Peter Brooke: NI secretary inaugurated delicate peace process

Former Conservative cabinet minister has died aged 89, remembered for singing 'My Darling Clementine' on 'Late Late Show' on night seven killed by IRA bomb in Tyrone

Peter Brooke was British secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Picture: PA

The former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Brooke, who has died aged 89, ought to be remembered as the Northern Ireland secretary who inaugurated the province’s delicate peace process.

 But he will probably be recalled for briefly singing a song on The Late Late Show the night when seven Protestant construction workers were killed by an IRA bomb.

The singing of 'My Darling Clementine' on Gay Byrne’s show shortly after the atrocity, in January 1992, was a mistake for which Brooke apologised and offered his resignation, but he had an understandable excuse. Brooke had had a hard week working in Belfast and had barely heard about the attack in Tyrone. However, he was chiefly disconcerted 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 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 Democratic Unionists demanding his resignation. 

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.

Chris Heaton-Harris, the current Northern Ireland secretary, in a tribute on Monday tweeted: "As one of my predecessors, Peter played a pivotal role in laying the foundations of the peace process. We are indebted to him for his public service working for the betterment of everyone in NI."

'The first gentleman of politics'

Former foreign affairs minister Gerry Collins with the then-Northern Ireland secretary Peter Brooke  at the Northern Ireland Office in Whitehall, London. File picture: Tony Harris/PA Wire

Brooke served as Northern Ireland secretary under Margaret Thatcher and national heritage secretary under Major.

Major said: "Peter Brooke was a dear friend and colleague for many years — before and after our time in parliament.

"In all he did, Peter was the first gentleman of politics, which he elevated with his calm, gentle, yet tenacious character — not least with regard to his pivotal role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

"Honourable to the core, he was one of the most deep down decent people I have ever known. I was proud to call him my friend."

After the 1989 European 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 — and grew alarmed when he soon suggested in an interview that Sinn Féin might be included in future negotiations if the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire. 

He would later, out of office, speak in a BBC interview of Gerry Adams being a brave man to have entered negotiations.

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 Republic’s government towards negotiations: “talks about talks”, the so-called Brooke initiative.

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 the Republican lawyer Pat Finucane in front of his family in 1989.

Later moves and outside interests

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.

Brooke was disappointed but within six months he was back as culture secretary following David Mellor’s affair with the model Antonia de Sancha. 

In 1994, Brooke was again replaced and returned to the backbenches. He rather hoped to become the Commons speaker but this was thwarted by the election of Betty Boothroyd. He accepted her appointment with good grace and remained in the Commons for another seven years before stepping down and becoming a life peer. He also served in the House of Lords as chair of the Association of Conservative Peers.

Brooke’s list of outside interests accumulated: he became a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, supervising Dove Cottage, of the Churches Conservation Trust, and of the Cusichaca project, which seeks to preserve the Inca remains in Peru — his first wife had grown up there — and of various other arts projects, some in Wiltshire, where he had his home. In 1992 he was appointed Companion of Honour.

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 his sons, Jonathan, Daniel and Sebastian; sisters Honor and Margaret; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Guardian/PA