Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Similar ineptitude characterised Trimble’s dealings with the parliamentary party. Shortly after the election, a very senior UUP source told Frank Millar that ‘we have five MPs who I wish would just go, announce that they intend to stand down at the next election’. The five named were Ross, Smyth, Cecil Walker (North Belfast), Roy Beggs (East Antrim) and Clifford Forsythe (South Antrim).20 Trimble says that he knew he had a generational problem: indeed, in early 1996, the Belfast Telegraph noted that the combined age of the nine UUP MPs was 560 years, or an average of 62.2 (with Trimble as the youngest at 51). Whilst most Ulster parties tend to be older on average than their mainland counterparts, the UUP’s record was then the most gerontophile. Some of the Young Turks were pushing for deselections, notably the Oxford-educated North Belfast councillor, Nelson McCausland, who had targeted Walker. Trimble says that he did nothing to dissuade McCausland, but nor did he help him either (Trimble would later change his view of Walker dramatically for the better).21 David Brewster, then Treasurer of the East Londonderry Association, says that Trimble’s backing helped him to win one of the party’s four honorary secretaryships at the 1996 AGM of the UUC. Brewster thinks that Trimble had a reason for this: he told the younger man that if he wanted his support to take over from Ross, he would have it. Brewster had no interest in making such a challenge against Ross, and would subsequently become a leading critic of Trimble in the Union First Group after the signing of the Belfast Agreement and in December 2003 joined the DUP.22 McCausland’s challenge in North Belfast fizzled out, partly because of the endemic factionalism in that association, which as Brewster observes, ‘makes Kosovo look simple by comparison’.23

Trimble also appeared to flirt with the idea of recreating a pan-unionist front – an idea which resurfaces every time that loyalists feel under threat. The idea was that Unionists would opt out of the process ad interim, build up their strength, modernise their structures, and then return to the table stronger and better equipped to repel the advances of their enemies. After Drumcree I, the conditions for such a recoalescence of pro-British forces appeared more auspicious than they had for some time. Certainly, Paisley welcomed Trimble’s election as leader and ascribed his success to his identification with a stance closer to that of the DUP. Within ten days of his election, Trimble had met with Paisley at the latter’s home in Cyprus Avenue (a street made famous in the Van Morrison song on the album Astral Weeks).The two men expressed their unity of purpose on the Union and the Frameworks Documents, but made little further progress.24 But this démarche failed – largely because the UUP feared it would end up co-opted into a Paisleyite front in which it would become the junior partner. The other significant Unionist party leader, Robert McCartney of the UKUP, was soon to develop doubts about Trimble as well. Initially, McCartney had also welcomed Trimble’s election as leader, judging him to be the candidate most willing to work with the leaders of the other Unionist parties.25 A week after the election, Trimble contacted McCartney, who duly invited Trimble to his home, where the two men discussed the future of Unionism. As Trimble was leaving, McCartney said to him: ‘David, you are now leader of the largest Unionist party and as such you will not want for advice. There are people in London, Dublin and Washington who will take you to the top of the temple and they will say, “all of this can be yours if you do what you are told”.’ According to McCartney, Trimble simply nodded, smiled and left.26

Washington was not so sure whether Trimble was quite so biddable as McCartney feared. Nancy Soderberg says that the US administration knew little about Trimble, apart from what had been observed on the television screens at Drumcree earlier in the year.27 But for all their doubts, the Clinton administration had to make the effort to see whether the new UUP leader would become ‘engaged’.28 Trimble did so with gusto. For unlike so many of the older generation of Unionist politicians, Trimble carried no anti-American baggage, either culturally or politically – although he disliked the activities of many Irish-Americans and of Nancy Soderberg in particular. Prior to serving as senior staff director for European affairs on the President’s National Security Council with specific responsibility for Ireland, Soderberg worked for Senator Edward Kennedy. For this, and above all for her role in helping Gerry Adams obtain a visa over British Government objections in 1994, she became a hate figure amongst Unionists, earning the soubriquet of ‘Nancy Sodabread’. Moreover, she forged a close working relationship with Jean Kennedy Smith, the American ambassador in Dublin and a sister of Senator Kennedy, who had out-gunned her counterpart in London, Raymond Seitz, over the Adams visa. But Soderberg and her colleagues also understood that it took ‘two sides to tango’. Having ‘engaged’ with Adams, they would now have to work much harder with Unionists to convince them that they, too, had a stake of sorts in the ‘process’ and that the United States was not utterly hostile to the interests of the Ulster-British population. They were keen to emphasise their desire to promote a peaceful settlement and did not care that much about the precise terms of the deal. As Nancy Soderberg observes, ‘the truth is we were knocking on the unionist door for some time and Trimble was the first one to answer’.29

Trimble was indeed the first Ulster Unionist leader of recent times to answer the call on a sustained basis, but the links went further back than Soderberg’s remarks suggested. Terence O’Neill as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland sought to make much of Ulster-Scots heritage in his dealings with both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and his Christmas card of December 1964 showed him meeting with LBJ at the White House: on St Patrick’s Day of that year, O’Neill had presented the Commander-in-Chief with a book on the Scotch-Irish and banqueting cloths (which delighted the Linen Guild back at home).30 Charles Reynolds, an Ulsterman living in America, also organised information campaigns on behalf of the pro-Union population following the outbreak of the Troubles, the highlight of which was a highly effective tour by Brian Faulkner in June and July of 1972.31 And efforts were made at various points in the 1980s by David Burnside, Frank Millar and Harold McCusker. Likewise, Peter Robinson, Gregory Campbell and others undertook activities on behalf of the DUP.32 However, during the long tenure of James Molyneaux, such activities were not given a notably high priority by the UUP. Towards the very end of Molyneaux’s long tenure in office, arrangements were put in place for a UUP North American bureau with offices donated by Tony Culley-Foster, a Washington businessman who grew up in Londonderry. One of his employees, the Scottish-born Anne Smith of McLean, Virginia, was seconded to work for it, officially for one day a week.33

Nancy Soderberg acknowledges that the UUP North American bureau did provide some kind of reference point which had not previously existed, and other Administration officials have been courteous enough about Smith’s contribution.34 Nonetheless, Smith was neither from Northern Ireland nor could she be described as a ‘heavy-hitting’ Washington lobbyist type who ‘packed a punch inside the Beltway’. Trimble stuck doggedly by her and refused to entertain any suggestions to have Smith removed. Moreover, this outfit had nothing like the resources of Sinn Fein’s North American organisation. It has remained determinedly low-key in the years since then: David Burnside says that he had secured a pledge of $250,000–$300,000 for a full-time professional lobbyist, but the offer was rejected.35 According to Trimble, Burnside offered a lobbying firm to raise money. But the idea was partly rejected by the UUP officer team on the grounds that it would be embarrassing if the North American office spent more money per annum than Glengall Street. More important, says Trimble, was the point that the money could have come from conservative American sources who wanted it to be used for partisan, anti-Clinton purposes. This was something he was not prepared to countenance, despite the fact that the US Administration was close to a low ebb at this point following the Republicans’ takeover of Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections.36

Trimble’s election also coincided with a change in key personnel amongst British and American officialdom in 1995, notably the appointment of Sir John Kerr as British ambassador to Washington, and that of Blair Hall as Political Counsellor at the US Embassy in London. Both men earned Trimble’s admiration and trust, in a way that Soderberg never did: she realised that Unionists had to be brought in, but carried so much baggage by this point that she was unable to do it herself. Kerr and Hall were thus crucial to the task of facilitating the Unionists’ admission into the international mainstream. Kerr was a Glaswegian Protestant married to a Catholic of Irish descent: Trimble certainly felt that as a native of the west of Scotland, he had a greater instinctive feel for the problems of Ulster than a more conventional ‘Oxbridge type’. Kerr arrived in Washington on the heels of Sir Robin Renwick’s devastating rebuff over the Adams visa. The British Embassy was enormously defensive towards Capitol Hill and the media. Kerr determined to reverse this through a variety of measures. In March 1996, Kerr broke with tradition by hosting his own St Patrick’s Day party in the Lutyens embassy residence; Dermot Gallagher, the then Irish ambassador retorted that he would throw a St George’s Day drinks party to even the score. But there was a serious message behind Kerr’s move. Its essence was that Irishness was not the sole preserve of Irish nationalists or of the Irish state.37

America need not necessarily have been stony ground for Unionism. As a News Letter editorial of 9 November 1995, ‘Selling Ulster’, put it: ‘the Unionist message has never been fully explained on the other side of the Atlantic and this has undoubtedly been to the detriment of a majority population who enjoy a kin relationship with up to 25 million of US citizens, descended from the quarter of a million Ulster-Scots Presbyterians who emigrated to the American frontier 200/250 years ago. Of the 40 million Americans who would claim to have Irish blood in their veins, an estimated 56 per cent come of Ulster Protestant stock. Whilst the knowledge of the political nuances in Northern Ireland may be extremely limited, this section would be broadly susceptible to the unionist argument and the importance of effectively dealing with terrorism conducted by a tiny unrepresentative group of people.’ Trimble wholeheartedly agreed with these sentiments. Indeed, according to the American website Political Graveyard, no fewer than seven Trimbles have been elected to the US Senate and Congress since the inception of the Republic – mostly from Kentucky and from neighbouring Ohio (the most recently elected Trimble had, ironically, served in the US House of Representatives as a Democrat from Arkansas from 1945 to 1967). There was even a Trimble County in Kentucky, named for Robert Trimble, who became an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court and an intimate of the great John Marshall, Chief Justice. His forebears had orginally come from Co. Armagh in the 1740s. And General Isaac Trimble of Virginia – a descendant of a Trimble who emigrated from Co. Antrim in the early 18th century – had led two brigades of Pender’s division during Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was captured by Union forces after the lower third of his leg was amputated near the battlefield.38

This was the heritage which, in British eyes, lent Trimble such significance in America. For a long time, the US Administration had been influenced by the notion that the Unionists were mere puppets of the British and of the Tories in particular. This idea had been assiduously fostered by Sinn Fein via Irish Americans. Patrick Mayhew, with his patrician manner, was not the best man to correct this impression with American audiences and his visits became more infrequent. Trimble’s manner was obviously not patrician. His accent alone was proof that there were intelligent and reasonable residents of the geographic entity of the island of Ireland who wished for no part in an all-Ireland state. Moreover, the British Government understood that the Unionist population were fed up with the ceaseless reminders of Adams’ film-star status in America. If it continued unchecked, they could easily conclude that the ‘peace process’ was irremediably stacked against them. They would then become even less willing to cut some deal with Irish nationalism. The British also understood very well that many Unionists have always had a craving for respectability, perhaps more than some of their critics and admirers have supposed. This included the UUP leader. ‘Trimble went to America a huge amount,’ recalls Sir John Wheeler. ‘It played to his ego. He loved his Washington jaunts and was made much of. Suddenly, here was the man from Vanguard who walked with kings and princes.’39

William Crowe, the American ambassador in London, and Blair Hall, the Political Counsellor at the embassy, also recognised that a one-sided process would be inherently unstable. But initially, it looked as if these overtures might go disastrously wrong. Anthony Lake, the National Security Adviser, came to London in October 1995 and met Trimble in the sunlit corner room of the US ambassador’s residence in Winfield House, overlooking Regent’s Park. There was an exchange of pleasantries which well matched the Gainsborough pictures and the flowered armchairs. It all passed smoothly until Lake urged Trimble to ‘exert leadership’ over prior decommissioning and ventured that his community would understand. ‘Don’t tell me what my community thinks!’ exploded Trimble. Lake appeared shocked, and it confirmed the Americans’ fears of Trimble’s volatility (Lake and Soderberg also expressed scepticism about Trimble’s elective assembly).40 It is possible that Trimble wanted to show that he was no pushover, and that he chose deliberately to foster what Richard Nixon called the ‘madman theory’: that he needed to be handled with great care lest he go off the rails. Trimble denies this to be the case, though he is calculating enough in other ways.41 It may be that he behaved thus out of genuine annoyance at a foolish suggestion which showed no comprehension of the balance of forces within Unionism.

The British were determined to persist with the UUP’s ‘outreach’: Trimble recalls that John Major had told him that if he pressed for a meeting with the President, the request would be favourably received. It was accordingly arranged that the President would make a ‘drop-by’, ‘spontaneous’ meeting whilst Trimble was in Vice President Al Gore’s suite. This was the form employed when the President did not yet want to bestow a full Oval Office tête-à-tête, but from a Unionist perspective it was a significant step to parity of treatment with John Hume.42 Sir John Kerr says that there was huge interest in Trimble when he came to town. Attention particularly focused upon internal relations within the UUP, notably between Trimble and Taylor. Nobody, says Kerr, had studied Trimble in advance and they did not know what to make of him (such uncertainty did not affect the hardline republican Irish American Unity Conference, which took out an advert in the New York Times on 30 October 1995 entitled ‘A WELCOME TO DAVID TRIMBLE, THE “DAVID DUKE” OF IRELAND’ and likening the Orange Order to the KKK. The next day, David Duke expressed anger that his name had been blackened by such unfavourable comparisons!). Following a breakfast meeting with Edward Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts singled Trimble out as the most important political leader in the Province and said that ‘all of us here in Congress know that Mr Trimble is going to play a vital role in settling the future of Northern Ireland. Whatever is worked out will be worked out for the future of Northern Ireland by the people of Northern Ireland.’43 This belied the rancorous nature of Trimble’s meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs, including Congressman Peter King, a Long Island Republican and an energetic supporter of Sinn Fein. All relentlessly peppered him with hostile questions, and Trimble responded in kind. At the White House, Trimble met with Gore for half an hour and they were joined by Clinton for ten minutes.44 Trimble again pressed his idea of an elected assembly, but little of substance was achieved. One thing would impress him above all others: he presented Clinton with copies of two Ulster Society publications: Ronnie Hanna’s book on American servicemen in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, Pardon Me Boy and Gordon Lucy’s lively study of the Ulster Covenant – which he brought into the White House in a grotty plastic bag. When the President made his first visit to Belfast some weeks later, he had read both from cover to cover, and was able to put the British Prime Minister right on points of fact. The White House noticed one other thing about Trimble during these early visits: according to Anthony Lake, the UUP leader would glance across to John Taylor to see his deputy’s reactions.45

In truth, Trimble made a mixed impression on those he met. He seemed to many of his interlocutors to be very prickly, and very much on the look-out for insults and slights. Partly, it was inexperience: he handled the US media in a confrontational manner more appropriate to a rowdy Unionist gathering back at home. But, says Anne Smith, it was also because many of his interlocutors were either hostile – as was the case with the Ad Hoc Committee – or else uninformed. As she observes, the most common question which Trimble had for years to endure on his visits to America was ‘why won’t you shake hands with Gerry Adams?’ They always, says Smith, wanted Trimble to make the first move, because that is the way that reasonable men settle their disputes in the United States. It would take some years for Americans to understand the reasons for Trimble’s reluctance – namely, the reaction of ordinary Unionists to the idea of such a meeting.46 That was because such understanding of the Unionist case as was achieved was entirely functional: no Unionists, no process. But there was no year-round constituency created with a positive understanding of the merits of Unionism. There was, eight years later, no pro-Unionist bloc to counteract the influence of the Irish-American lobby.

In some ways this was understandable. After all, when it came to the affairs of Ireland, the Scotch-Irish Protestant immigrants of the 17th and 18th centuries were more thoroughly assimilated than the Gaelic Catholic Irish of the 19th and 20th centuries. That said, many small peripheral peoples without limitless resources such as the Chechens had set up Washington offices on a shoestring basis and had successfully mobilised far more support for their cause. Indeed, in the 1980s, even a figure such as the military dictator of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt (who was pushing a rather worse case than the Unionists of Ulster) had managed to garner some support amongst his fellow evangelicals in the United States for his regime. Why then did the UUP not succeed in making in-roads? Anne Smith states there was simply no time to cultivate the ‘Bible Belt’, partly because of what she claims to be the size and fragmentation of the community.47 But Unionists did little better with secular conservatives ‘inside the Beltway’. Despite widespread conservative disgust with the Clinton administration, Unionists were unable to cash in much on his granting of a visa to Gerry Adams at the behest of that great right-wing bête noire, Edward Kennedy. Indeed, Sinn Fein/IRA was allied to many bitterly anti-American ‘national liberation movements’ such as the PLO: the historic hostility of Irish republicans to US foreign policy objectives throughout much of the world remained one of their best-kept secrets until 2001. Nor was the UUP leader aware of the existence of the extended Trimble clan in Kentucky and Ohio, despite his own historical enthusiasms. Trimble himself recognised that the UUP ought to do more, but was too busy and too disorganised to do anything about them. There was, however, another aspect to his failure to deliver. Did Trimble really want to build up a network of support amongst Congressmen from the Deep South, who might act as a counterweight to the Kennedys et al.? When the idea of such an ‘outreach’ operation in America was broached to him at the October 2000 Conservative party conference in Bournemouth, he said, ‘No, I can’t be associated with yahoos.’48 Certainly, he never reached out on a regular basis to such natural allies as Senator Jesse Helms, who held the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee throughout that period, and who loathed the Provisionals. Partly, this was because Trimble had gradually became acutely self-aware of his status as a pillar of the international ‘civilised’ order. And because he is naturally shy, he liked to engage only with a few people in the United States, or anywhere else: what mattered to him above all else were his dealings with Clinton. It was a pattern which would eventually be replicated in his dealings with Clinton’s admirer – Tony Blair.

FIFTEEN ‘Binning Mitchell’

TRIMBLE’S tetchy approach in America and at home may have won him few friends; but intentionally or not, it served him well enough in his dealings with the unionist community. For every time the two Governments resiled from their positions on decommissioning, Trimble would eventually follow suit. But because he often did this with ill grace, it masked the extent of his acquiescence in the intergovernmental strategy. This was particularly true of his acceptance of the ‘Twin Track’ procedure in 1995–6. In essence, what happened was that the British accepted that Mayhew’s ‘Washington III’ demand for IRA decommissioning prior to a republican entry into talks was no longer viable: the IRA simply would not decommission. Since the purpose of British state strategy was to secure an all-inclusive settlement which stopped nationalists and unionists fighting each other and thus harming British interests, the price of upholding Washington III became too high to pay. The only question was how to wriggle off the hook of prior decommissioning without obvious humiliation and without inflaming Tory backbench sensibilities. The two Governments hit upon ‘Twin Track’ as the vehicle for accomplishing this.1 It entailed setting up an international commission to arrange for the terms of decommissioning simultaneous with the start of preliminary all-party talks: in other words, parallel decommissioning as opposed to prior decommissioning. It enabled them to say they had not abandoned the principle, but simply altered the timing and the mechanism.

Trimble publicly signalled his willingness to go for a Twin Track procedure in an Irish Times interview on 11 November 1995. Trimble stated that despite his serious misgivings, he had never ruled out Twin Track – so long as it was linked to his assembly proposal. As Patrick Mayhew notes, if the UUP had rejected this formulation, and stuck to Washington III, the two Governments would have been in trouble, not least with the Tory backbenches; but it was Trimble’s willingness to go along with it, subject to certain conditions, which convinced Mayhew that the UUP leader was ultimately serious about doing the deal.2 Indeed, Trimble sometimes behaved as if immediate decommissioning was a tactical device which could be downplayed and then resurrected and traded for some other, more sought-after, objective. Thus he told Andrew Hunter to keep up the pressure on decommissioning, even as he sought to dilute the concept for the sake of more valuable gains.3 His decision not to put too many eggs into the decommissioning basket at this point was also conditioned by his inner belief that ultimately the two Governments were not that serious about it anyway. It would always be subject to broader political imperatives. And in November 1995, the most urgent of those was the forthcoming visit of President Clinton to these islands.