A further phase of the British Government's role opened with the arrival of Peter Brooke as Secretary of State in July 1989. The son of a former Conservative Home Secretary (Henry Brooke) at a time when the Home Office still handled Government relations in Northern Ireland, and with substantial family links with Ireland, Brooke was one of those unusual figures thrown up by the Conservative Party from time to time (and probably now obsolete). Scholarly, courteous and honourable, with a manner vaguely suggestive of the Bench of Bishops, Peter Brooke concealed an ingenious and analytical mind behind an avuncular exterior. His manners and methods were in the Whitelaw mode. So far, in my view, history has not done him justice. A long shadow was cast over his reputation by an absurd episode during the Gay Byrne television show in Dublin, when his innate courtesy, allied to discomfort about a previous line of questioning, led him to break into song on the day of a notorious PIRA multiple murder. It was, as he readily admitted, a real error of judgement, but it was peculiarly unlovely to witness those local politicians who had hitherto found him consistently courteous and helpful elbowing each other out of the way to cast the first stone.

His major contribution to political development was to make it absolutely clear that the British Government regarded the pursuit of the republican objective of Irish unity, if undertaken by peaceful and constitutional means alone, to be as legitimate as the defence of unionist views. In a particularly controversial and significant statement (later to be re-echoed both in the Downing Street declaration and in the Good Friday Agreement itself), Brooke affirmed that the British Government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic role in Northern Ireland’. These few words were to be construed and misconstrued as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls. Irish commentators were sometimes prone to insert a non-existent comma between the words ‘selfish’ and ‘strategic’, with the implication that the British Government had no interest whatever in Northern Ireland's destiny. Like many high-profile statements too often interpreted out of context, the controversial phrase needs to be viewed against the wider argument of the whole ‘Whitbread’ speech (as it came to be called).