The Conservative former cabinet minister Jim Prior has died aged 89, according to the official website for parliament.
Lord Prior served for five years in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Originally appointed employment secretary when she became prime minister in 1979, he was moved to the post of Northern Ireland secretary two years later.
The move was widely regarded as a sign of her frustration at his refusal to press ahead more quickly with her trade union reforms. Thatcher was deeply suspicious of his “wet” tendencies and opposition to her monetarist economic policies.
Prior was sent to Belfast just a month after the 1981 republican hunger strike in Maze prison and spent the next three years in the region. His tenure as secretary of state came at one of the most turbulent and violent periods in the Troubles.
During his time in the post there were a number of high-profile Provisional IRA attacks in Northern Ireland and England, including the 1982 Hyde Park bombings in London and the attack outside Harrods in the Knightsbridge area of the city in 1983. Also in 1982, the Irish National Liberation Army murdered 17 people in a bomb attack on the Droppin’ Well bar and disco in Ballykelly, County Derry.
In 1982, Prior had tried in vain to hand back some power to politicians in Northern Ireland with his plan for “rolling devolution” at Stormont. But the plan failed because the main nationalist party at the time, the Social Democratic and Labour party, boycotted the assembly.
The SDLP’s line was in large part in response to the rise of modern Sinn Féin, which was rising on the tide of nationalist anger over the deaths of 10 hunger strikers at Maze prison. The party also opposed Prior’s plan because the political agreement contained no input from the Irish government and did not result in a power-sharing settlement like the failed 1974 Sunningdale agreement.
His failure to restore devolved power was compounded by the trials of a strict security regime he lived under as Northern Ireland secretary. For three months in the early days of office, Prior was not allowed to sleep over in the region because, in his own words: “They [republicans] were trying to blow me up.”
