Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Drafts of a formula on the Twin Track mechanism had been shuttling back and forth across the Irish Sea throughout the autumn. Now, both Governments wanted something in place before Clinton’s arrival. They hit upon a three-man international commission, which would report on how disarmament should be achieved by the end of January 1996. It was to be chaired by George Mitchell, the half-Lebanese, half-Irish-American former US Senate Majority leader, who was mistrusted by many Unionists because of his ancestry. He would be ‘counterbalanced’ by the former Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff, John de Chastelain, a great favourite of the UUP Security spokesman, Ken Maginnis; and Harri Holkeri, a former Finnish Prime Minister. The deal was sealed at a dramatic, late-night summit on 28 November between the two heads of government in Downing Street.4 The British were well pleased with themselves. True, the Commission further ‘internationalised’ the conflict – a concession that almost precipitated a Tory backbench revolt. But on the positive side, from the British Government’s viewpoint, the formula was remarkably similar to that of September 1995. This, of course, had initially been accepted by the Irish and was about to be announced at a summit when the Dublin – Government was bluntly informed by the republicans that to set up a disarmament body on those terms would prompt a crisis in the peace process and so the Irish duly pulled out of the summit. This time, things were different, and the ‘Rainbow coalition’ agreed to the international body.5

Trimble knew of the possibility of a backbench Tory revolt, and that if he had chosen to stick to Washington III he could have forced the Government to reject Mitchell. But he feared that if he did so, he would lose the battle for public opinion in England and would only have the support of The Daily Telegraph (in fact, decommissioning, unlike Orange parades, was one of the areas where English opinion was sympathetic to the Unionists’ position, as polls subsequently showed). But he also knew that he could not sound too positive a note about Mitchell in the first instance. This was typical of his modus operandi: tactical, rhetorical escalations to mask a line of strategic retreat. He described the communiqué as ‘shameful’ and a ‘fudge’, and observed that ‘we have had all this rushing about and a press conference at 11 p.m. last night, all that so that John Major could meet Bill Clinton and say “what a good boy I am, I’ve done what you told me”.’ As Jeffrey Donaldson observes, this was classic Trimble: he was bargaining that many Unionists would listen to the volume, rather than the content of what he said.6 But as the day progressed, Trimble moderated his tones and did not rule out an alternative to decommissioning, if the international body came up with something acceptable.

Trimble’s changing tone might have had something to do with his imminent encounter with the US President. Trimble was a particular target of Clinton’s attention on this visit – again, on the principle, that if you treat him ‘like a statesman’, he will become one. ‘And he did grow in confidence and stature, within his own community and beyond,’ recalls Anthony Lake.7 Like all presidential visits, it was organised on the principle of ‘taking care’ of the mythological Chicago alderman. This required photographic acknowledgement of the stature of the individual local worthy, who poses in time-honoured fashion with the Commander-in-Chief. Blair Hall and the White House advance men ensured that Trimble had a substantial measure of private time alone with the US head of state. They also took care to ensure that the form of presidential favour would be especially impressive to Trimble’s community. They therefore arranged for the ultimate accolade: Trimble would take the short ride from the Whitla Hall at Queen’s University to the Europa Hotel with Clinton in the presidential limousine. This was no easy thing to organise, since the limousine is the inner part of the presidential cocoon. But the Americans were determined that Trimble be seen entering and leaving the car. In time, the strategy became more elaborate still. Administration officials concluded that even Trimble’s rudeness could be turned to good effect. He had to be seen to beat his breast and to win over the US Government to his position (exemplified by his extollation of Unionist work in North America in his address to the 1996 UUP party conference).8

Trimble was well satisfied with Clinton’s visit to Belfast, which on this occasion he found very even-handed; he particularly liked Clinton’s address at the neutral venue of Mackie’s plant on Springfield Road, where the President told the paramilitaries that ‘you are the past, your day is over’ (it was not, of course, to be: whilst Clinton was there, the IRA was making preparations to end the ceasefire).9 That night, the two men took their short drive together back to Clinton’s hotel. ‘He was tired, I was tired,’ Trimble recalls. ‘But he referred to the books I had given him in Washington. He had read them, and especially liked Ronnie Hanna’s’ (on American servicemen in Ulster during the Second World War). Clinton asked Trimble what he saw as the final outcome: the Unionist leader dwelled very much on Strand III of the Talks, outlining his vision for a Community of the British Isles. Trimble was thrilled with the meeting, and spoke about it to colleagues for some days afterwards. But contrary to what some believe, Clinton applied no direct pressure whatsoever on Trimble, either then or in the subsequent negotiations.10 Clinton would never say, for example, ‘don’t make decommissioning a precondition to all-party talks’. It was a more subtle process than that. Rather, Clinton would call Trimble and say something along the lines of ‘now what can I do for you at this stage in the process?’ or ‘how can we help?’ Often, the mere fact of a call from the President was pressure enough to maintain the momentum of the process. Clinton’s involvement was thus not a case of rape, but of seduction. Trimble undoubtedly gave the Americans a greater understanding of his position, but this ‘influence’ over American policy was bought at a price: the Americans now had a purchase upon the party leader’s calculations which they had never enjoyed before. Indeed, Jeffrey Donaldson recalls that Trimble’s fear of forfeiting unionist ’gains’ made in America was an important factor in his decision to remain in the talks after Sinn Fein’s admission on easier terms in 1997.11

Mitchell met with Major three times during his deliberations, with Ancram more often. Mitchell recalls that ‘the British repeatedly told me that David Trimble was in a difficult position politically, that there’s a political division in Unionism and we’ve got to help him work his way through that’. Ancram, he says, ‘told me that the elective route is very important to David Trimble and we want to see it in there’.12 Trimble, obviously, made similar points.13 Trimble’s position was strengthened by a poll in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 January 1996, which revealed that seven out of ten respondents in Ulster wanted a new elected body as the next step towards negotiations, including two-thirds of SDLP supporters and half of Sinn Fein’s constituency. But when Mitchell showed his report to the British Government, prior to publication, the results were not what they had hoped for. Mayhew’s secret paper, sent to his colleagues on the Cabinet’s Northern Ireland Committee on 23 January 1996, noted ’Senator Mitchell and his team were given a hard task … not surprisingly [they] have produced something of a curate’s egg. It is disappointing that they have accepted, without question, that the paramilitaries will not start decommissioning in advance of negotiations.’ Instead, it suggested decommissioning in parallel with negotiations. Mayhew had no problem whatsoever with the six Mitchell Principles of democracy and nonviolence, which he recognised would prove difficult for Sinn Fein (such as an end to punishment beatings) and the International Body’s rejection of the notion of equivalence between security force weapons and illegally held stocks. It noted that the Body ‘also recognises that an elective process, if broadly acceptable, could contribute to building confidence despite Sinn Fein and the SDLP’s public opposition to unionist proposals’. And it went on ‘we know that Sinn Fein expect the Body to pose some particularly hard (if not impossible) challenges for them. They also anticipate that the Body will not endorse Washington 3. Reporting indicates that Adams hopes that the British Government, by giving a premature negative reaction to the Body’s failure to endorse Washington 3, will relieve Sinn Fein of all responsibility for giving a positive response to the challenges posed to them by the Body’s report.’

But how would the British Government respond? Mayhew indicated there were three broad options:

‘(a) Reject the Report. This would be highly damaging. HMG would be exposed. There would be stalemate. Sinn Fein – as we know they hope – would be let off the hook: The nationalists and all their sympathisers, including the Americans, would stand together in holding HMG responsible for the continued impasse.’

‘(b) Accept the approach the Report canvasses. I do not believe that would be the right approach, without further consideration and development in consultation with all the parties. As it stands it provides too uncertain a basis for the necessary confidence. We need to test the response of the paramilitaries, and to take view of the parties including of course the UUP.

‘(c) Take a positive line in response to the Report, in no way abandoning Washington 3, but promote a modified way ahead involving an elective process, as identified by the Report albeit rather faintly, requiring broad support within the political track as the next stage.’

Mayhew continued: ‘I consider the third option offers the best way ahead. It enables us to take the initiative both in responding positively to the report and in putting forward a route to negotiations which builds on unionist ideas but will be difficult and damaging for nationalists to reject out of hand.’ As for the proposals for an assembly, Mayhew noted that ‘the attraction of some elective process is that it builds on unionists’ own idea. The DUP, UUP, and Alliance Party have all proposed some form of time-limited elected body. They have all said they would be prepared, without prior decommissioning, to sit down with Sinn Fein after an election for discussions … nationalists are opposed to such a body, but I believe their concerns could be met if:

– elections clearly gave direct access to substantive negotiations (ie without further insistence on prior decommissioning);

– those negotiations remained on the three-stranded basis agreed in 1991;

– there was a proper role, as in 1991, for the Irish Government in appropriate strands and the British Government in all strands;

– the negotiators themselves were drawn from the pool of elected representatives, avoiding unwieldy 90-member negotiations although the full body of elected representatives could be consulted at key points;

– HMG maintained its position that there could be no purely internal settlement.’

The document demonstrates several points. The first is the central importance of the UUP to the then Government’s thinking: no UUP, no process. This was a genuine article of political faith (though it was functional rather than ideological in character) which pre-dated the parliamentary arithmetic. Rather, the Government saw it as the Realpolitik of the Northern Irish political scene. The second is how even at this stage, the Government were seeking formulae which would dilute and even divest the elective route of its content as envisaged by the UUP, to make it bearable to nationalists. That, of course, was to be a hallmark of the peace process: for every advance by one side, there would be a counterbalancing measure in the next round.

Above all, does Mayhew’s paper show that the Tories ‘binned Mitchell’, as nationalists contended – thus showing their bad faith and tilting the balance in the IRA back to the ‘militarists’ as opposed to the exponents of the ‘political route’? For one thing, as was demonstrated during the trial of the Docklands bombers, plans for the resumption of full-scale IRA violence began prior to Mitchell’s appointment to the International Body, let alone before Major responded to his report.14 But on the point of ‘binning’, the record is less clear. It was not binned in the sense of the first option canvassed by Mayhew. But nor was it accepted in toto, either. Rather, the response can be interpreted as classically Majorite fudge: make positive sounds without giving the report wholesale endorsement, and seek to play up those elements of it that most suited the Government’s needs.

When Trimble was briefed by Ancram on the Mitchell Report, he shared the Government’s disappointment: in particular, he found the principles and the reference to the elective route too weak. Trimble made it absolutely clear that if Washington III was abandoned without compensating gains, he would be ‘blown out of the water’. To this day, he believes that his warnings were responsible for the strength and tone of Major’s response to Mitchell in the Commons on 24 January 1996.15 The strength of Major’s response may also have been partly conditioned by a rough ride meted out to Mayhew at the meeting of the backbench Northern Ireland Committee when they were briefed on the report. The Irish claim they also received a faxed copy of Major’s remarks an hour and a half before he was due to deliver his official response in the Commons. Fergus Finlay recalls that the DFA felt that it was written by ‘John Major, the Chief Whip’, looking at it from the point of view of his parliamentary majority, rather than ‘John Major, the Prime Minister’. As they saw it, the assembly idea was another ‘precondition’, meaning ‘elections first, and then we’ll see’. Indeed, there was no date set for the commencement of all-party talks. Finlay says there was a huge sense of shock that this risk had been taken with nationalist Ireland in order to keep David Trimble on board (whom the DFA believed to be far stronger than he made out).16 Major responded much along the lines which Mayhew had outlined, but his tone was more insistent; significantly, Tony Blair, the Opposition leader, maintained the bi-partisan approach and offered unqualified support (thus upsetting Labour’s ‘Green’ wing, which often took its cue from John Hume). Trimble, who spoke third, praised Blair for his willingness to facilitate legislation on the assembly. He also tweaked Hume’s tail with an aside about the degree of sympathy for the elective route amongst SDLP supporters: this may have contributed to the Derryman’s mood and, in a rare misjudgment of the mood of the Commons, he lashed out at Major and the Conservatives.17 For the first time in years, an Ulster Unionist leader was making the political weather, and nationalist Ireland did not like it.

SIXTEEN ‘Putting manners on the Brits’

AT 7:02 p.m. on Friday, 9 February, the British and Irish official elites were assembling for pre-prandial drinks at the Foreign Office conference facility at Wilton Park. At that precise moment, a massive bomb detonated at South Quay in London’s Docklands, ending the IRA ceasefire. Within minutes, the news had been relayed to Ted Barrington, the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. Barrington told his fellow guest, Quentin Thomas, what had occurred. The Political Director of the NIO was stunned. So, too, was Martin Mansergh, special adviser to successive leaders of Fianna Fail. The next day, he paced around the gardens, alone, seemingly in a state of shock. The attempt to draw this generation of republicans into constitutional politics – one of his life’s main goals – appeared for the time being to be in ruins. According to Thomas, the two men had spoken a few minutes earlier, when Mansergh had expressed optimism about the future.1 Meanwhile, John Major was in his Huntingdon constituency when the news came to the No. 10 switchboard at 6 p.m. that RTE had received a call from the IRA stating that the ceasefire was over: the codeword was genuine.2 The White House rang shortly thereafter to say that Adams had called with the same information. According to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the Sinn Fein President was ‘elliptical and sounded concerned. But we didn’t know what he meant. And I still don’t know whether he knew what was going to happen.’3 At Stormont House in Belfast, Sir John Wheeler, the Security Minister at the NIO, was making his way through paperwork: it was his turn to be the duty minister. His Private Secretary immediately came on the line with the news. Wheeler stayed up till 1 a.m., reintroducing many of the security measures withdrawn after the ceasefire began.4

But despite the shock of the South Quay bomb, the British state did not alter course: there was no fundamental reappraisal of the nature of republicanism. Wheeler says that at no stage did the Government even contemplate the notion that there should be anything other than an inclusive settlement so long as the IRA was on some kind of ceasefire; or, as Cranborne puts it, ‘it was treated almost as though it was a cri de coeur from a delinquent teenager rather than a full-scale assault on British democracy’.5 Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary of 21 February 1996 that even as Mayhew expected another IRA ‘spectacular’ on the mainland, the Government still were looking for signals that some kind of process was possible. Indeed, one senior NIO official was shocked within weeks of the blast to find the Government negotiating again with Sinn Fein: he concluded from this episode that if even a Conservative ministry with a narrow majority could do such a thing, then a serious question mark had been placed against the viability of the Union. The official was therefore prepared to toy with the idea that negotiating a federal Ireland was a possible means of ‘getting the Provisionals off the Prods’ backs’ and to minimise their leverage over the system.6

John Steele, the then Director of Security in the NIO, states that as he saw it, ‘the IRA were cracking the whip. They were demonstrating that bad things could happen. But the break in the ceasefire was a carefully calculated signal, not a wild lashing-out.’ Steele recalls that even Wheeler – the minister most sceptical of the IRA – only wanted to respond with enhanced intelligence gathering. The Security Minister suggested neither the reintroduction of internment, nor did he advocate letting the SAS use lethal force.7 Nor were the prisoners released during the first ceasefire recalled, and the border was not sealed. Mary Holland correctly observed the ‘surprisingly mild’ response to that atrocity. ‘We heard almost nothing from the British side about the spirit of the bulldog breed,’ she noted in her Irish Times column of 29 February.

The British were convinced that such measures would prove counterproductive at home and abroad. At home, they concluded, it could be a recruiting sergeant for the IRA. Abroad, principally in America, old-style counter-insurgency was deemed diplomatically too costly – even if set in the context of an overall ‘carrot and stick’ approach to the republican movement. Thus, Cranborne also had no purist scruples about offering the republicans the ‘carrot’ of political development – provided they were prepared to abandon armed struggle entirely. But he also believed that the political forms of the ‘stick’ were not being employed properly either. He therefore sent Major ‘an intemperate memo’ suggesting that the Government was totally inactive in trying to defeat the IRA. Cranborne wanted ‘to put our money where our mouth is and appoint a counter-terrorist supremo in the Cabinet in charge of winning it on all levels’. This supremo would be responsible to the Prime Minister, special Cabinet committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee of the Commons. Cranborne knew that the ‘mandarinate’ would oppose his plans, on the grounds that they would cut across existing lines of departmental reponsibility and chains of command in the security forces and the police (although the creation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had shown that there was scope for innovation). Major was deeply uncomfortable with the idea and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, shot it down completely. Butler and Major met with Cranborne and instead offered improved intelligence coordination but no radical overhaul.8

Curiously, for all his rhetoric, David Trimble did not really push a return to an old-style security crackdown; nor, even then, did he think that the republican movement would necessarily be beyond the pale in the future. Mayhew notes that Trimble did not ask the Government to scrap the ‘peace process’ as a concept now clearly based upon false premises. ‘I think he always had it in his mind to do something more than spend the whole of his political career leading a minority party in the Commons,’ says the former Secretary of State.9 Fergus Finlay also states that Trimble never asked the Irish Government to endorse the concept of a deal without Sinn Fein: without them, Finlay believes, the UUP leader could never realise his ambition to be Prime Minister of a stable Northern Ireland.10 Again, this was partly because Trimble felt that the British state from the outset was not going to place republicans beyond the pale, and would work tirelessly to restore the broken ceasefire. Indeed, Major told Trimble that the decision to return to armed struggle was taken by a curiously informal grouping of 20 senior republicans and not through the more ‘formal’ mechanisms of the IRA Army Council; the actual operation was run by a very tight group based in the Republic, not involving Northern Irish ‘assets’, though some of the participants were northerners. Trimble drew the inference that the South Quay bomb may not have been the settled view of the whole organisation. Indeed, he says that there are many unanswered questions about the role of Adams and McGuinness in that bombing.11 On 1 March 1996, Trimble told the Irish News that if there were to be an IRA ceasefire which means ‘a change of heart’ he would not want to create ‘unnecessary obstacles about Sinn Fein’s involvement in all-party talks’. All he asked for was adherence to the terms of the Mitchell Report. ‘Mitchell does talk about parallel decommissioning, not prior decommissioning. If we had reasonable commitments we would be able to move in that direction.’12

In his first lengthy disquisition on the end of the ceasefire, published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday February 12, Trimble stated that the purpose of the bombing was to stop elections to his proposed body from taking place. This later turned out to be unlikely, for the simple reason that the IRA’s decision to return to ‘war’ was taken well before the Forum idea was accepted by the British Government. But whatever the real reasons for their actions, it was certainly inept of Trimble to identify this as a cause of the bomb: it implicitly validated the nationalist notion that Major’s actions in ‘binning’ Mitchell and alighting upon the glancing reference in the International Body’s Report to the elective route had in some way precipitated South Quay. But did the IRA resumption of violence work from their perspective? Many in nationalist Ireland, and not a few Unionists, certainly believed as much, pointing to the announcement of all-party talks made on 28 February 1996 at Downing Street by Major and Bruton.13 Bruton disagrees with this notion, observing that the decision to set a date for such negotiations had been taken in principle when the British Government accepted Mitchell as Commission chairman in November 1994. Bruton also notes that the log-jam on prior decommissioning had already been broken by the elective route of the Forum: he feels that Trimble received insufficient credit for this idea.14 But the manner and timing of the announcement of a date for all-party talks made it appear as though the Provisionals had ‘put manners’ on the two Governments.

Trimble decided straight after the South Quay bomb to head to the United States to brief Clinton on what had happened, taking the advice of John Holmes, the Prime Minister’s new Private Secretary before he did so. When Ken Maginnis and Donaldson arrived at the White House on Monday 12 February at 2 p.m. they found a President who seemed ill at ease. Trimble said he was surprised at the timing of the bomb. ‘Yeah, it was stupid, damned stupid,’ lamented the Commander-in-Chief, referring to the fact that the blast took place at the very moment that there was a chance of all-party talks. But Trimble says he never asked Clinton to place the Provisionals beyond the pale at this moment: ‘They [the US Administration] know best what leverage they have,’ Trimble explains. ‘There is no point in telling them what to do.’15 He shares the conventional British wisdom that this blast came as a tremendous shock to Clinton, thus prompting a reappraisal of White House attitudes towards Northern Ireland. In fact, Trimble’s recollection is not quite correct: he asked that Adams’ visa to the USA be rescinded and that there be a ban on fundraising by Sinn Fein, but both these options were rejected by the US Administration. Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, rejected this reasoning, stating that ‘Mr Adams is an important leader in this process because he speaks for Sinn Fein. It is hard to imagine a process making progress towards peace without the active involvement of Sinn Fein.’ Partly, the White House’s unwillingness to place Adams beyond the pale can be ascribed to the fact that the British Government did not want to do so, either: they favoured Adams’ admission to the USA and for the doors then partially to close on him as a sign of displeasure as exemplified by the Sinn Fein president’s exclusion from the annual St Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Trimble did, however, attend a dinner of the American-Ireland Fund on St Patrick’s Day at which Gerry Adams was present – another small breach in the wall of taboos surrounding the republicans (Trimble had initially not wanted to attend, but feared the consequences of ‘exclusion’ if he did not turn up).16