Patrick Mayhew, Lord Mayhew of Twysden, the former Northern Ireland secretary, who has died aged 86, was one of the Tory party’s last old-style “toffs” in the Commons, before they all but disappeared following the landslide defeat of 1997. Mayhew retired from the Commons before that election and was given a life peerage. He had served as a minister throughout the Thatcher and Major years. His style was detached and pragmatic. He believed, as he told the party conference one year, quoting Edmund Burke: “All government ... every virtue, every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.”
But it was Mayhew who, as solicitor general, led the controversial prosecution of the civil servant Sarah Tisdall under the Official Secrets Act in 1984 for leaking details of the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain to the Guardian, resulting in her being sentenced to six months in prison. He was also at the centre of the Westland helicopters affair, two years later, which shook the Thatcher government.
Mayhew’s nine years’ service as a government law officer – with four years as solicitor general during Thatcher’s second term, then five years as attorney general – suited his semi-detachment from Thatcherite Conservatism, since the legal posts are supposed to stand apart from political partisanship. But as a descendant of an Anglo-Irish family, he coveted the Northern Ireland office and finally was given it by John Major after his surprise election victory in 1992. Mayhew’s stiff charm did not beguile either side in the Troubles, but his pragmatism in pursuing dialogue with the Dublin government helped to pave the way for the Good Friday agreement, reached subsequently by the Blair government.
Patrick’s father, George Mayhew, was a decorated army officer turned oil executive; his mother, Sheila, was a member of the Roche family, members of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy who had lived amicably enough with their Catholic neighbours in County Cork for seven centuries and had been sympathetic to Irish republicanism during the struggle for independence. The Irish republic was where Patrick spent childhood holidays, learning to ride and becoming a keen huntsman. He was also a descendant of the Victorian Liberal chancellor of the exchequer George Goschen and of the radical journalist Henry Mayhew, who investigated the life of the labouring poor in mid-19th-century London.
Educated at Tonbridge public school, Mayhew studied law at Balliol College, Oxford, and, demonstrating his interest in politics, became president of both the university Conservative association and the Oxford Union debating society. He undertook his national service as a subaltern with the Royal Dragoon Guards and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, determining to establish himself as a barrister before diversifying into politics. He did, however, fight the marginal seat of Dulwich in the 1970 election, before taking silk in 1972 and securing one of the safest Tory constituencies in Britain, at Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1974. He held it with large majorities comfortably for 23 years.
Mayhew was a ponderous speaker. “I think the law is a bad training for politics,” he said in an interview. “It diminishes hunch but it does teach you the importance of words and their use. For the first two years, every time I spoke in the Commons I made a court of appeal speech and spoke as if I had a bad smell under my nose.” Some of those he dealt with felt the sense of lawyerly haughtiness never left him.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Mayhew was inserted into the Department of Employment as parliamentary undersecretary, supposedly to inject rigour and backbone into Jim Prior, who was seen as a notorious “wet”. But if this were so, it was a misjudgment. Mayhew was not a Thatcherite – his mentor was the patrician William Whitelaw – and he fully supported Prior’s gradualist approach to trade union reform. Within two years, as the wets were culled, Mayhew was nevertheless moved to become Whitelaw’s minister of state, adding his legal nous to Whitelaw’s political skills at the Home Office. He it was who had to advise his boss that Michael Fagan, who had broken into Buckingham Palace and sat on the Queen’s bed with her still in it, had not actually broken any law. He gave the young Major his first step on the ministerial ladder by making him his parliamentary private secretary.
In 1983, following Thatcher’s landslide victory, Mayhew was knighted and became solicitor general, rather reluctantly: “I came into politics to get out of the law, but if you are asked to do a job by the Queen’s first minister then you do it.” The Tisdall prosecution came the following year – the Guardian had not destroyed documents that the junior civil servant had leaked and was forced to hand them over to the government, which was then able to track her down.
This was followed less successfully from the government’s point of view the following year with the prosecution of another civil servant, Clive Ponting, for leaking documents about the sinking of the Argentinian battleship Belgrano during the Falklands war. In his case the documents were sent to the Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell and Ponting was acquitted. In 1987, in a further attempt by the Thatcher administration to crack down on bad news, there was the Spycatcher affair, the vain attempt to prevent publication of the memoirs of the former cold war spy Peter Wright. Mayhew as a law officer was implicated in all these decisions: legally, he may have been correct but politically they were both embarrassing and damaging to the government.
It was not as if the Thatcher government was above selectively leaking confidential information itself. Also in 1987, a leak similar to those of Tisdall and Ponting produced a very different outcome during the Westland dispute. During a takeover battle for the helicopter company, Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary, favoured a European consortium, whereas Leon Brittan, the trade secretary, with the support of the prime minister, preferred an American bidder. The row spilled out of cabinet and became rough and highly public.
Asked privately to give his legal opinion, Mayhew wrote to Heseltine broadly endorsing the correctness of his conduct but adding that his presentation of the case contained material inaccuracies. The letter, with its damning phrase highlighted, was leaked to the media with Thatcher’s permission, intensifying the storm. Mayhew and Sir Michael Havers, the attorney general, neither of whom had been party to the leak, were furious and demanded an inquiry, even threatening to send the police into Downing Street to investigate. The government rocked but the storm dissipated following Heseltine and Brittan’s resignations and the Labour opposition’s failure to hold the PM to account.
Mayhew’s legalism often seemed too flexible in the government’s interest, for example his refusal to overturn a decision by the director of public prosecution not to charge 11 RUC police officers implicated in the shoot-to-kill policy in Armagh uncovered by the Stalker inquiry. This caused him problems when he became Northern Ireland secretary a few years later.
As a law officer, Mayhew was responsible for the abolition of the notorious “sus” law, which had enabled police to stop young, usually black, men on the off-chance that they were up to no good. And he was the originator of the Crown Prosecution Service. He was an opponent of capital punishment, though he did vote for it once in the case of terrorism in the febrile and populist early days of Thatcher’s first administration, a decision he later regretted.
Following Major’s electoral victory in 1992, when Mayhew became Northern Ireland secretary, he was confident that his Anglo-Irish roots gave him special insights into the problem. But that was not how politicians north and south of the border saw it. Albert Reynolds, the Irish taoiseach, wondered why London kept appointing “west Britons” instead of English people, while to the Ulster Protestants he was too English and not understanding enough of them. They found him stiff and pompous: “Arrogant I am. And so be it,” he once told a journalist testily. But he was even-handed in his criticisms, castigating republicans and loyalists in equal measure. With repeated IRA campaigns – bombings of the City of London and in Manchester and Warrington, all of which caused casualties – there seemed little scope for progress, even though he offered talks to Sinn Féin if the terrorism stopped.
Both sides were, however, starting to weary of a conflict that neither could win. Mayhew helped to initiate the faltering first steps to dialogue with the Dublin government – “talks about talks” in Downing Street – and Major offered the possibility of the appointment of an American peace envoy. The constant pressure was exhausting, though the patient approach eventually led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998.
There was a first visit by the Irish president, Mary Robinson, north of the border; a drive to promote Catholic police officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Northern Ireland Office; money for Irish language lessons in schools; and the statement that the government was neutral about whether the province remained part of the UK, depending on the will of its people. “There is a huge prize for Ireland if hatreds and suspicions can be mitigated and togetherness can be engendered slowly,” said Mayhew.
He retired from the Lords last year.
In 1963 Mayhew married Jean Gurney, who became first a religious education teacher at a London secondary school and was later ordained a priest in the Church of England. She and their four sons survive him.