Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Yet in the short term, Trimble was to suffer even more acute, personal discomfiture as a result of the Voluntary Coalition debacle. In the last debate of the Convention, on 3 March 1976 – just before its dissolution – Trimble wound up for Vanguard. His concluding remarks were directed at his UUUC colleagues, and especially at Paisley: ‘In 1972, he [Paisley] was not prepared to exert himself to defend Stormont and in 1976 he does not seem to be prepared to exert himself to restore it …’ opined Trimble. ‘In the debate of the last few days I have been reminded of an old Russian proverb that I came across in the pages of The Gulag Archipelago, volume 2, to the effect that we should look for our brave men in prisons and for the fools amongst the politicians.’42 It was, says Trimble, a bit of hyperbole on his part to hurt Paisley: in his view the DUP leader had always been a short-term thinker who was prepared to undermine Stormont for the sake of gaining an immediate advantage over the UUP. But the quote from Solzhenitsyn was also, he contended, a reference to his view of the way in which Paisley’s rhetoric had fired up a lot of loyalist people, who had then ended up in Northern Ireland’s jails. Those who did those deeds, thinks Trimble today (and then), had more bravery than those who encouraged them.43

Trimble was not, however, ready for Paisley’s response. ‘There is a story going round Queen’s University that a well-known member of Vanguard and a lecturer in law at Queen’s University, was toying with his personal side-arm in a young lady’s home’ retorted the DUP leader. ‘After seemingly unloading it he pulled the trigger and surprise, surprise, it went off and a bullet embedded itself in a wall behind the girl, missing her head by a mere inch. Our man from Vanguard very quickly filled in the bullet hole with Polyfilla. One wonders how good Polyfilla is for holes in the head. Mr Chairman, that might be an apocryphal story, but tonight the hon. Gentleman was certainly toying with a situation with which he was not prepared to come clean out into the open.’44 The attack was a clear reference to Trimble. There was uproar and shouts of ‘withdraw!’ from Convention members; Trimble tried to make Paisley give way, but the DUP leader declined. John Kennedy, one of the clerks to the Convention, recalls that ‘it was the most chilling, lowest, moment I have ever witnessed at Stormont. The blood literally drained from David Trimble’s face. Even the nimble-witted Lowry was lost for words.’45

Not for nothing is Ian Paisley reputed to have the best contacts of anyone in the Province – and, to this day, David Trimble does not know how the DUP leader discovered about this episode.46 Paisley still declines to say who his source was.47 Indeed, a large number of people – mostly, but not exclusively anti-Agreement unionists – have asked me whether I know of ‘Trimble’s attempt to kill his first wife’ or of an attempt of kill an ex-girlfriend. One senior Ulster Unionist even suggested to me that because of this supposed attempt to murder his then consort, Trimble was exposed to blackmail by MI5 – resulting in a vulnerability to British state pressure which led him, ultimately, to sign the Belfast Agreement (there are echoes here of the allegations made by some Irish republicans against Michael Collins, to the effect that he only signed the 1921 treaty because London ‘had something’ on him).48 The reality then was rather more prosaic. Far from being an illustration of Trimble’s temper in the course of a domestic dispute it was, rather, an illustration of his technical incompetence. Trimble was at the Belfast home of his girlfriend and wife-to-be, Daphne Orr, in Surrey Street off the Lisburn Road. He was clearing his personal protection weapon – a nine-millimetre automatic – and had removed the magazine. He thought he had cleared the chamber and squeezed the trigger to clear the spring. To his horror, ‘there was a round up the spout which fired into a wall. Even now, I find it it a bit of a shock to recall it.’49 Daphne Trimble recalls that her reaction after the bullet hit the wall was ‘quite unprintable’ – and adds, reasonably enough, that if she believed that he was trying to kill her, she would have terminated the relationship. The RUC was never called, nor did David and Daphne Trimble ever tell anyone about it: Daphne, who was in the public gallery when Paisley revealed this information, was in a state of shock. The episode contributed to Trimble’s decision to give up the weapon in 1978, a decision made all the easier by the fact that he thought then he was leaving public life following the break-up of Vanguard.50

Daphne and David Trimble had first met at Queen’s in 1972, where he had taught her Land Law in her second year and then advanced Property Law in her third year for her honours classes. She had been born in 1953 at Warrenpoint, Co. Down, a small port by the border with the Republic. She was the second of four Orr sisters, the last two being twins.51 Her older sister, Geraldine, married a Newry Catholic, Connla Magennis – whose uncle, Frank Aiken, was an IRA Chief of Staff in the 1920s who later became Fianna Fail Foreign Minister (Trimble never met Aiken, and Daphne only met him once at her sister’s wedding).52 Daphne’s mother came from Scotland and her father owned Fred C. Orr, a well-known jeweller in Newry, the nearest large town. Newry was, she recalls, a tinderbox in the early years of the Troubles, and Protestant businesses were regularly burned out: she remembers that when the next shop was set alight, the arsonists were burned to a crisp. Like so many border Protestants, they came under huge pressure in this largely nationalist area, but the family remained resolutely non-sectarian. None of her family ever joined any of the Loyal Orders, though her father was a Freemason. Her parents were in the New Ulster Movement, the precursor of the Alliance party, but she freely admits that had she not married Trimble she would never have become a political animal.53

Initially, she had only liked him as a lecturer and felt comfortable enough to ask him for advice on an apprenticeship, for she had few contacts in the legal profession in Belfast. He directed her to his old friend from the Land Registry and personal lawyer, Sam Beattie, of F.J. Orr & Co. (no relation). It was only in the summer of 1975, after she had graduated, that they started going out with each other: the courtship was first struck up at a staff-student cricket match. Later, he took her to the bar at Stormont and taught her about classical music, especially Wagner. They were married on 31 August 1978 at Warrenpoint Methodist Church: as at his first wedding, ten years earlier, Trimble was married to the strains of the bridal march from Wagner’s Lohengrin.54 The reception was held in Banbridge and Trimble’s new-found happiness was apparent for all to see: even today, members of his staff are struck by how his countenance lightens whenever her name is mentioned. Daphne Trimble’s influence on his life has been enormous. As Herb Wallace notes, ‘she is good at all the things David is not good at’. She provides the softening touch when he can be brusque or distracted – especially running the constituency office in Lurgan.55 Sam Beattie notes that under her influence, he has become more even-tempered.56 Above all, she provided him with four chidren: Richard, born in 1982; Victoria, born in 1984; Nicholas, born in 1986; and Sarah, born in 1992. Trimble had little contact with children prior to his marriage, but to Daphne’s surprise has proved to be a good father. Since 1982, the couple have lived in a chaotic, detached house at Harmony Hill in suburban Lisburn – just off the old Belfast road heading towards Lambeg, Co. Antrim, and a mere ten minutes away from the outlying portions of republican west Belfast. More significantly, perhaps, the particular cul-de-sac in which they live is majority Roman Catholic.57

Despite that, Harmony Hill has provided a stable home and community in which to rear a family. It also permitted Trimble to reconnect with his spiritual roots. He had ceased to participate in the act of worship from 1968 to 1978, but resumed kirk attendance shortly after his remarriage. Daphne Trimble was born into a Methodist family, but they go every week to the nearby Harmony Hill Presbyterian Church, as much for geographical reasons as anything else. And when in London or abroad, he worships either at Crown Court Church of Scotland kirk in Covent Garden or at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington DC. Since 1992, the family has been ministered to by a liberal evangelical clergyman, David Knox, and all the children have been brought up as Presbyterians. This church is ecumenical in spirit and holds joint services with its nearby Roman Catholic neighbour, St Colman’s, Lambeg: Trimble has read the lesson when the shared Christmas carol service is held at Harmony Hill, although he has never gone down the road to St Colman’s itself. But there is no connection, says Trimble, between his religious evolution and his political development: he has kept a pretty rigid separation between church and state in his own life.58

SIX Death at Queen’s

AFTER the Convention was dissolved, Trimble stayed loyal to Craig, who was still Westminster MP for East Belfast. In 1977, Trimble helped his chief defeat the abortive DUP-led loyalist workers’ strike called for the purpose of pushing the British Government to adopt a more robust security policy to crush the Provisionals: like much of the UUP and the Orange Order, Vanguard did not believe that the time was right. There were a number of reasons for this. First, unlike in 1974, there was no obvious target, in the form of a power-sharing enterprise. Second, under the new Labour Secretary of State, Roy Mason, British security policy was at its toughest anyhow. Craig and Trimble duly met with Mason on 1 and 10 May 1977 to advise him on how to deal with the disturbances. In particular, after Mason had issued a stern attack on the strikers from his home in Barnsley, Trimble urged him to tone it down: he feared that it might consolidate support for the strike, much as Wilson’s ‘spongers’ speech had done several years previously.1 Perhaps Mason took notice, for he did not use such language again.2

However valuable Craig’s and Trimble’s advice was to the British Government, nothing could alter the central political reality: Vanguard was finished. Craig duly wound up the party in 1978 and decided that his movement would again work for change from within, rather than from outside the UUP. Trimble duly joined the UUP for the first time in 1978 and found a berth in the Lisburn branch of Molyneaux’s constituency party in South Antrim. Far from slowly working his passage, after serving on the losing side in the internal party debate, both he and Craig were soon in the thick of the action again. At their 1978 conference at Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, the UUP backed the idea of a Regional Council for Northern Ireland. In other words, they would rather accept the lesser level of power inherent in local authority-style devolution than share a greater measure of Stormont-style power with nationalists. There were sound political reasons for this carefully calibrated stance. The party was deeply divided between integrationists and devolutionists. The Regional Council proposal could be represented as a move towards either wing of the UUP. For integrationists, it offered the prospect of British-style local government; for devolutionists, the return of such limited powers could be the prelude to return to Stormont.3 Trimble put forward an amendment at Enniskillen which called for a restoration of a devolved legislature working along normal parliamentary principles. He told the gathering that the party’s original motion would be interpreted as abandoning devolution and adopting integration as a policy.

Such interventions did little to endear Trimble to the UUP establishment. The reasons for their distaste were personal as well as political, and ensured that he remained an outsider for many years to come. First, he was a refugee from Vanguard, which in 1973 had contributed mightily to the split in the old UUP. Indeed, there was always a whiff of sulphur about Vanguard, with its air of unconstitutionality. ‘It was not just David Trimble,’ recalls Molyneaux. ‘There was a certain reservation in the mind of a great many members of the party. It was a little unseen question mark – particularly if they do something impulsive. That was the trademark of the Vanguard party.’4 Then there was the matter of his character, which was light years from the backslapping bonhomie of the ‘good ole’ boys’ at Glengall Street; nor, he admits, did he do much to make himself amenable to them.5 Then, of course, there were the more obvious reasons for political prejudice, namely Trimble’s status as a devolutionist dissident in a party that was apparently becoming ever more integrationist under Enoch Powell’s influence. No doubt such sentiments help explain why Trimble came in third place when he sought to become UUP candidate in North Down in the 1979 General Election, behind Hazel Bradford and the eventual nominee, Clifford Smyth.6

Given these sensibilities, it was perhaps fortunate that few, if any, of Trimble’s party colleagues (including Molyneaux) knew that from 1976 to 1986, he often wrote the ‘Calvin Macnee’ column in Fortnight magazine, which alternated between a unionist and a nationalist (subsequently, nationalist contributors wrote under a nom de plume of Columbanus Macnee). He had originally been recruited by his colleague, Tom Hadden, who found it hard to persuade Unionists of Trimble’s hue to write for the journal: Hadden recalls that Trimble would leave his contributions in his pigeon hole at the faculty in a brown envelope.7 It was characterised by an irreverent, mocking tone: two of its main targets were Molyneaux and Paisley, though Martin Smyth and Harold McCusker were recipients of the occasional sideswipe as well.8 Trimble was contemptuous of what he saw as politicians who would wind up the public and then walk away from the consequences of their actions – in terms which would have been well understood by Andy Tyrie and others in the UDA. ‘Just the other day Harold McCusker was discussing, on television, the circumstances that would lead to loyalists firing on the RUC and the British Army. It is all rather reminiscent of the days when Bill Craig went to Westminster to make his shoot-to-kill speech. Though there are differences. When Craig made his threat he had the strength of the UDA and others behind him. Also, if I remember rightly, he used the first person singular, while McCusker ingloriously refers to what others might do.’9 In particular, he heaped scorn upon Paisley’s ‘Carson Trail’ antics, launched in protest at the Thatcher-Haughey dialogue and which followed Sir Edward’s itinerary in protest at the Home Rule Bill in 1912. At one point, the DUP leader had assembled 500 men on a Co. Antrim hillside, supposedly waving firearms certificates. ‘To be impressive you must have something extra – something to show that these men mean business,’ opined Calvin Macnee. ‘So what do they do? They all wave a piece of paper in the air, and it is suggested that the papers represent firearms certificates … If the “Big Man” wants to persuade the government that he is a threat to be taken seriously, he must do better than that. I’ve heard it said that the demonstration might not be unconnected with the current history programmes on television, which have unearthed a lot of interesting film of bygone days. Paisley himself has made the connection by saying that he is following the Carson trail. Well, I’ve heard it said too that the television set at the Paisley home is faulty – that it’s not the example of Sir Edward that he is following, but Frank of that ilk…’10 Correctly, he warned fellow Unionists that despite Margaret Thatcher’s John Bull rhetoric, she was not reliable on Northern Ireland. As he saw it, Unionists tended to respond to her positively because of the very hostile reaction of Irish nationalists to the volume and manner of her remarks, rather than because of the intrinsically pro-loyalist content of policy.11

Before the 1979 General Election, Molyneaux had struck up a close relationship with Thatcher, then leader of the Opposition and her principal spokesman on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave. He had persuaded her to go for Scottish-style regional councils with no legislative powers and had contributed greatly to the writing of the section of the Tory manifesto on Ulster. But after Neave was murdered by the INLA in March 1979, and the Conservatives entered office in May 1979, Thatcher put in the much weaker Humphrey Atkins as Secretary of State. He listened very carefully to his officials, whose institutional preferences were profoundly sceptical of anything that might integrate Northern Ireland more fully into the rest of the United Kingdom. Instead, in November 1979, the Government published a consultative document, The Government of Northern Ireland: A Working Paper for a Conference. Although it ruled out discussion of Irish unity, confederation, independence, compulsory power-sharing or the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, it contained none of the positive suggestions for which the UUP had hoped. The SDLP, meanwhile, demanded the right to raise the ‘Irish dimension’, which was eventually conceded in ‘parallel’ talks.12 Molyneaux reacted bitterly to what he saw as this betrayal and the UUP accordingly refused to attend the ‘Atkins talks’ – whilst the DUP, to the surprise of many, did so. Trimble, writing as Calvin Macnee in Fortnight, slammed Molyneaux’s ‘miscalculations’ and dismissed the boycott of the talks as ‘silly’.13 Molyneaux, whose approach was always one of ’safety first’, had his own calculations: he had to fend off a challenge from the DUP. Paisley had scored the highest number of first preferences in the 1979 European elections, the first Province-wide ‘beauty contest’. And during the 1981 Hunger Strikes, the DUP actually outpolled the UUP in the local council elections (as Trimble correctly predicted in Fortnight in July/August 1980).14

Trimble disagreed with Molyneaux’s approach. ‘Jim should not have assumed that the Government was going to pick up his ideas and run with them as a single option. The fact that there were talks did not mean that they would disappear. But he was petulant. Because he was not offered those things on a plate, it meant that his ideas could not possibly come about. It was a terrible tactical judgement from his own point of view. Molyneaux’s negativism drove an impatient Thatcher into the hands of succesive Irish governments. She felt she had to do something following the Hunger Strikes of 1981, and this eventually resulted in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985’ (significantly, even in this highly polarised period, Trimble was at pains to emphasise in his Fortnight column that he did not conclude from Bobby Sands’ victory in the first Fermanagh-South Tyrone by-election of 1981 that the majority of Catholics backed violence).15 Indeed, he recalls that even the South Antrim UUP management committee passed a highly unusual motion that was critical of Molyneaux’s behaviour over the Atkins talks.16 Despite these public reversals, Molyneaux proceeded to consolidate his internal grip on the party, prompting Trimble to form the Devolution Group in conjunction with some fellow dissidents. One of the key driving forces behind this ginger group was Trimble’s colleague from Queen’s, Edgar Graham, who would come to play an important role in his life. Superficially, they were birds of a feather, though in fact the two men were very different (nor were they ‘best friends’, as some have suggested). They had first met when Graham was a second-year law student, taking Trimble’s course on Trusts. Graham, who was born in 1954, came from Randalstown, Co. Antrim and had attended Ballymena Academy. After Queen’s, he had gone on to postgraduate work at Trinity College, Oxford, where he worked on a thesis on sovereign immunity. Returning from England, he was called to the Bar and taught Public Law at Queen’s. He and Trimble occupied adjacent offices and became close professionally and politically, talking animatedly together in the Common Room during coffee breaks. Graham, who had been interested in politics since his teens, joined the UUP, but significantly did not join the Loyal Orders: he wanted to see how far he could progress in the party without such feathers in his Unionist cap. He was also opposed to capital punishment. He lacked the personal spikiness of Trimble, nor did he carry any of the Vanguard baggage and became one of the few intellectual indulgences which the UUP allowed itself.17 After his election in 1982 to the Assembly, he displayed an impressive command of parliamentary procedure, which few could match. Many, including Molyneaux and Trimble, assumed that Graham would one day become leader of the UUP.18

Graham was elected Chairman of the Young Unionist Council in 1981 and in the following year was elected Honorary Secretary of the full Ulster Unionist Council. Ian Clark, a Queen’s Young Unionist and Devolution Group activist who later became election agent to John Taylor, recalls feeling a sense of despair that Trimble, by contrast, could not have managed to be elected a party officer on the Devolution Group slate.19 At one point, Trimble was even thrown off the Ulster Unionist Executive as representative from South Antrim and in the 1981 local elections he failed to be elected as a councillor in Area D of ‘Loyalist’ Lisburn.20Moreover, the space which he might potentially have occupied within the party was further ‘crowded out’ by two other capable lawyers who had recently joined up – Robert McCartney and Peter Smith. Significantly, both were critical of the drift of Molyneaux’s policy. McCartney became chairman of the Union Group, which according to Trimble was founded to perform a function akin to the Bow Group or the Tribune Group. In 1982 the Union Group published Options: Devolved Government for Northern Ireland. McCartney wrote the foreword, while Trimble contributed the main paper. Trimble acknowledged that there could be no return to old Stormont-style majority rule and urged that a coalition be formed of all parties prepared to support common policies – that is, something along Voluntary Coalition lines. It also endorsed Sir James Craig’s flexibility at the time of Partition: ‘Before the 1921 Treaty, Craig had gone south to speak to de Valera while the latter was still on the run. [Trimble’s added emphasis] This meant putting himself into the hands of a go between, allowing himself to be taken, blindfolded, to an IRA hideout … Craig negotiated the Craig-Collins pact with Michael Collins which covered the whole range of law enforcement in Ulster, including the proposal that Catholic reserve constables should be recruited specifically for the policing of Catholic districts.’ The favourable reference to these discussions is significant: according to Marianne Elliott, ‘the Craig-Collins pacts had held out the prospect of peaceful collaboration by the minority with the northern state. Not until the Sunningdale agreement of 1973 was another such effort made.’21 But few invested these lines with much significance at the time; and as James Cooper, a prominent Fermanagh Ulster Unionist notes, Trimble was a master draftsman, who would be careful to emphasise that he was simply putting forward options, which were not necessarily his own views.22 Trimble says he was even perfectly prepared to place his academic expertise at the disposal of political rivals. Ulster: The Facts, published in 1982 under the names of Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and John Taylor, was, he says, largely drafted by the Unionist writer Hugh Shearman and himself. It was written in preparation for the trio’s visit to America and was described by John Whyte in his bibliographical study, Interpreting Northern Ireland as ‘the fullest recent attempt to give the Unionist case a factual basis’.23 However, Peter Robinson and Cedric Wilson – a director of Crown Publications, the company which produced this work – state vigorously that they have no knowledge of Trimble assisting in this endeavour. But Robinson concedes that Trimble might have worked privately with Shearman. By contrast, John Taylor states that he clearly recalls Trimble playing a leading role in drafting of the document. Whatever Trimble’s precise role, it is clearly symptomatic of the divisions in Unionism that even so apparently uncontentious an issue as the authorship of a two-decades-old pamphlet should prompt such disagreement on basic facts!