'We wouldn't have touched Northern Ireland with a barge pole' if we knew how difficult it was - Good Friday negotiator.
"I'd been very, very ignorant - like everyone else in Britain - about Northern Ireland, until I was sent to the embassy in Washington in 1991," he said.
"So was sent over to Northern Ireland and I toured west Belfast with a bunch of squaddies on patrol in the back of an armoured car - getting out and walking along the streets. "I became a little bit addicted to it and would go back there as often as I could as part of my briefing when I came back from Washington"."I was by no means an expert; in fact, in some ways the fact that Tony Blair and I were both pretty ignorant about Northern Ireland was an advantage," he said.Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell arrive for a cabinet meeting in London, England in March 2007.
"But because the border in Northern Ireland was so permeable, people could live in Northern Ireland and they could feel Irish or they could feel British or they could feel both."The idea was to make politics in Northern Ireland boring so that people could talk about education, about health, about woodchips if necessary - but not about identity.Mr Powell said the approach by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was akin to 'vandalism'.
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