IN RECENT WEEKS Jonathan Powell, Britain’s national security adviser, has emerged as a crucial participant in negotiations over a possible Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. He is one of many senior advisers from the 1997-2007 Blair administration to have taken up government positions under today’s Labour prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Mr Powell served as Sir Tony Blair’s chief of staff throughout his ten years in office.

A key experience for him then was peacemaking in Northern Ireland. He was the main No 10 negotiator throughout the tense talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. One lesson Mr Powell drew from this was the importance of bringing in all sides, even those considered terrorists. In Northern Ireland that meant talking to the Irish Republican Army, particularly its deputy leader, Martin McGuinness, as well as to the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. A second lesson was the enormous value of direct person-to-person contacts through shuttle diplomacy.

Mr Powell carried these lessons into Inter Mediate, a charitable group on conflict resolution that he set up in 2011. He was asked by David Cameron to try to make peace in post-Qaddafi Libya in 2014, but this proved beyond even him. A more successful assignment last year was to negotiate a deal ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius in exchange for a 99-year lease on the American base at Diego Garcia, the biggest island of the Chagos Archipelago. The deal now seems likely to pass muster despite much controversy, including criticism from some in the Trump administration.

Those who have dealt with him say that Mr Powell can be blunt and even abrasive, and sometimes talks like a machinegun. But he also stays calm, is often persuasive and is prepared to sit through lengthy negotiations. He learnt from Northern Ireland the value of confidence-building measures to keep talks going and to coax those who might otherwise prefer to continue fighting into understanding that there may be a better case for some mutual concessions to resolve conflicts.

As national security adviser, Mr Powell has applied the same habits and lessons to talks over a ceasefire in Ukraine. He has been back and forth to Washington, DC, keeping in close touch with Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. He has similarly shuttled to and from Kyiv to talk to President Volodomyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. If a ceasefire deal is eventually agreed over Vladimir Putin’s initial objections, it will bear Mr Powell’s fingerprints as much as anybody’s.

As well as being national security adviser, Mr Powell is the foreign-policy adviser in No 10. He has long been close to Sir Keir’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, as well as to his pick as ambassador in Washington, Peter Mandelson. Yet combining the two roles will test him, and a new adviser to No 10 is likely to be chosen soon. Mr Powell is not overtly political despite his links to many in the Labour Party. He has described himself as “of the establishment but anti-establishment”. He is careful to keep a good relationship with David Lammy, the foreign secretary, but this too may prove tough to sustain as Sir Keir, like many previous prime ministers, engages more fully and personally in foreign policy.

Mr Powell’s background is key to both his clout and his performance. After a short stint as a journalist, he joined the British Foreign Office in 1979. He helped negotiate Hong Kong’s handover and was later posted to Washington, where he made it his business to get to know Bill Clinton before the 1992 presidential election. He has a long and easy familiarity with many in the foreign-policy establishments in both Britain and America.

He also has an interesting family background. His father, an air vice-marshal, was once himself a target of the IRA. His older brother, Charles Powell (a name he pronounces, unlike Jonathan, as “Pole”), was chief No 10 foreign-policy adviser under Margaret Thatcher, to whom he and his wife became very close. The younger Mr Powell may get a better press than some others thanks partly to his links with journalists. He is married to Sarah Helm, a long-time correspondent for the Independent and a successful author. Sarah’s brother, Toby, is the political editor of the Observer newspaper. And Toby’s own ex-wife, Emma Tucker, is now editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Powell tries hard to stay out of the limelight. But his media contacts may help him to weather some recent controversy over No 10’s decision not to let him appear publicly before parliamentary committees. The years ahead will surely test him even more; but, for now at least, most of the publicity surrounding him is largely favourable.■

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