Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Like McCusker – who was known to leap over fences – Trimble set a ferocious pace on the hustings; indeed, the first remark which many people made was how much he physically resembled his predecessor (a few were upset that he did not opt to live in the constituency, because he ‘did not want to live over the shop’ and this still rankles with some). Then, because no one knew him, he could canvass an estate in a mere 20 minutes, but now he can scarcely do one house in 20 minutes. Partly, also, it owed much to his natural shyness which he has taken years to overcome, for he would come across on the doorstep and sway back and forth on his feet. He soon enough learned some of the politician’s techniques, though: on one occasion, a voter asked him, ‘Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?’ Trimble replied, ‘I’m actually here on behalf of the UUP’. More insistently, the elector said, ‘No, but are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?’ Trimble thought for a second and finally assented to the proposition.18 To further integrate into the community, Trimble joined the Royal Black Preceptory. After he signed the Belfast Agreement, many members of his lodge would be supporters of the ‘No’ campaign. But in those days, there was only good fellowship between brother loyalists. ‘I really loved the place then,’ remembers Trimble. ’There was a keen interest in politics which never existed in Lisburn or Bangor.’19

Nationally, the main interest in the campaign lay in the fact that it was the first time that the Conservatives were running in Northern Ireland. This was not evidence of serious integrationist intent by the Conservative Government: rather, they had been dragooned into setting up associations by a grassroots revolt by English and Scottish Tories at the 1989 party conference. Kenneth Baker, the party chairman, came to canvass on behalf of the Conservative candidate, Colette Jones (a Moira house-wife) along with the Environment Secretary Chris Patten (then a staunch advocate of the NI Conservatives’ cause); and Ian Gow, who was to be murdered that summer by the IRA, boomed the Tory message on the loud-hailers. The SDP also launched one of its last, quixotic electoral forays, and Dr David Owen turned up to lend his support to the candidate, Alistair Dunn. Meanwhile, Paddy Ashdown came to Portadown to back the candidate of the Liberal Democrats’ sister organisation, the Alliance party. The other candidates included Rev. Hugh Ross of the Ulster Independence Party; Gary McMichael, son of the late John McMichael (also murdered by the IRA: Trimble heard the car bomb go off in Lisburn), representing the Ulster Democratic Party, the political wing of the UDA; Brid Rodgers, a very experienced SDLP local councillor; Sheena Campbell of Sinn Fein, who was subsequently murdered by the UVF; Tom French of the Workers’ Party (formerly the political wing of the Official IRA); Peter Doran of the Greens; and Erskine Holmes of the Campaign for the Right to Vote Labour.20 Trimble loved the attention, relishing particularly his first encounter with the mainland press in the person of Donald Macintyre, who visited Lurgan for the Sunday Correspondent. Trimble’s message was unremitting: he sought resounding defeat for the nationalists and an exemplary humiliation for the Tories who had signed the AIA of 1985. The voters in the 18 May 1990 by-election clearly agreed: on a 53.66% poll, Trimble romped home with 20,547, compared to the second-placed Brid Rodgers of the SDLP on 6698. The sectarian head-count in the seat made such a result inevitable, but the real story was that despite bringing in the heavy guns, the Tories lost their £500 deposit and secured only 1038 votes, or a mere 3% of the poll; they were beaten into sixth place by Sinn Fein with 2033, the Ulster Independence Party with 1534 and the Workers’ Party with 1083.21

Curiously, the press speculation about what kind of an MP Trimble would turn out to be was rather more accurate at the time of his arrival in the Commons than when he became UUP leader in 1995 – especially in the southern press. Thus, Marie O’Halloran in the Irish Times prophesied that ‘some consider him a potential future leader with a close association with the maverick Strangford MP John Taylor, while overall he is viewed as a middle class intellectual with an understanding of both sides of the integration/devolution divide’.22 The NIO was divided within itself about the implications of Trimble’s election: in this period, they were seeking to find a formula that would afford Unionists the latitude to participate in talks without scrapping the AIA. ‘We were trying to break the permafrost,’ recalls one former senior official. ‘The election of David Trimble, who was a volatile loose cannon, was seen as changing the internal Unionist party balance, and thus could lead to what we called “creative instability”.’23 The following Tuesday, he took his seat in the Commons for the first time in the presence of Daphne Trimble, his mother and his sister-in-law and her husband. John Kennedy – who for many years was clerk at Stormont to the suspended Assembly – spoke to one of his counterparts at Westminster. ‘Brains at last in the Unionist party’, was their verdict.24 Indeed, within a month or two of his election, Trimble recalls half the Tory Cabinet came and sat down next to him at the large table in the members’ dining room: he was particularly pleased to come to know Malcolm Rifkind, who had been greatly admired by William Craig. ‘My impression was some were coming over to have a look,’ Trimble observes.25

It did not stop him from rebuking the Tories and Labour in his maiden speech during the Appropriations (No. 2) Northern Ireland Order debate on 23 May 1990. Initially, Trimble’s speech was a fairly routine tribute to his immediate predecessor and a discussion of the history of the seat – although, characteristically, it was much more learned than the contributions of the bulk of new MPs. The former Land Law lecturer delighted in describing the critical role of the ‘Ulster custom’ (a special provincial form of landholding arising out of the customary rights that tenants had won for themselves) which some have claimed provided the basis of the indigenous growth of the industrial revolution in the Lagan and the mid-Bann Valleys.26 He described the role of another predecessor, Col. Edward Saunderson, reminding the House that the father of Ulster Unionism had started out as a Liberal MP for Cavan before representing North Armagh. (Trimble would have been conscious that his Colhoun great-grandfather voted Liberal, prior to Gladstone’s embrace of Home Rule.) His purpose here was to emphasise that the UUP was not a provincial party. Rather, he asserted ‘we are the British national parties’ in the Province, formed as an alliance of Tories, Liberals and latterly of Labourites who had to band together in defence of their constitutional rights; indeed, Trimble reminded Labour MPs that their party did not organise in Northern Ireland. But his main target was the Conservative decision to fight the by-election. As saw it, the poll showed that there was ‘no mandate’ for the Government’s policies. Their real aim in standing for the first time in 70 years was to ‘divide and diminish’ the Unionist voice.27

Whatever effect he had on his colleagues, there can be no doubt that Trimble took to the Commons with great gusto. He was a staunch defender of its traditions, and well after he became UUP leader denounced the new Blair government’s decision to curtail the rights of backbenchers by cutting down the number of Prime Minister’s Question Times from twice a week to once weekly.28 On social and cultural matters unrelated to the Ulster crisis, he developed a moderately conservative record: he is pro-hunting; opposes the 1967 abortion legislation on the grounds that it has become abortion on demand; and on homosexuality, he takes a cautious line on lowering the age of consent.29 Important though these issues were, they were not fundamental to the nature and scope of Trimble’s parliamentary mission. Of far greater significance was Molyneaux’s decision to invite him to become home affairs spokesman. Trimble duly immersed himself in the details of criminal justice and Prevention of Terrorism legislation; it was during the committee stage of one of these debates that he came across his young Labour counterpart – Tony Blair.30 Indeed, Frank Millar was struck by the fact that like all Unionist MPs who come to Westminster, Trimble became much more of an integrationist.31 The consistent thread of his contributions was to illuminate how Northern Ireland was treated in a fashion very unlike the rest of the United Kingdom. Thus, Trimble spoke up when an IRA terrorist, Paul Magee, received a 30-year sentence for murdering a special constable in Yorkshire: he was outraged that the average tariff for security-force killers in Northern Ireland was a mere twelve years. Likewise, he spoke out against the fact that the only major government department without a Commons Select Committee was the NIO.32 But these were staple Unionist themes over the years, albeit put forward with rather more eloquence and erudition by Trimble than by most UUP MPs. What was really distinctive about his contributions was his eye for the international dimensions of the Ulster crisis: he said the principles of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed by 34 countries at the Paris summit of November 1990 (where the Cold War formally ended), should apply to Northern Ireland: these held that existing frontiers ought to be recognised, but that the rights of national minorities should be provided for, too. What was good enough for eastern and central Europe should, he reckoned, be good enough for Ulster.33

Inevitably, Trimble also took much time over his duties as a constituency MP. At first, he did not know where to collect the mail at the Commons and it piled up in a great mass for a month before he discovered what to do. He located his constituency office in Lurgan: this was closer to his home in Lisburn than any of the other possible sites, and was ably run by his wife Daphne and Stephanie Roderick (whom he met whilst she worked at the Ulster Society). He may not have been the authentic grassroots politician that McCusker was, but his academic skills could still be very useful. Thus, in 1993, the fifteen-strong Economic Development Committee of Craigavon District Council visited La Grange in Georgia, where the world-wide headquarters of Interface carpet tiles was located: it was his first visit to the United States, and Trimble played his part in persuading the Americans to create 30 jobs in Lurgan with a masterly exposition of their shared Ulster-Scots heritage (the forebears of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the USA, came from the Ulster area, along with those of four other Presidents. At least two further holders of the office appear to have been of southern Protestant origin).34 But in truth, his work in Upper Bann has never defined his identity as a parliamentarian as completely as it did Harold McCusker’s. Bob Cooper, former chairman of the Fair Employment Commission claims that Trimble was far less active than his predecessor in bringing anti-discrimination cases on behalf of Protestants – though, as he adds, this opinion is only possible because McCusker was so unusually hyper-active on behalf of his constituents.35 Trimble was, deep down, far more of a creature of Westminster than McCusker and he would rarely miss a division at the Commons in order to attend a meeting of his private (Orange) lodge, after the fashion of his predecessor.

The hardest part of the job, Trimble found, was visiting the families of murdered constituents, whether Catholic or Protestant – though he usually rang the RUC beforehand to make sure that the deceased had no paramilitary links. Since his own constituency was a centre of terrorist activity, dealing with security matters occupied more of his time than had he been MP for relatively unmolested seats such as North Down or Strangford. Large IRA bombs went off in the constituency at Craigavon in 1991, Lurgan in 1992 and Portadown in 1993.36 He also campaigned assiduously, with the DUP, on behalf of the ‘UDR 4’ (a quadrumvirate of soldiers convicted of the murder of a Roman Catholic in Armagh in 1983: all of them asserted their innocence, and three of them were subsequently released on appeal).37 Trimble went to HMP Maghaberry with Ian Paisley, Jnr, and then presented materials on the miscarriage of justice to the then Secretary of State, Peter Brooke. Unusually for a Unionist MP, he was not a supporter of all forms of capital punishment: in the Commons division of 17 December 1990, he favoured it as a penalty for the murder of police and prison officers, and for killings committed with firearms and explosives, but not for any murder. Indeed, since the defeat of Enoch Powell in the 1987 General Election, probably only Ken Maginnis was a more consistent opponent of capital punishment in the voting lobbies within the Unionist family.38 Partly, this was because of Trimble’s acute sense of the possibility of miscarriages of justice. Indeed, he believed that mainland juries, in particular, had a tendency to react with excessive emotion to atrocities. ‘Because of the nature of terrorism and the emotional response to it, the response of the man in the street cannot be trusted,’ opined the former law lecturer during the debate on the renewal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1991. He believed there was a good case for replacing juries with judge-only, Diplock-style courts throughout the United Kingdom.39

More disturbing still to Trimble were rumours that officials were engaged in talks with Sinn Fein. He wrote to John Major in January 1991 asking the Prime Minister to confirm that there were no such negotiations with republicans: Major replied, assuring him that the Government would not have talks with terrorists or those threatening violence to advance their agenda. Major’s formulation did not, though, preclude ‘contacts’ between republicans and officials – a very fine distinction, but one to which ministers would have increasing recourse in the coming years. Channels of communication had been operating almost continuously in one form or another throughout the Troubles: Ed Moloney has shown that overtures were certainly being made during Tom King’s period as Secretary of State.40 But the talks to which Trimble was referring were those described by Anthony Seldon in his authorised life of Major. In late 1990, the Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, had been approached by John Deverell, a senior MI5 officer and director and coordinator of intelligence in Northern Ireland.41 He requested that a line of communication which had existed in 1974–5 and during the Hunger Strikes of 1981 be reopened. Brooke gave his approval, subject to it being deniable in the event of exposure. His reasoning was two-fold. First, terrorist deaths had risen from 62 in 1989 to 76 in 1990 (an increasing proportion of which were by loyalists) and he was determined to do something to reduce them. Second, he was informed by John Hume – who since 1988 had been engaged in a much criticised dialogue with Gerry Adams – that republicans were engaged in their own process of revisionism. According to this conventional interpretation of events, the IRA recognised that the ‘war’ was unwinnable, at least as traditionally defined, and that if the conditions were right they might wish to ‘come in from the cold’. They had reached a ceiling of 30 to 40 per cent of the nationalist vote and were finding it hard to break out of such electoral ghettoes in Northern Ireland – let alone the Republic, where their support remained minimal after the republican movement’s decision in 1986 to end the policy of abstentionism from the Dail. The public response to this was Peter Brooke’s Whitbread Lecture of 9 November 1990, in his Westminster South constituency, where he first formulated the phrase that Britain had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Significantly, an advance text was shown to Sinn Fein.42

At the same time as such possibilities seemed to offer themselves, the Government was also engaged in trying to coax Unionists back into the political mainstream. Partly, it was a function of British disillusionment with the AIA. First, it had not yielded the end to violence and the levels of security cooperation with the Republic for which the British had hoped. Second, as Patrick Mayhew recalls of his subsequent term in office from 1992–7, the AIA ‘was like a lead necklace, not so much for its content as the secretive way in which it was foisted upon the Unionists. It precluded me from saying what I wanted to say, “trust me”.’43 It was possible, but distinctly harder, to operate ‘direct rule with a Green tinge’ with only minimal cooperation of the representatives of the majority community; and it was certainly impossible to obtain agreement for more broadly based, popular institutions of government, without them. But how could it be done without scrapping the AIA, or at least suspending it, the minimum requirement of Unionists? Under Tom King, Secretary of State from 1985–9, Thatcher was reluctant to make even the most tacit, public admission that the AIA had been anything other than beneficial; but where King failed to gain her approval for a gesture to win over Unionists, Brooke succeeded. The result was Brooke’s other major address, of 9 January 1990, to a gathering of businessmen in Bangor: in his bid to launch inter-party talks and devolution, he urged Unionists to end their ‘internal exile’. If they did so, then the AIA would be operated ‘sensitively’.44

After the failure of the protest campaign against the AIA, Unionists were also anxious for a way out. British ‘revisionism’ of the AIA seemed to offer this. Aided by a ‘suspension’ of the AIA and the Maryfield permanent secretariat whilst talks took place, they opted to participate in the elaborately constructed, three-stranded approach, first announced by Brooke in March 1991. The concept of the three strands would provide the framework for all future negotiations and structures: Strand I, chaired by Brooke and his successors, would focus on the internal governance of Northern Ireland – with the aim of restoring some sort of devolved institutions. Although any devolved parliament or council would not be based upon majority rule, Unionists would still be the largest bloc and it would, therefore, constitute an institutional structure of sorts to protect their interests. Inevitably, nationalists always sought to hedge about and to restrict its powers. By contrast, the Strand II talks (which had an independent chairman) catered for the Irish identity. Their purpose was to create North-South bodies – of greater or lesser degrees of autonomy from the northern and southern legislatures – which, nationalists hoped, would over time acquire greater powers and thus form the basis for an all-Ireland government. Inevitably, Unionists always sought to limit their remit. Strand III dealt with the east-west dimension – that is, the wider context of British-Irish relations. For long, it was the ‘poor relation’ of the strands – but it was the one which most interested David Trimble.

Molyneaux seems to have calculated that there would be no agreement. On this, he was proved right and talks eventually collapsed in November 1992.45 Nationalists had little reason to make an accommodation at this particular point. For it was the Unionists who were desperate to be rid of the AIA, not nationalists. Thus, if the talks failed, the worst that could happen would be that the Agreement would simply resume its normal workings, and another impasse combined with further IRA violence might even prompt an Anglo-Irish Agreement Mark II or Joint Authority. Nonetheless, it seemed reasonable to the UUP to suppose that if they were flexible – which included going to Dublin for the Strand II talks without the DUP – they would be rewarded in some way for taking risks. This, combined with British disillusionment with the AIA, led them to believe that the Government would then return to a more Unionist agenda. It was not altogether a fanciful conception, since during the 1992 General Election, Major had successfully taken up the theme of the Union: he particularly had Scotland in mind, but he also referred to the ‘four great nations’ of the United Kingdom and Brooke had attacked Labour’s ’unity by consent policy’ during the campaign. After the election, the NIO team headed by Patrick Mayhew was ‘just about as Unionist as the current Conservative party could produce’.46 In the meantime Molyneaux decided to play along with the three-stranded formula for those very tactical reasons. But although ministers acknowledged after the failure of the 1991–2 talks how far the UUP had moved, and that SDLP intransigence had undermined progress, the party never received a pay-off commensurate to the extent of its flexibility. This was because at the moment when Unionists hoped that the British Government might adopt such an agenda, a far bigger prize than the re-entry of the weakening Unionist community into the restructured institutions of government in Northern Ireland became a real possibility. That potential prize was, of course, an IRA ceasefire.

Retrospectively, therefore, the work of the 1991–2 UUP talks team looks rather peripheral to what was really going on. Indeed, as has been noted, Trimble devoted himself to what then seemed to be the most marginal issue of all: to develop the Strand III ‘basket’ of the talks, which resembled the old Vanguard concept of the Council of the British Isles. In the short term, his focus on this matter seemed largely to have had the effect of annoying his colleagues, as much on grounds of style as of substance. Ken Maginnis, who later became a staunch ally of Trimble, was less than impressed: ‘I thought that he was intolerable at that time. He had a purely theoretical approach to the situation without any sense of the practicalities. And his only friend in a parliamentary party full of non-graduates was the other Queensman, John Taylor [with whom Trimble shared an office]. The two were considered to be academically a cut above the rest.’47 Substance divided the two men as well. Whereas Trimble wanted to forge ahead on Strand III, Maginnis wanted to push ahead on the North-South bodies. Trimble was riveted by Brian Faulkner’s experience: that powerful cross-border institutions could prove to be the vehicle for smuggling unionists into a united Ireland. His view was that the AIA and any such Strand II structures could be transcended by bringing them into a wider context – of regions cooperating with each other on an equal basis.48 Maginnis thought this to be nonsense. Far better to deal with Dublin one-on-one, where Unionists had some real negotiating muscle, than in such a large community of variegated peoples. In this entity, he argued, the Ulster Unionists would end up as a small, isolated group in one vast pressure cooker. When its deliberations turned sour, as they easily could when the British had to take into account their relations with the Irish Republic and other regions, there would then be enormous pressure within the unionist family to withdraw from such a body.49 Whoever was right, there can be no doubt that once again Trimble had done little to endear himself to his colleagues at Westminster. But the dramatic events of the coming three years made such tensions irrelevant. For Trimble would soon become the main beneficiary of the challenges posed to traditional Unionism by the British state’s increasingly strenuous attempts to treat with republicanism.

NINE Framework or straitjacket?

TRIMBLE may have been the youngest and most junior UUP MP – but he was already acquiring a reputation as the party’s most intellectual elected representative. Indeed, he did remarkably well to maintain his historical and intellectual interests after his election to Parliament. Trimble’s main efforts lay in two pamphlets for the Ulster Society.1 The first, The Foundation of Northern Ireland (1991), sold out its complete print run of 2000: it recounted familiar events leading to Partition and immediately thereafter, but gave them a ‘revisionist’ twist. Far from being simply the ‘gallant little Ulster’ taking its stand against the Fenian hordes and a faithless British Government, Trimble painted a much more complex picture. Its real political interest lay in the fact that here – at the heart of the Ulster Society – was a Unionist MP again praising Sir James Craig for going unprotected to Dublin to negotiate with terrorists. ‘At home, there were some who were ready to criticise Craig, but what was not in dispute was his enormous physical and political courage,’ noted Trimble. The paper was written at the time of the Brooke-Mayhew talks of 1991–2 and its aim was to show that Unionists could once again make up for their lack of political power through manoeuvre and tactical adroitness: the Craig – Collins pact, believed Trimble, had worked in the Unionists’ favour. It also provided a sharp critique of Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism at Westminster, following their triumph in the south in the General Election of 1918. By declining to take up their seats, they were unable to affect the direction of the debates on the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the Unionists had the field to themselves. In the following year, Trimble produced another paper for the Ulster Society, entitled The Easter Rebellion of 1916. Its main interest lies in its rarity value, for few Ulster Unionist MPs had ever bothered to tackle this subject seriously, and it was a competent survey of the secondary literature. Indeed, even so formidable an adversary as Martin Mansergh, who became adviser to successive Fianna Fail leaders, acknowledges the quality of Trimble’s researches in his recent collection of essays, The Legacy of History.