Ian Paisley: Belfast, Ireland, February 2010

The sense of menace that envelops Western cities was sharply manifest last Monday when the passengers crammed into our Air India plane were suddenly ordered back into their seats after landing at Heathrow. It wasn’t because Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s sinister “Dr No”, who was said to have lit the first fuse of the civil war I covered in the late Sixties, was about to quit politics. This time, the terror that holds London to ransom was in our midst.

Though the faithful spoke in hushed tones of “the Reverend Doctor Paisley”, his religious credentials prompted as much scepticism as his academic pretensions. But not for Malcolm Muggeridge, the born-again Christian journalist who had not yet discovered Mother Teresa but was already in his ecstatic phase and planning a film on Paisley’s brand of Protestant militancy. “The good doctor fascinates me, doesn’t he you?” “Saint Mugg” (Muggeridge’s nickname) gushed as we waited one afternoon in Paisley’s anteroom in Belfast, the province’s ravaged capital. I was spared the embarrassment of replying because the man himself boomed in just then and was about to introduce us in his gravelly Irish voice when Muggeridge plunged me into worse embarrassment.

“But of course I know him. I was his deputy editor!” he oozed. I was too taken aback to reply. Though he had, indeed, worked for The Statesman in Calcutta, he left at least three years before I was born. That was not the devotional Muggeridge’s only terminological inexactitude. Gentlemen didn’t need labels in those days and there was no need to spell out who would stand in for the editor and take over if need be. Muggeridge represented the paper at the viceregal court in Delhi and Simla; in the head office in Calcutta he wrote editorials and was one of several assistant editors. Such informality lasted until the baboos (and I use the word in the colonial British sense and not to mean civil servants as in the parlance of today’s baboos) came along.

Earlier that day in Belfast I had sat quietly in the congregation of Paisley’s chapel for my first glimpse of the man. There were two reasons for this unorthodox approach. Paisley was a latter-day F.E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead) who was credited not only with saying “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, but with smuggling in guns for the purpose while the government turned a blind eye, and I wanted to experience at first hand the mesmerizing charisma of which so many tales were told. Second, I was told he didn’t meet the press.

It was a session well spent. “’Ave yer ’eard?” the woman on my right hissed across me to the woman on my left. “Papa’s forbidden Papists to take honey because it comes from the bees!” Both women dissolved in laughter. Papa was the Pope; “bees” stood for the Royal Ulster Constabulary B-Specials whom Roman Catholics accused of repression.

Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority was probably just as obdurate. Religion defined Belfast’s Falls and Shanklin road ghettos and only a taxi driver of the right faith would take you there. There had been a pitched battle the night before, and I gathered the Clonard monastery was involved. Visiting there, I had a job avoiding being dragged into the confessional box. When the stocky monk in black at last accepted I was a journalist and not a penitent, he sat down patiently to answer questions. Where had he been the night before, I asked, not for a moment dreaming of the candour with which I would be rewarded. “And where else would I be but with my flock out in front?” the priest retorted. Hitching up his cassock, he had manned the barricades all night.

Paisley was too sophisticated to be as directly engaged. But as a Catholic priest in Singapore observed with delicious irony many years later, he had single-handedly done more for Irish unity than anyone else. The priest meant that revulsion provoked by Paisley’s rhetoric had pushed all decent Protestants into seeking a compromise.

Suddenly, Paisley strode heavily on stage, yelled “Hallelujah!” with outstretched arms and flopped down on his knees. After a period of silence, he jumped to his feet and with another dramatic “Hallelujah!” burst into torrential speech. There were strangers in the room, he bawled, not from across the border but from far-off lands beyond the seas, to them “Hallelujah!” and a warm welcome. It was no surprise he had spotted me for I stood out then in a UK audience as I would not now. His threat followed his welcome. “This is a house of god. Reporters are warned they will not be allowed to take notes or pictures. The moment they try, they will be thrown out and their notebooks, pens and cameras confiscated!” There was a hint of physical chastisement.

Afterwards, he reminded me of the Pope’s sinister designs on India. “Why did Papa go there?” he asked rhetorically. One of his entourage told me Northern Ireland’s Catholics were not loyal to the Crown. “It’s only the half-crown they’re after, mister,” he sniggered, referring to the coinage of the time.

Paisley relented sufficiently in the end for the Democratic Unionist Party he founded and led to enter into alliance with Sinn Féin, the Catholic party and political front for the Irish Republican Army. He and the Provisional IRA leader, Martin McGuinness, became so close people called them the “Chuckle Brothers”. But Protestant hard-liners splintered off to found the Traditional Ulster Voice. Whether or not more leave when his son inherits his mantle, Northern Ireland’s age of the Protestant warrior is over.

But violence isn’t. As usual with a planeload of Indians, we were pushing and shoving with the huge bags that should never have been allowed on board as hand baggage when the captain peremptorily ordered us to sit down at once. No one had permission to get out, he bellowed; everyone should sit down in the original seat for which he had a boarding pass. As the instructions were repeated in hectoring tones, I forced the couple next to me back into their seats. They had made my eight hours in the air a torment for they spoke only Punjabi, had never been in the air, leave alone abroad, and were bursting with insatiable curiosity.

Six burly Brits in navy blue uniforms and unseeing eyes, Border Agency written on their chests, appeared and made a beeline for a tall, lanky young man sitting by himself in the more spacious area by the emergency exit. I had noticed his jeans, jacket, tie and mop of curls earlier as I stretched my limbs, trying to place him in the social matrix so beloved of us all. I failed for he was smart and seedy, debonair and downcast at the same time. Now he was being taken off the plane without a word said, without a hand laid on him as he walked along the aisle among the policemen. The last I saw of him was through the glass on our way to Arrivals and Immigration, a lost figure slumped in a chair, the guardians of his person looming over him.

How had they known exactly which seat to target? “We know all about the passengers before they land!” chuckled the cheerful young black Immigration officer. He thought it a better idea to pick up suspects on board before they landed but as to what they were suspected of he wouldn’t hazard a guess. It used to be drugs; then it became terrorism.

British politics may not seem the same without the burly dog-collared mastiff of a firebrand who has decided to call it a day at 84. But whether he was trafficker or terrorist, our flying companion demonstrated there are inheritors enough to carry on the legacy of menace.