Humphrey Atkins

Humphrey Atkins, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, is presented through moments when political decisions turn on uncertain predictions: whether Dolours Price could safely be released, and whether the hunger strike at Long Kesh would end with Bobby Sands or continue through successive deaths. The book does not give him a private interior life or a broad political biography. Instead, it shows him as a government minister receiving warnings, conveying the uncertainty surrounding Sands’s condition, and weighing the possible consequences of a strike whose participants were taking turns to starve.

Office and the Price sisters

Atkins enters the account first as the recipient of a letter from Fenner Brockway about Dolours and Marian Price. Brockway told him that both sisters had come to believe the violence of the Irish Republican Army was wrong. He also warned that release might expose them to danger: if they were freed on the basis that they had repudiated their earlier actions, he believed the organisation might shoot them. In Brockway’s view, prison could therefore be safer than freedom. The letter casts Atkins not as the author of this appeal but as the minister to whom its political and personal stakes were addressed.

Brockway later made a direct appeal to Margaret Thatcher on Dolours’s behalf. He portrayed the sisters’ involvement in the London bombing as the product of youthful emotion and said they had undertaken it only on the understanding that no one would be harmed. He presented their rejection of violence as sincere and promised that Dolours, if released, would urge Catholics to refrain from it. Atkins is part of the surrounding political setting for this campaign, but the account does not describe his response to Brockway’s earlier letter or establish that he personally accepted Brockway’s case.

The hunger-strike crisis

The clearest recorded exchange involving Atkins took place on 25 April 1981, after Sands had been elected to Parliament on 10 April following forty-one days without food. His election had not secured the demands of the hunger strikers, and his health was deteriorating. Thatcher asked Atkins about the likely time remaining. He reported that Sands was determined and relayed estimates that he might have only two or three days, while making clear that no one could know with confidence. The exchange places Atkins in the role of conveying the limits of the available forecast at a moment when the government was confronting an immediate crisis.

Atkins also described why Sands’s death might not resolve the confrontation. Because the hunger strikers were staggered, he warned, another prisoner could be expected to die a few weeks later. Even if the government endured the backlash and adverse publicity following Sands’s death, the sequence might continue. He hoped the pattern could be stopped before it became a repeated cycle and suggested that there might be a weak link among the strikers. His assessment made the timing of the deaths central: the crisis was not simply whether Sands would survive, but whether his death would be followed by others.

Thatcher considered whether the Irish Republican Army leadership might halt the strike if several prisoners died without winning concessions. Atkins’s response indicated how unattractive that prospect looked; it did not offer a confident prediction that the leadership would stop. The exchange therefore records a government trying to reason through possible outcomes without a dependable way to know which one would occur. Atkins’s contribution is practical and conditional: he lays out the likely succession of deaths, while the conversation leaves unresolved whether that forecast would change the course of the strike.

Release, suspicion, and the limits of the record

When Dolours was released, the decision provoked public anger. Ian Paisley called the suspension of her sentence an outrage and described her as a continuing danger. Other observers alleged that Atkins had been deceived by the Price sisters, treating their eating disorders as a calculated means of securing release rather than as consequences of hunger striking and force-feeding. They also speculated that Dolours’s release formed part of a secret arrangement connected to Sands and the other prisoners at Long Kesh. These were accusations and suspicions reported in the book, not established explanations of the decision.

The contrast between Brockway’s appeal and the public reaction makes Atkins’s position in the narrative especially exposed. The case for release rested on claims of changed belief and a future commitment to nonviolence; its opponents interpreted the same outcome as evidence of manipulation or a hidden bargain. The available account does not show Atkins resolving those competing claims, nor does it establish what part he played in the decision. It does, however, place him near two consequential uncertainties: whether repudiation of violence could be trusted, and whether the government could prevent a hunger strike from producing a series of deaths. His narrative role is defined by that proximity to decisions whose consequences were easier to anticipate than to control.