Jonathan Powell's lessons from Belfast

Jonathan Powell was chief of staff to Tony Blair throughout his ten-year premiership, and was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998. As Powell writes in the new issue of Prospect, the recent tenth anniversary of the agreement has given rise to a good deal of criticism, largely from right-wing commentators, that the British government allowed the extremists in Northern Ireland to emerge politically victorious, leaving the moderate parties on both the unionist and the republican sides to wither.

Powell responds to this critique in his Prospect piece, providing insight into the manoeuvrings and machinations that lay behind the political developments in the province. He argues that despite the unique nature of the Northern Ireland conflict, there are useful lessons to be drawn for other trouble spots in the world—and repeats his controversial point, first made on the Andrew Marr show a few weeks ago, that it is essential to have a channel in place for negotiation with the likes of the Taliban and al Qaeda.