Edinburgh, so young reporters sometimes were able to indicate a preference for where they wanted to work.
Offered a job in Edinburgh, Esler remembers: “I said no, I didn’t really want to go to The Scotsman because I thought that would be boring. I wanted to go to the Belfast Telegraph. I can remember there was considerable degree of silence in the room.
“I don’t think there was a lot of competition for that in the 70s,” he says. Unusually, by then, his parents and sister, Claire, had long since moved from Scotland to Northern Ireland, where his father had moved for “a better job” in a building firm.
“They went on honeymoon to Buncrana [Co Donegal]. My father’s family, in particular, has relations across Northern Ireland,” says Esler. “He was classic postwar, upwardly mobile from working class to become a manager.”
“Ian Paisley, the son of Rev Paisley, says we are faced with an English nationalist government in Westminster.” Chris Patten and George Osborne think the same.
Forty years on, Elser remains interested in the area and the issues. Earlier this month, he travelled to Belfast to speak to an Ireland’s Future lunch in the Europa Hotel.
There, he recounted an encounter in the late-1970s with a loyalist paramilitary, who asked to meet him in an empty hall. Esler sat for 20 minutes waiting, wondering if he had made the right decision.
“He walked into the room and didn’t say hello, just walked straight up to me. The first words he said were, ‘I’m speaking to you as someone deeply involved in violence.’”
“I said something like, ‘Oh, hello. Shall we have a talk?’ We talked for quite a long time, actually. We met subsequently every few months after that,” he says.
The man had come to explain. Declaring himself to be “a counter-terrorist”, the man wanted to explain his view that nightly attacks were not mindless violence, but responses to IRA killings.
“His biggest fear was that British troops would be used to turn unionists out of the union of the United Kingdom. He feared that more than anything else,” says Esler.
“As a Scot with Ulster roots, it was a real eye-opener for me. What would drive somebody – who I presume, in a different life, in a different situation, would have just been a decent, ordinary individual – to violence?
I said to some of the former paramilitary people that an ostrich strategy doesn’t even work for ostriches
— Esler
By then, loyalist gangs – the Shankill Butchers, but others, too – were carrying out brutal sectarian killings regularly, “picking people up just because they were Catholic or thought to be Catholics”.
Esler did not accept the man’s arguments, but he understood the fear behind them. Today, that same fear expressed by a paramilitary decades ago is replicated in many strands of unionism and loyalism as arguments about a united Ireland circulate ever more freely.
Two years ago, he returned to Belfast for a series of detailed conversations with former loyalist paramilitaries, who were extremely concerned about the state of the UK.
“They wouldn’t be particularly friends of Sinn Féin, but that’s not who they were talking about. They were talking about feeling undermined by Westminster.
“I think that’s a realistic fear,” he says, adding that he went to speak to Ireland’s Future to encourage unionists and loyalists to engage in conversations about the future.
The reality, says the former BBC Newsnight presenter, is that the ties that bind England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together in the United Kingdom are fraying, if not to breaking point, then significantly.
“It is not people from Sinn Féin or people who are Scottish nationalists who are making the case that the union has been undermined.” Instead, it is people who believe in the union, such as former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and his party colleague, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford.
“Ian Paisley, the son of Rev Paisley, says we are faced with an English nationalist government in Westminster,” he adds. Chris Patten and George Osborne think the same, he says.
“[They] need to think more positively. What do they actually want and how can they possibly achieve it? That may mean having to reach an accommodation with what could be a Sinn Féin-led government in the Irish Republic.
“And it could be a majority, or a government led by Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, too. That’s something that I think unionists may fear, but they may have to come to terms with that,” he says.
He understands the reluctance of unionists and loyalists to engage: “[But] I said to some of the former paramilitary people that an ostrich strategy doesn’t even work for ostriches.
“If you put your head in the sand, you never know what’s going to come up behind you. It’s not for me to tell people what to do, but I think if you don’t engage, you may be really surprised.”
The state of the UK is going to bear down on the debate, he says. “Growing numbers of people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland no longer wish to be part of our union.
“Significant numbers in England don’t seem to care if the others leave. Where once we had delusions of grandeur, we now often have delusions of competence,” he writes in his book.
Esler’s main argument in his book – that the UK needs a written constitution – is esoteric, he admits, and will be difficult for many to grasp.
However, it is crucial to explaining the sins of the recent past, both before and after the Brexit referendum, and lays bare the dangers of the near future.
For centuries the lack of a written constitution was argued as one of the UK’s key points of advantage, offering remarkable flexibility.
If that was true, says Esler, it was true only in the era of so-called “good chaps”, when conventions, however imperfect in their design or execution, were generally accepted.
“You didn’t lie in parliament. If you did, you resigned. If something went wrong in your department, you resigned, even if you weren’t responsible for it,” he says.
I don’t think that there is a kind of a moral crisis about people lying any more than they used. There is certainly no evidence for it
In the past decade, however, there has been “a behavioural change” that has allowed people, especially Boris Johnson, to demolish long-established conventions.
“We don’t have very many good chaps. We’ve got a lot of fairly rotten people in parliament,” he says. “The problem is structural. It’s partly due to British complacency and it’s due to a sense of British exceptionalism, and it’s also due to a kind of ignorance about our history and the place in the world.”
And it continues, even though Johnson is gone: “This week we had a prime minister who said that we can just declare by law that Rwanda is safe. This is like the papacy in the 17th century telling Galileo that the Earth can’t move around the sun because they’ve decided it’s not.”
The last decade has been bad for the UK’s internal cohesion and its standing in the world, but it could “get even worse if we had somebody not as indolent, and not as narcissistic as Boris Johnson” who wanted to take the UK down previously untrodden paths – “[if it was] somebody with a real political agenda, who really believed in some kind of weird ideology. Boris Johnson didn’t have an ideology, except that Boris Johnson was in power,” he says.
He wonders why the British public, and their counterparts in the United States, tolerate lies from some political leaders when they would not accept similar conduct in their day-to-day lives, and the evidence shows that they would not.
“I don’t think that there is a kind of a moral crisis about people lying any more than they used. There is certainly no evidence for it. In fact, it is actually quite the opposite. I find people very often incredibly helpful, ridiculously polite and constantly say ‘Sorry’ when they bump into you. Maybe that’s another book: “Why Do Decent People Let Shits Run the Country?”
Britain Is Better Than This by Gavin Esler is published by Apollo
