Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

TWELVE The Establishment takes stock

AS Trimble and his supporters celebrated their victory, members of the British-Irish Association were enjoying their post-prandials in the very different surroundings of St John’s College Cambridge. Most of those who attended this annual conference of the great and the good fully expected that the winner would be the pragmatic John Taylor or perhaps even the liberal Ken Maginnis. But when Frank Millar, now the London editor of the Irish Times, conveyed the news in the bar, there was a general sense of horror.1 Many of the guests would have shared Marigold Johnson’s distaste for ‘that ghastly man Trimble’; now, they feared that the far right had taken over the UUP and that the victor of Drumcree would end the ‘peace process’.2 (She would later come to change her opinion of him for the better and believed he was the best choice of leader for that time.) The British and Irish states, though, could not afford such self-indulgence. Now, they had to work with him. Yes, there was apprehension – as always occurred with any ‘changing of the guard’ in the remarkably stable Northern Ireland party system. Indeed, one minister was reported as saying that ‘I choked on my Frosties’ when he read in a Times editorial that the newly elected UUP leader was a ‘moderate’.3 The minister in question was Michael Ancram, who now claims that he did so out of surprise rather than disgust.4

But when all was said and done, the British state’s private audit of Trimble’s election was more finely balanced than is commonly supposed. According to John Bruton’s contemporaneous note of a conversation with the British Prime Minister on 23 September 1995, ‘Major said David Trimble was a prickly man, into detail, not grand conceptions. Don’t reject his ideas too quickly…’ Woodrow Wyatt’s diary for 17 September 1995 records the British Prime Minister as observing that ‘there was nothing to worry about because he’s a clear thinker but it shows the IRA and Sinn Fein that he’s a tough customer. He said “He’s a lawyer and a very good one and, being on the right wing of the Ulster Unionists, he’ll be able to make them agree to things which his predecessor couldn’t.”’5 Likewise, Major’s Assistant Political Secretary, George Bridges, who was with his chief when news of Trimble’s victory came through, says that Major was not at all displeased.6 In so far as they were worried, the British Government’s main worry, says Patrick Mayhew, was Trimble’s weakness.7 They believed that he had won the election without the public support of a single MP, and amongst constituency chairmen only enjoyed the backing of his own in Upper Bann. For the last thing that the NIO mandarins wanted on their hands was ‘another Faulkner’. They wanted someone who could deliver the party, and it did not matter that much to them who that person was. A secondary worry was Trimble’s volatility, for he was seen as driven more by his temperament than his intellect (considerable as they conceded it was). But on the positive side of the ledger, as they saw it, was Trimble’s ambition. No. 10 was not sure where this ambition would lead. Some thought that Trimble wanted to be a Law Officer in a Conservative Government, but Mayhew was convinced that Trimble wanted to be Prime Minister of a devolved Northern Ireland (all of which Trimble says was then untrue).8 In this respect, Trimble was an improvement on the gentlemanly Molyneaux, who was too old for the position and who would not in any case have wanted it on grounds of integrationist principle. But there were also officials such as Peter Bell – the joint head of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat at Maryfield – who argued it was vital that the UUP be led by someone with intellectual self-confidence, rather than someone who would assume that any negotiation was bound to be disadvantageous to the Unionist cause. Elements of the system thus saw Trimble as much the most ‘modern’ of the Unionist MPs, along with Peter Robinson (on such occasions as the DUP deputy leader could escape from Dr Paisley’s shadow).9

These calculations, though, did not necessitate any fundamental reappraisal of the grand strategy of the British state. The officials had a long-held view of where a ‘balanced’ settlement between the two traditions lay. Trimble’s election did, though, affect the state’s tactics, most obviously towards the new Unionist leader himself. The NIO immediately contacted Rod Lyne, the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary for foreign affairs: they then began a pincer movement. It was reckoned that Trimble was open to flattery by No. 10 – few would be exempt from it, especially from a minor party at Westminster – and made sure to advertise that there was an open door to him whenever he needed it. Indeed, on one morning shortly after his election, Trimble spent three hours at No. 10 talking to Lyne, who provided him with further reassurance about the British Government’s intentions towards Northern Ireland: after the Molyneaux years, when the then leader kept the key details of discussions with Government very much to himself, Trimble found that the conversation made him more comfortable about state policy.10 This process of cultivation took place on many levels: Daphne Trimble remembers that at Major’s behest, Lyne gave the whole family a tour of No. 10, including the Cabinet Room, during the Christmas break.11 Meanwhile, Sir John Kerr, who had just taken up his position as British ambassador to the United States, wrote to Trimble suggesting that he come to America as soon as possible to meet with senior administration officials.12 Andrew Hunter, MP, the chairman of the Conservative backbench Northern Ireland Committee was asked twice by Mayhew for an assessment of Trimble’s personality and was then told to maximise his contact with the UUP leader. Later, his instructions became more explicit still: on 22 May 1996, Hunter noted following a meeting with Major that ‘we have a chance of winning the election if we can hang on until May next year. You can help us. Do everything you can to keep the Unionists happy.’ (Discussing the AIA, Major also told Hunter that ‘I’d like to tear it up … Margaret got it wrong … the government assured the UUP that there was nothing going on. All along Margaret was planning it.’) Trimble immediately grasped what was going on here and became defensive, thus making it very hard for Hunter to report back to Government ministers. ‘He didn’t know if I was a spy or a friend,’ says Hunter. ‘He knew that I was playing two roles and that I was partly a spy for the Government.’ Because of his status, Hunter was also regarded as being partly on ‘the team’ and frequently cleared his pronouncements with No. 10. Hunter now says that he is ‘ashamed’ to have been a conduit for so much Government ‘spin’ to the Unionists: this sense of guilt partly explains why he campaigned for a ‘No’ vote during the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement.13 It was the start of a journey which would ultimately take Hunter into the DUP.

The reason for the British state’s curiosity was that Trimble had immediately begun an almost Gorbachevian whirligig of activity. This was not so much antithetical to their interests as it was unpredictable. For if he had a detailed game plan, he certainly shared it with very few people, though the broad outlines – scrapping the AIA, regaining a measure of local control through devolved institutions, and ending the marginalisation of Unionism – were well enough understood. The frenetic round of meetings had been implicit in his Ulster Hall election speech, where he pledged to go anywhere, anytime to promote the Unionist cause (the only exception turned out to be the Forum on Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, which he declined to attend on the grounds that it was a ‘nationalist body’).14 His priority, as he saw it, was to free Unionism from ideological taboos which restricted its freedom of manoeuvre – such as the terms on which Unionist leaders could go to Dublin to talk to the Irish Government. The first opportunity to do this presented itself on the Monday following his election. Notwithstanding his unhappiness over Trimble’s election, one of the UUP’s best-known left-wingers, Chris McGimpsey, contacted Glengall Street with some important information. His fellow progressive, Proinsias de Rossa, the Irish Social Welfare Minister, was in town for one of his regular meetings with his colleagues in Democratic Left. Would a meeting be possible?15

This suggestion was, in the Northern Irish context, less improbable than it might at first glance appear. Democratic Left had emerged from the split in the old Workers’ Party, once the political wing of the Official IRA. These previously pro-Moscow Marxists were arguably the most anti-nationalist political force on both sides of the border and had been deadly rivals of the Provisionals (who had split from them in 1970–1). Many of them regarded the Provisionals as fascists, and the Provisionals reciprocated their loathing, accusing the ‘Stickies’ (as the Officials were nicknamed) of betrayal of national ideals. Prior to embracing constitutional politics, de Rossa himself had been a republican activist: in May 1957, he was arrested at Glencree in the Wicklow mountains, was remanded and then sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for declining to account to the Gardai for his movements – a crime under the Offences Against the State Act. Whilst in Mountjoy jail, the southern Government introduced internment against the IRA, which had begun an unsuccessful border campaign that lasted until 1962. De Rossa was thus kept inside – only this time at the camp run by the Irish Army at the Curragh, Co. Kildare, where he remained until February 1959. But now, he was one of three party leaders in the ‘Rainbow Coalition’ and a member of the Irish Cabinet’s Northern Ireland Committee. John Bruton, the Fine Gael Taioseach – who was more instinctively hostile to the most atavistic forms of nationalism than almost any other holder of that post – felt closer to de Rossa on northern questions than any other member of his Government. Indeed, a poll of UUP delegates conducted at the party’s annual conference by Liam Clarke of The Sunday Times showed that de Rossa was the Irish politician most trusted by Ulster Unionists – and, as such, way ahead of John Bruton, Dick Spring and John Hume. No doubt this was because of his anti-Provisional credentials.16

When Trimble learned that de Rossa was visiting Belfast, he immediately invited him to visit UUP headquarters: had any other Irish Cabinet minister been visiting he would not have moved as he did. Above all, this particular encounter had the virtue of sending out the signal that Unionists would talk to those who had genuinely embraced constitutionalism – whilst simultaneously annoying the Provisionals.17 Its significance was largely symbolic and little of substance was discussed: for his part, de Rossa recalls that ‘I wanted to knock for six the notion that David Trimble was an obstacle to peace. Ruth Dudley Edwards, who knew him socially had said as much and she was influential in this regard. I got some hassle over it, though Democratic Left loved it.’ De Rossa remembers that throughout the 30-minute meeting, Trimble displayed a nervous exuberance. But he was left with the distinct impression that the UUP leader was willing to talk to all political leaders in the Republic, including the Taoiseach.18 Whether or not the meeting seriously annoyed the Provisionals, it certainly set alarm bells ringing at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin. Fergus Finlay recalls that it was interpreted as an attempt to create a ‘back-channel’ to the Taoiseach at the expense of the Foreign Minister and Tanaiste, Dick Spring: Unionists saw Spring and his department as far more hostile to their interests than John Bruton.19 Shortly thereafter, Trimble also stated that ‘some unionists at the moment would have difficulty envisaging Gerry Adams coming to Glengall Street, but that’s because they see Adams as he is today. But if we have a situation where people have proved a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods and have shown that they abide by the democratic process, that will put them in the same position as Proinsias de Rossa is today.’20

The unhappinness of elements of the Irish Government over the meeting with de Rossa was one thing; a discontented UUP parliamentary caucus was quite another. It was not so much the substance of such exercises in free-thinking which vexed them: after all, as Trimble never tired of pointing out, Martin Smyth had been the first MP to declare that Unionists might have to talk to Sinn Fein, subject to a surrender of weapons.21 What really annoyed them was the manner in which the meeting took place. Trimble had met with de Rossa before he had met with his colleagues. Indeed, he did not meet the Westminster MPs for weeks afterwards – either collectively or one-on-one. Partly, it was his own personality. It was not his style to dabble in the little touches in man-management at which Molyneaux excelled, such as solicitous inquiries after wives and children. Indeed, Trimble says that he knew he had serious problems with his fellow MPs, but that it did not occur to him to meet with them until Parliament resumed in the following month. Ken Maginnis – who became one of Trimble’s strongest supporters – still thinks it was a cardinal error of judgment which has damaged him to this day.22 Trimble, though, believes that levels of resentment were such that he doubts it would have made very much difference.23 Certainly, in the case of William Ross, the gulf between the two men was probably so enormous as to be unbridgeable. Ross, a magnificently ‘thran’ sheep farmer from the Roe Valley near Dungiven, finished his elementary education at the age of fourteen and is very much out of the ‘School of Life’ Brigade; he would soon emerge as Trimble’s most forthright critic in the Westminster team. Ross regarded Trimble as a clever butterfly who moved from one group to the next – from Vanguard to the UUP to the Union Group to the Ulster Clubs and finally on to the Ulster Society. Although no fool, Ross’s conservatism was of the heart, not of the mind. This proved to be the essence of his differences with Trimble. He felt that Trimble had no gut understanding of the malignancy of republicans because he came from the most English part of Co. Down, where there was a tiny and largely quiescent nationalist population. By contrast, Ross’s native Dungiven, which was one-third Protestant when he grew up, was now almost completely Catholic and the local IRA units were much in evidence. Talk of a balanced accommodation, Ross believed, was all very well – unless you were on the receiving end of ethnic cleansing.24

The member of the parliamentary party with whom Trimble then felt more comfortable was his closest rival for the leadership – John Taylor. The two men had an older brother – younger brother relationship since Vanguard days: Taylor, first elected to Stormont in 1965, was then the longest-serving elected representative in Northern Ireland.25 But for all their compatibility, Taylor was also the only Unionist who could conceivably threaten his leadership. A role had, therefore, to be found for him. But of what kind? Trimble rang Taylor from his Lurgan office and asked to come to the latter’s home near Armagh. He knew that if Taylor had won, the older man would have appointed him as chief whip. But to have done the same for Taylor would have been beneath Taylor’s dignity. On the drive down, a solution occurred to him. He remembered that the parliamentary party was not governed by UUC rules. Harold McCusker had been elevated to the deputy leadership of the Unionist caucus in the 1982–6 Prior Assembly. Armed with this precedent, Trimble made his offer to Taylor. The Strangford MP duly accepted, though Trimble acknowledges that this action, too, inflamed some in the parliamentary party.26 But it was worth it: they could not decide Trimble’s fate, whereas Taylor, with his 333 third-round votes, easily could. Indeed, as Reg Empey recalls, ‘Trimble needed Taylor more than Taylor needed Trimble’.27