Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Once the immediate shock of the South Quay bomb had passed, the attention of the political classes on both sides of the Irish Sea moved to the form of election to the new assembly and to the format of the talks. Trimble and the UUP did relatively badly in this. Indeed, Andrew Hunter noted in his diary of 21 February 1996 that ‘Secretary of State [Mayhew] worried about the case for elections to a Peace Convention. Believes it is difficult to find solid, objective justification. Michael Ancram and I argued that elections justified on pragmatic grounds; no other way to get Unionists into all-party negotiations … Not much optimism in our discussion. Implicit agreement that PM overegged elections in his Mitchell response.’ Yet Trimble was himself partly responsible for affording the British Government the space which it needed to make the elective process ‘work’ vis-à-vis nationalist Ireland. As early as 24 December 1995, he had suggested in a Sunday Tribune interview that the assembly ‘could take evidence from the Republic, from the Irish Government and other interested bodies’ about possible North-South cooperation. The new body would not be a recreation of Stormont, he noted, but rather would be time-limited to two years (though it was a point which he never had much success in conveying). Trimble’s proposal was very considerably short of joint management of the talks but Irish offficials approvingly noted the UUP leader’s flexibility. Later, Trimble indicated that if the questions were framed in the right way and if it was clear that it was not an island-wide referendum, he might under certain circumstances back John Hume’s idea of a plebiscite in both jurisdictions simultaneous with an assembly election (concerning the right of the Irish people, north and south, to self-determination and their right also to determine the method whereby that might be achieved). There was, of course, another imperative behind his need to obtain an elective process: Trimble says that if he won an election, he would greatly increase his authority within the UUP.17

Trimble’s position within the UUP helps to explain his concerns about nationalist successes in diluting the Assembly idea: he was worried at least as much by the appearance as the substance. In a memorandum to Major, dated 22 February, entitled ‘UU outline talks scheme’, Trimble stated that there was some limited flexibility on when the Provisionals could begin decommissioning – effectively a green light to the British Government considering the other pressures on them. But on the presentation, there was no such hint of flexibility: ‘The announcement of the elections for the Peace Convention and the associated talks should avoid the usual Anglo/Irish style, i.e. it should avoid the language typical of Stormont Castle/Iveagh House joint productions,’ stated Trimble. ‘There should be no references to the two Governments jointly sponsoring or jointly managing the Peace Convention or the talks.’ In the end, the Ground Rules for Substantive All-Party Negotiations paper produced by the British Government in March 1996 gave precisely that impression: to the intense annoyance of Trimble, it was sent out while the Unionist leader was in America and suggested that the Irish Government be the joint coordinator of the negotiations.18

The crucial next step of setting a date for all-party talks was complicated – and dramatically so – by the Government’s parlous position in the Commons. Lord Justice Scott’s report on the Arms for Iraq affair was scheduled for debate on 26 February 1996. If the Government was defeated in the House, it would trigger a vote of no confidence. Not all Conservative MPs were solidly behind the Government and attention again focused on the Unionists’ intentions. From the Conservative Government’s viewpoint, the initial signs were not hopeful. In an interview with Roy Hattersley, Trimble had told the former Labour deputy leader that he was appalled by the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates (the gagging orders produced by the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, which were said to have prevented ministers from revealing information on national security grounds that would have shown that the defendants in the Matrix Churchill case had acted with the state’s approval).19 He was thus less worried by the Government’s Iraq policy than by the fact that innocent men might have gone to jail for raison d’état. No less important, the former law lecturer believed that Lyell gave poor legal advice – and had stated as much as early as the original debate on the Arms for Iraq affair in November 1992.20

But Trimble could not now afford the indulgence of thinking like some independent-minded backbencher. The UUP’s stance would have also to be based upon the Realpolitik of Unionist interests. It was a close call. On the one hand, Trimble was dubious about how much he could extract from a weak Government. ‘Major can’t deliver much on his own,’ he told Hattersley. ‘[I would prefer] a strong Government with the confidence to take difficult decisions.’ Hattersley stated that Trimble did not believe that such a Government existed then. ‘Ireland [sic] cannot go right for Major in any big way before the election,’ predicted the UUP leader. ‘It can only go wrong. That means that we are likely to have another year of stalemate.’21 On the other hand, although Trimble may then have felt that the prospect of New Labour was more congenial, there was still much short-term business to be transacted with the Conservatives (whom Labour would broadly back as part of the bi-partisan approach towards Northern Ireland). The most immediate item on the agenda was the method of election to the new body proposed by Trimble: he feared that the Government was at this stage leaning to a variant of the DUP’s preferred system (which, for a variety of complex reasons, also benefited the SDLP and thus mitigated nationalist hostility). The Paisleyites wanted a Province-wide poll based on a party list system, as in the European Parliamentary elections, which was well suited to maximising the large personal vote of their chief who would then barn-storm the Province. The Ulster Unionists, by contrast, wanted a single transferable vote in the constituencies, which would maximise their greater strength in depth further down the ticket. If a Paisley-friendly system emerged, it could conceivably destroy Trimble and inflict a serious blow to his conception of New Unionism. His fears of a deal were confirmed when one colleague heard from Paisley himself that the three DUP MPs would not enter either lobby for the Scott vote; indeed, Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, recalls that the Government communicated via NIO civil servants that an electoral system more in line with DUP needs would be introduced – though, as he points out, the linkage was hinted at rather than being ‘crudely made’.22 Trimble believes that the NIO has quietly favoured the DUP over the years as a means of weakening the solidarity of the Unionist bloc and specifically of its largest component, the UUP. But perhaps of greatest significance to the Government was the fact that the DUP might potentially participate in such a representative institution with Sinn Fein at some point in the future – assuming there was a ceasefire and that republicans would then take up their seats in such a body. Quentin Thomas had been impressed from the early to mid-1990s by the point made to him by senior DUP politicians that they could not voluntarily agree to share power with nationalists; but, they added, if such an outcome was forced upon them and sanctioned by a particular kind of electoral process (as on District Councils, where committee chairmanships were shared out proportionately according to party strengths) then the DUP would not decline to fulfil their democratic mandate and take up their allocated slots.23

But Trimble still had to treat with the Tories, and examine what, if anything, they had to offer. If they offered something very tempting (approximating to the UUP’s preferred system of election) Trimble could not possibly say no. But if the Government made no such offer, Trimble might as well stick to his principles and obtain a bit of credit with an increasingly powerful Opposition. What happened next remains a matter of dispute between the Tories and the Ulster Unionists. To this day, Conservatives assert that Trimble appproached the Government to make a deal; Trimble says that on each occasion, he was approached by the Government. Trimble met twice with Major on the night of the vote, in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s chair. On the first occasion, between 6 and 7 p.m., Major urged Trimble to support the Government. Trimble explained to Major that he was in some difficulty because he had reason to believe that the Prime Minister had done a deal with the DUP: irrespective of the merits of the Scott case, he would look ‘bloody stupid’ if he supported the Government that week and then a week or so later an election system emerged that ruined his party’s chances. ‘I’m not in the business of damaging the UUP,’ replied Major.24 But Trimble noted that the Prime Minister did not contradict his assertion that there was some understanding with the DUP. Major added that he could not say what kind of electoral system he would deliver since he had not told anyone else and could not have it said that he had preferred one party over all others. On the second occasion that night, Trimble says he was approached in the tea room by the Conservative Party chairman, Brian Mawhinney. ‘The boss wants to see you,’ Trimble recalls Mawhinney saying.25 Mawhinney, by contrast, says that he asked Trimble in the course of a more general conversation if he wanted to see the Prime Minister. In other words, states Mawhinney, he gave Trimble the option of speaking to Major and the UUP leader chose to make the effort to avail himself of it.26 When Trimble arrived, Major was in the room with Michael Heseltine; the chief whip, Alistair Goodlad; and Mawhinney. Trimble expected Major to say something, but he did nothing of the kind. Instead, the two just sat there and looked at each other. One witness to the scene recalls Major stating that ‘I will not do a deal with you’ and Trimble replying that ‘I will not ask you to do a deal’: it was as if both men were waiting for the other to make the first move.27

Trimble says he did not believe the Government’s assertion that there could be no deal. He thinks they were, indeed, in the market for trading policy concessions in exchange for UUP support. Rather, it was simply not their first choice to rely on the UUP, especially after the furore in nationalist Ireland over the British response to the Mitchell report. They needed to show that they could not be bought specifically by the UUP. A DUP abstention was, by contrast, somehow a less explicit assertion of the Unionist family’s ‘hold’ over the Government than a UUP vote for the Government. The support of the DUP was arithmetically less valuable and ideologically less predictable than a link-up with the UUP (and they were less close to the Tory backbenches than the UUP). Thus, in a peculiar way, the DUP was in these circumstances less threatening to nationalists. Specifically, a deal with the DUP afforded certain advantages to the SDLP: if enough votes haemorrhaged from the UUP to the DUP, the SDLP might receive the huge boost of becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland. The DUP and SDLP also had strong personalities at the top of the ticket, namely Paisley and Hume. But ministers still entertained doubts over the reliability and deliverability of the DUP. Because the Government was not sure until the last minute what the DUP might leak, it kept its options open. The likeliest explanation of what happened is that once it thought it had the DUP in the bag, Major et al. sought to make a virtue out of not doing a deal with the UUP.

Trimble next remembers coming out into the division lobby after the vote – in which the Government scraped by with 320 votes to 319 – to be met by a torrent of abuse from the Tories.28 This, he suspected, emanated from Mayhew who had alleged that the UUP leader sought to blackmail the Government. Mayhew never felt comfortable with political horse-trading (he himself admits that Michael Ancram was much more comfortable doing such deals) and his distaste for the political arts emerged that night. According to Mayhew, he was crossing the lobby when he was met by the BBC’s Jon Sopel. ‘What do you think of the result?’ asked Sopel. Mayhew replied: ‘Delighted, and the more so because the Unionists tried to do a deal and the Prime Minister sent them away and we’ve still won.’ Mayhew says he thought the conversation was on lobby terms but claims that within minutes his remarks were broadcast to the nation; Sopel denies that Mayhew’s name was used, since as an experienced lobby journalist, he would have known better. Whatever the precise sequence of events, Trimble was enraged and shortly thereafter went up to Mayhew, scarlet with anger. ‘It was a hostile act,’ fumed the UUP leader. ‘It was a hostile act to try and bring us down,’ retorted Mayhew.29 Major was even angrier over the events of that evening. Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary that he twice met the Prime Minister in the division lobby: according to the backbencher, he felt ‘betrayed; furious; he had done so much for them; UUP had tried to make a deal; he would never play party games over peace. What deal [was offered]? About elections.’ Later, Hunter met Ancram in the smoking room, where he was nursing a large whisky. According to Ancram, Trimble had offered a constituency-based electoral system, elections before proximity talks and no guarantee that such elections would lead into proximity talks. On the next day, Mayhew contacted Hunter whilst the latter was at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, on one of innumerable semi-official missions both to Ulster and the Republic which he undertook during these years. According to Hunter’s account, Mayhew told him that the UUP had offered one year’s support in exchange for their tariff of demands, and had given the British Government one and a half hours in which to think about it. Indeed, when Hunter met Trimble in the lobby, he remembers telling Trimble that he had blown it. Trimble did not need to make the offer which he did, asserted Hunter, not least because Hunter believed that in conjunction with other backbench supporters he could guarantee Unionist interests. In so doing, the Tory said, Trimble had demeaned himself. Moroever, he had soured relationships with backbenchers who might lose their seats in any elections precipitated by the UUP voting with the Opposition. It was a further illustration of the point that for all of the complaints of nationalist Ireland, Trimble’s hold over the Government was in practice severely circumscribed (or at least was much more complex than that simplistic analysis suggested).

But the mess illustrates another point: what was Trimble playing at all through the 1995–7 period? What was his strategy vis-à-vis the mainland parties, and from whom did he really think he could obtain the best deal for Unionism? The evidence is contradictory. According to Paddy Ashdown’s diary for 27 February 1996, Trimble said that he would have abstained in a no-confidence vote that might have followed any Government defeat on Scott and added ‘“we hate this crew and the sooner they go, the better”’. Ashdown then commented: ‘The old line. I wonder if he means it?’30 But Woodrow Wyatt’s diary for 27 November 1996 records a Spectator party at the Savoy, at which Trimble told him that ‘it was very much to Major’s credit that he’d managed to get some kind of peace going for so long. “I make a face every now and again for the hell of it, but yes, we’ll back him [Major]. He’ll be quite safe until he wants to call an election.”’31 Trimble says that the situation altered sharply in the months between these two conversations: Labour knew by November 1996 that it was on for a big victory and therefore had no need of Trimble to bring down the Conservative Government quickly, lest the situation change to the Tories’ advantage.32 The implication is that he might as well have continued to enjoy a few months more of limited leverage. These contrasting remarks to Ashdown and Wyatt illustrate two other points: the obvious desire that both men report back to Blair and Major, respectively, things that each party leader would want to hear. Indeed, as Paddy Ashdown noted in a conversation with Blair on Remembrance Sunday 1995: ‘I told [Blair] that I had had a brief chat with Trimble at the Cenotaph earlier in the day, when Trimble had made it clear that he couldn’t support the Government. Blair said “but can we trust him?” I said I thought we could, though it was the nature of Irish [sic] politicians to face both ways at once, as it was necessary for their survival.’33 These contrasting bits of evidence do, however, also show that Trimble had no detailed, preordained game plan and may well have been making it up as he went along.

Indeed, all sides played at horse-trading of this kind during the latter part of the Conservative Government’s life. John Bruton sought to reduce Major’s dependence on the UUP by volunteering to ask John Hume to vote for the Government in the debate (Bruton felt that there were echoes here of the possibilities opened up by Parnell’s flirtation with the Tories in 1885 – a strategy predicated upon the notion of not putting all of the Irish party’s eggs into the Liberal basket. Parnell in the end returned to the Liberal fold when the Grand Old Man outbid the Tories by converting to Home Rule in the following year).34 The leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, attacked Bruton and asserted that it was not the role of the Taoiseach ‘to be helping the British Government as an assistant whip hours before the vote’; but Bruton’s effort was unsuccessful in its own terms, for Hume would not break with his Labour colleagues in the Socialist International. As an exercise in intergovernmental diplomacy, though, Bruton’s intervention was more successful. It contributed to the attainment of a key Irish objective in the summit communiqué of 28 February, which the British withheld until almost the last moment: the start of all-party talks on 10 June 1996 (which would only become inclusive upon the restoration of an IRA ceasefire). The summit communiqué also stated, inter alia, that political parties would be asked to attend proximity talks to consider the structure, format and agenda for the all-party talks, and discussions would be held finally to determine the form of elections that would lead to the all-party talks. Moreover, there was no mention in the communiqué of prior decommissioning.

Trimble now acknowledges that the elections lost a lot of their value to the UUP. In part, he says, this was because of ‘collateral damage’ which he suffered as a result of the bruised relations with the British Government after the Scott vote (though he feels that nationalist pressure would have eroded much of the UUP’s advantage, anyhow). He now concedes that his own inexperience at the time played a part in these reverses and that his own proposal should have made clearer the link between the elected body and the talks. Trimble had in mind something like the Convention of 1975–6, which included serious debates but also had the potential for informal negotiations arising in the corridors. He was alerted to this problem when he met Mo Mowlam, the Labour spokesman on Northern Ireland, in the corridors at Westminster and she informed him that the linkage between the elective body and the talks was not sufficiently explicit. ‘I don’t need to make it explicit – it’ll happen organically,’ Trimble told her. However, he says he underrated nationalist ‘paranoia’ about the Unionists ‘pocketing’ the concession of what the Irish saw as a ‘new Stormont’ – and, having obtained what they wanted, then stalling on the negotiations. The UUP would thus have regained something akin to their Parliament, whilst nationalists would not have obtained their cross-border bodies and other reforms.35 Whatever the alleged diplomatic shortcomings in the presentation of Trimble’s election proposal, the fact remains that both he and the DUP pointedly stayed away from multilateral consultations about the format of the forthcoming talks, which began in the following week at Stormont. In the following weeks, recalls one senior official of the period, much complex mathematical work was done in the NIO to come up with the ‘correct’ electoral system. He believed they needed a system that satisfied the UUP entitlement to a majority of the majority community (though they did not in the end, manage it) but which would at the same time give due weight to the DUP and the smaller loyalist paramilitary parties. At the same time, the NIO obviously also had to consider the effects of any electoral system on the internal balance of forces within the nationalist community. Could they avoid handing a victory to Sinn Fein against the ageing SDLP – and in any case was that so wrong, they asked themselves? After all, senior NIO officials reasoned, the more that Sinn Fein expanded and stretched in support, the more diluted their ideology would necessarily become and they would be unwilling to lose new-found supporters by returning to full-scale violence. Over the long term, the NIO reasoned, this would help Adams and those who wished to go down a more political route. It would enable them to show to the apolitical militarists that the electoral route could yield greater gains than the armed struggle of the old variety. In consequence, the British came up with a hybrid of the constituency and list systems: electors voted for parties rather than people in the new, expanded number of eighteen constituencies, each of which returned five representatives. Two extra seats would be allocated to each of the ten most successful parties in the Province as a whole, thus guaranteeing representation to the small loyalist parties with minuscule levels of public support. The outcome of these deliberations was, in the view of one senior official, ‘the least democratic election of all time. It shows that Governments can tweak voting systems and how careful you have to be with reforming the mainland system.’ In the background all of the time were the Americans: Anthony Lake recalls that he would have long discussions with Sir John Kerr in his office in the West Wing of the White House to determine what kind of electoral method would be used for the elective route (that is, Single Transferable Vote, etc).36 It was a remarkable illustration of the degree of American interference in internal United Kingdom matters.

Indeed, Brian Feeney, a former SDLP councillor in Belfast with a regular column in the Irish News, spotted the irony in the system which was set up for the elective route into negotiations. It was, he asserted, the most un-British, un-unionist formula ever devised. ‘Professor Umberto Eco, who knows about these things, says all structures in the west display a Protestant or a Catholic mentality. If Protestantism is all about individualism the list system is fundamentally the opposite of a political system where people vote for individuals rather than parties. This political Protestantism reaches its peak in the USA where Democrats and Republicans do their own thing on the floor of the Senate … but thanks to David Trimble, we’ve got a Catholic continental system where the individual is subsumed within the party discipline and dogma. Only Sinn Fein has adopted an innovative approach. They have fielded candidates from the Republic who will be elected. Also in a number of areas they have placed at the top of the list prominent figures who have been convicted of high profile IRA activities. No doubt these men unambiguously support the armed struggle. They will certainly be elected. So thanks to David Trimble and his political acumen, the pro-Union vote will be divided a dozen ways and more overtly republican candidates than ever before will be elected under a system as mysterious as a papal conclave. Take a bow, David.’37 Feeney was being customarily bilious about the Unionist leader (whom he nicknamed the ‘Portadown Prancer’ after Drumcree I) and it was undoubtedly unfair of him to blame Trimble for the kind of system adopted. But Feeney’s observations were invested with one underlying truth. Like so many of Trimble’s victories, the elective route into negotiations blew up in his face. Thus, Trimble reproved Robert McCartney for splitting the Unionist vote in the 1996 Forum elections. McCartney replied that but for Trimble’s elective route into negotiations – which required that anyone who wanted to be at the talks table had to stand for the contest – he would never have set up the United Kingdom Unionist Party (prior to that, McCartney sat as an independent Westminster MP for North Down but had no Province-wide party organisation).38