Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

Despite his skilled advocacy, much of the UUP hierarchy still regarded Trimble with suspicion as the most dangerous of the devolutionists. Those suspicions were further fuelled by the style as well as the substance of Trimble’s politics. For Molyneaux’s boycott of the Atkins talks and the attendant mistrust of the NIO were the antithesis of Trimble’s approach: he believes in engaging political opponents head-on. In 1978, Trimble had several meetings with Allen Huckle, a young civil servant on secondment from the old Civil Service Department and later a senior member of the Foreign Office. He also met Stephen Leach, a rising civil servant in the political affairs division of the NIO, who contacted him out of the blue after reading his contributions to the Convention debates. The dialogue was a two-way process: the officials were out to influence the Unionists, and Trimble was out to influence them. Later, Leach introduced Trimble to a more senior figure in the NIO, David Blatherwick, who was on secondment from the Foreign Office and who later became ambassador to the Irish Republic and Egypt. ‘Trimble came to us with a lot of suspicion not of the British state but of the Foreign Office and the NIO,’ recalls Blatherwick. ‘All of them, in his view, were selling out and pandering to the nationalists. You can’t, of course, provide reassurance through mere words. You can only do it by consistency, by trying to explain what government is trying to do. If I had been in his position, I would have been suspicious, too. Everything normal about the Unionists’ early lives had been swept away and here were these funny foreign guys from London put in charge temporarily and why should you trust them?’24

Trimble says he learned an important lesson from these conversations – that the Government had no master plan for the future of the Province and that Blatherwick was, in fact, grateful for ideas. Far from seeking a ‘sell-out’ or ‘scuttle’ from Ulster, Trimble contends that Blatherwick was looking for some formulation that would quieten things down.25 The two men spoke in particular about the ideas which Trimble, Craig and David McNarry had expressed in their personal capacities as UUP members in February 1980 in a paper entitled Towards the Better Government of Ulster. The document proposed a phasing of devolution which in the first stage could cover those services presently administered by the six Northern Ireland departments (Health, Education and so on), thus reserving more controversial matters for later. These reserved matters, it went on, could then be transferred within a specified period following a vote by a special or weighted majority of the members of the Northern Ireland Parliament. It added that the advantages of this procedure would be that there would be a clear incentive for all parties to work towards such a transfer. Some of these ideas were later incorporated into the ‘rolling devolution’ plans of Thatcher’s second Ulster Secretary, Jim Prior, and the ensuing 1982–6 Assembly. Although the UUP participated in the Prior Assembly, many integrationists – and, above all, Powell – saw the body as a NIO stratagem to perpetuate the semi-detached status of the Province.

Trimble may have found discussions with officials informative, but they cost him dearly in the short term. In 1982, Enoch Powell raised a grave matter in the Commons, which came to be known in unionist circles simply as ‘Sloan-Abbott’. The sequence of events was as follows: in February 1981, a young postgraduate researcher at Keele University called Geoffrey Sloan approached an upcoming NIO civil servant called Clive Abbott, for the purpose of interviewing him for his thesis. Sloan passed a record of this interview on to Harold McCusker, who in turn passed it on to James Molyneaux, who in his turn showed it to Enoch Powell. The contents of Sloan’s notes were sensational. Abbott had apparently informed him that when the Tories entered office in 1979, the NIO had to tell them that the Neave (and therefore the Molyneaux) policy of greater integration was ‘just not on’, both because such an approach would forfeit the cooperation of the Republic in security affairs and because of past secret undertakings given to the Irish Republic on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. The message was in line with Powell’s worst fear: that civil servants were working actively to undermine the policy of the elected government of the day at the behest of a foreign power. Prior was enraged that a civil servant who could not defend himself should be named in this way. Moreover, he said, beyond the fact that these interviews took place, there was no agreeement on what Abbott had actually said. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, had conducted an investigation. According to his findings, Abbott had not said these things: the notes contained some basic errors which, he held, no high-flying NIO civil servant could ever make (such as the misnaming of a US Congressman interested in Ulster). Above all, Prior retorted, Powell had not – as it were – ‘declared an interest’ in the matter of Sloan. For it emerged that although Sloan was, indeed, a researcher at Keele, he had once done research for McCusker and had also met Molyneaux on a number of occasions. When Powell raised the matter, he did not mention this and it thus appeared (erroneously) that Sloan had been acting as an entirely independent observer. Whatever the truth of the matter, the apparent errors in the interview notes and the question of Powell’s omission allowed the Government off the hook.26

But there was a further twist to the tale. For according to David McKittrick’s ‘Westminster Notebook’ in the Irish Times of 3 July 1982, the document ‘has Abbott naming a prominent Official Unionist politician and saying, “he is also a personal friend, and has kept us well-informed about what is going on inside Jim Molyneaux’s party for a number of years”. The politician named says he has never, to the best of his recollection, met anyone by the name of Clive Abbott.’ That unidentified person was David Trimble. The notes were circulated widely in loyalist circles and their contents were advertised – accurately – to the author. Key passages have also subsequently been passed on to me by a prominent UUP figure. The implications of this allegation were very serious indeed and confirmed the worst suspicions of the UUP about anyone who spoke to the NIO. For, at best, he could have been seen by his fellow unionists to have been indiscreet in front of ‘the Brits’. Indeed, the most damaging claim, says Trimble, was to be described as a ‘good friend’ by a civil servant. Trimble states that since he had not met Abbott, the reference to him was obviously meant in a departmental sense, in the light of his conversations with Huckle, Leach and Blatherwick. He protested loudly to Blatherwick about the damage, but the UUP leader remembers that ‘the NIO had gone into deep defensive mode’ and would not issue a denial on his behalf.27 Blatherwick also denies that Trimble was an informer of any kind and says that ‘as a person he’s honest to the point of brutality. A very proper person, very aware of his own position. That’s why he took Sloan-Abbott so badly.’28 Trimble also spoke to Molyneaux, as his local MP, to ensure that these claims were curtailed, but he remembers Molyneaux simply equivocated; Molyneaux says that he did not know what Trimble was alluding to. Even today, over two decades on, serving and retired senior civil servants are edgy about the Sloan-Abbott correspondence, refusing either to talk about it, or claiming that they cannot remember the details (or after much delay taking refuge in the Prior statement to the House in 1982). Abbott himself left the NIO a few years later for a senior position at the Home Office. Later, he held high rank in English local government and became chief executive of Cotswold District Council. He declined to talk on the record and his off-the-record comments added nothing beyond the existing public record. Sloan is now a lecturer in strategic studies and the author of an excellent tome entitled The Geopolitics of Anglo-Irish Relations in the Twentieth Century. Molyneaux strongly urged the author not to pursue the matter. Trimble, by contrast, is far more open about Sloan-Abbott than some of the other protagonists.

The accumulation of reversals contributed to Trimble’s decision not to run for the Assembly and to contemplate leaving politics altogether. ‘My first child was on the way and I was not getting anywhere personally,’ recalls Trimble. ‘Had it not been for Edgar [Graham] and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, my life would have gone in a totally different direction.’29Although Graham was by now in the Assembly – he had been elected for Trimble’s old seat in South Belfast – the two men remained on friendly professional terms. Graham carried a personal protection weapon, but it was no macho indulgence on his part. The nationalist population – including many students at Queen’s – had been ‘radicalised’ during and after the Hunger Strikes. Academia and judiciary, in particular, were becoming more vulnerable: in March 1982, whilst the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Lowry, was visiting Queen’s, the IRA fired four shots, wounding a professor; an RUC officer was shot in the head during an examination, though his life was saved; and Lord McDermott, Lowry’s predecessor, was injured in a bomb blast whilst visiting the then Ulster Polytechnic at Jordanstown some years earlier.30 And although the IRA did not usually target politicians, they had broken with this unwritten half-understanding in December 1981, when the Rev. Robert Bradford, Westminster MP for the constituency was murdered along with a caretaker at a community centre in Finaghy. Brian Garrett, a leading Belfast solicitor met Trimble at the opera that night and told him the news: Trimble’s reaction was such that Garrett recalls that ‘I felt as though I had plunged a knife into him.’31

By now, Edgar Graham had also come to the notice of the IRA. First, he was a relatively rare commodity – an intellectually talented Unionist politician. Second, in a debate at the Queen’s University student union, he had conducted a brilliant defence of the so-called ‘supergrass’ trials (to which he always referred as ‘turning Queen’s evidence’), drawing attention to their effectiveness in Italy in combating the Red Brigades. The ‘supergrass’ system was then threatening to play havoc inside the terrorist organisations on both sides. Undoing it became one of the principal short-term aims of republicans and Graham was a highly articulate and plausible obstacle. Graham’s colleague, Sylvia Hermon, who came to the debate to support him, never before witnessed such malignancy or hostility from some of the students. ‘I felt afraid for him that day and in that environment,’ she remembers. ‘But I then did not realise the significance of it.’32 There may have been other, more hidden threats as well. Trimble received a separate call after a gap of some years from Andy Tyrie to tell him that he had reason to believe a Queen’s colleague, Miriam Daly, was using her post to gather information on people at or associated with the University (that is, the activity which subsequently came to be described as ‘targeting’33). Miriam Daly was subsequently murdered by the UFF on 26 June 1980 – and was then described on the INLA headstone as a ‘volunteer’.34

However, Graham had not only come to the attention of republicans. He had also angered the loyalist terrorists, opposing separation of prisoners in the Maze. Indeed, friends of Edgar Graham – including David Trimble – recall that at this point, he was more afraid of assassination by loyalists than by anyone else and he alluded to this threat in an Assembly debate.35 Trimble told him that this threat was an attempt to intimidate rather than seriously to injure – on the grounds that no elected Unionist representative had been seriously attacked in the way, for example, that senior SDLP figures had been assaulted by republicans.36 Possibly, this was because Graham knew that a leading loyalist had been warned by a prison officer that he (the prison officer) overheard a UVF prisoner suggesting that Graham might be a ‘legitimate target’ because of his policies (the implication being that if the IRA killed Graham, there would be no reciprocal strike against a nationalist). Certainly, Graham was regularly attacked in Combat – the ‘journal’ of the UVF – during this period and especially for his views on prisoner issues. ‘Does Assemblyman Graham really speak on behalf of the UUP and its elected representatives?’ it asked. ‘They will be judged by their silence!’37

A few months later, Sylvia Hermon walked into the Law Faculty building at 19 University Square to find two men she had never seen before looking at the examination timetable. She let them depart the building, but followed behind into Botanic Avenue. She ran into an RUC officer who intercepted the pair. When pressed, one of them said that he had been looking at the timetable for his sister, who was reading geography and law – a non-existent combined course. It sounded suspicious, but the policeman could do nothing.38 On the last day of tutorials – 7 December 1983 – Graham walked across from the main university building to the Law Faculty. There, he met a colleague, Dermott Nesbitt. Nesbitt, a lecturer in accounting and finance, had been Brian Faulkner’s election agent in East Down in the 1970s; after leaving the party with Faulkner to form the short-lived Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, he had returned to the UUP fold. Graham laid down his case on the pavement and told Nesbitt that he was going over to London the next day to talk to the Conservative backbench Northern Ireland Committee. ‘John Biggs-Davison [vice chairman of the committee] is a good integrationist,’ said Nesbitt, teasing his devolutionist colleague. ‘Michael Mates [secretary to the committee] is a good devolutionist,’ retorted Graham to his integrationist colleague.

At that point, two men ran up behind Graham and fired a number of times, at point-blank range, into his head. He fell immediately to the ground. The other plotters, who did not pull the trigger, began running in all directions to distract witnesses so as to prevent the identification of the killers. Stunned, Nesbitt looked up at the row of buildings opposite. ‘Everyone was staring out of the windows,’ remembers Nesbitt. ‘With all the lights on during this dark December day, the hundreds of matchstalk heads looked like something out of an L.S. Lowry picture.’ He ran into the faculty, where he immediately met David Trimble. ‘It’s Edgar,’ exclaimed Nesbitt.39 Sandra Maxwell, administrative assistant in the Law Faculty since the days of Professor Montrose, remembers that Trimble was very quick to react, thundering up the stairs to call the ambulances and the RUC.40 But it was to no avail. Edgar Graham was dead, aged 29. Sylvia Hermon was present in the students’ union when his death was announced over the tannoy: it elicited a vast roar of approval from some of the republican students. She has never been able to set foot in the place since.41 Whilst regretting all deaths, Gerry Adams nonetheless declined to condemn the killing because Sinn Fein was not prepared to join the ‘hypocritical chorus of establishment figures who were vocal only in their condemnation of IRA actions and silent on British actions’.42

Hitherto, Queen’s had prided itself on being ‘above the conflict’ – a kind of safe haven where such unpleasantnesses did not intrude. Now, however, they found that the RUC investigation centred on republican students. According to Lost Lives, two former students were given suspended sentences for withholding information about the shooting – tariffs which the Unionists denounced as ‘shameful’.43 But Queen’s was terrified at the prospect of the University being torn apart by the murder. The handling of the aftermath of the killing was therefore a matter of great sensitivity – and, to this day, Sir Colin Campbell, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, declines to say what measures he took in dealing with any member of the University.44

Some colleagues suspected that Queen’s did not want Trimble making things worse because of what it might have considered as any injudicious pronouncements which he might have made in the heat of the moment. Trimble recalls Campbell coming up to him in University Square, with the body of Graham still on the ground, instructing him not to do any interviews on television. ‘This is the University speaking,’ Campbell told him.45 Campbell says this was definitely not the case: he had no instructions at this point from the Vice-Chancellor, Peter Froggatt, and that there was no such conversation with the body still on the ground. What Campbell does say is that he was subsequently advised by Froggatt not to say anything: he says that Queen’s policy in those days was not to get involved in anything which could be construed as hyping up political conflict.46 Trimble says that, in fact, he had no intention of saying anything. But when he discovered that Queen’s had no plans to make any collective institutional pronouncement, he told Campbell ‘you’ve got to say something or I will’. He recalls that Campbell did talk to the press on the next day and that he did it ‘very well’.47 Again, Campbell’s recollection is different. He says that upon seeing the massive media coverage of the event, Queen’s changed its mind and gave him authority to speak on its behalf on The World at One. His concerns, he recalls, were twofold: first, he urged Trimble and everyone else to keep quiet to ensure that the University did not speak with a multiplicity of voices. Second, Campbell says, with one colleague already dead, he did not wish to see Trimble pushed further into the limelight.48 But in the eyes of many of Graham’s friends, Queen’s had stuck its institutional head into the sand. The statement issued by the Vice-Chancellor’s office, reported in the Belfast Telegraph on 8 December 1983, read: ‘[No]…evidence been offered to suggest that these attacks originated from within the University and this University has no knowledge of any direct involvement by any member of staff or student.’ Piously, it concluded: ‘The University does not impose – nor could it impose – any political test for entry as a student or appointment to the teaching staff, taking academic achievement as its only criterion’.49 To this day, Colin Campbell describes it as ‘not a political event, but primarily a human tragedy’.50 Some of Graham’s friends felt this was besides the point. It was not people’s views which were at stake, but their actions.51

Whatever controversies attended the conduct of Queen’s, one thing is certain: anyone who attended Graham’s funeral still describes it as one of the saddest days they can ever recall. Rev. Dr Alan McAloney, who had baptised Graham, conducted a packed service at Randalstown Old Congregation Presbyterian Church, which included the teacher who taught him his first lessons and the seven members of the Graham family who sang in the church choir.52 The cortège then moved to Duneane Presbyterian Church, one mile from the shores of Lough Neagh, where this only son was laid to rest close to his mother’s forebears. Expressions of shock and sympathy came from all over the world: Margaret Thatcher, who had met Graham earlier in the year when he spoke at the Conservative party conference, wrote to the parents to express her condolences.53 But whatever the condemnation, the killing had a profound and beneficial effect from the IRA’s viewpoint. As one close colleague has noted, Graham could have been assassinated anywhere, but the choice of Queen’s was quite deliberate.54 Trimble observes that ‘the murder reinforced the “chill factor” on campus. It reinforced the tendency of Protestant children to go elsewhere for their education.’55 Indeed, when Nesbitt returned to teach the following term, he found on one occasion a mugshot of himself on the blackboard with a drawing pin through his head.56

The gunmen are still at large today, and their identity is widely known. Even in the wildly unlikely event that they admitted their involvement, the semi-amnesty provisions of the Belfast Agreement would ensure that any sentence served would be minimal. It contributed to the University authorities’ reappraisal of political activity by members of staff. Until then, they had viewed such forms of public service indulgently. But thereafter many contend they became more concerned lest it enmire them in further controversy. Trimble and others increasingly felt that excursions into the public arena would not help their careers.57 Trimble has been unable to forget his fallen colleague and extolled his memory when he won the UUP leadership at the Ulster Hall in September 1995 and in a key vote of the Ulster Unionist Council of November 1999. So, too, did opponents of the Belfast Agreement: ‘What would Edgar have done?’ became a topic of intense debate between the two sides of the UUP. Every day, he passes the memorial stone set on the wall at the entrance of the debating chamber at Stormont. The inscription, with its quote from Euripides, was specially chosen by Anne Graham, sister of the deceased:

IN MEMORY OF

EDGAR SAMUEL DAVID GRAHAM

ASSEMBLY MEMBER FOR BELFAST SOUTH 1982–83

SHOT BY TERRORISTS ON 7 DECEMBER 1983

‘KEEP ALIVE THE LIGHT OF JUSTICE’

SEVEN He doth protest too much

WHEN the University term resumed in January 1984 many colleagues of Trimble feared that he would be next in line for assassination. But short of leaving Queen’s – where any lecturer working to a set rota of lectures and tutorials would be desperately vulnerable – there was little that he could do. Ian Clark, a Queen’s Ulster Unionist student who was friendly with Graham, recalls an intimidatory atmosphere at the University in those days and remembers Trimble telling him that ‘if he needed any protection’, he could help to provide it: Clark understood this to mean physical muscle, but Trimble says that he meant he would intercede with the Queen’s authorities and the RUC.1 Whatever Trimble actually meant, the one thing which he was determined not to do was to be cowed by the University authorities into relinquishing all political activity: if nothing else he is ‘thran’ (an expression common to Ulster and Scotland spelled in three different ways, meaning in this instance ’obstinate’).2 An opportunity arose in 1984, when his old friend John Taylor – who was running for his second term as a member of the European Parliament – picked Trimble as his election agent. For the first time, he found himself running a campaign from party headquarters. Although personally disorganised, Trimble proved a good organiser on behalf of the party – and Taylor won the third of Ulster’s three seats in Strasburg (Paisley again secured the highest number of first preferences and Hume took the second seat).3

In Lagan Valley, too, Trimble sought to burnish his credentials. In 1983 he became Vice Chairman of the constituency UUP and in 1986 sought renomination for the same post. He found himself opposed for this largely honorific job and assumed that it was a renewed attempt by elements of the local Unionist establishment to be rid of him. Suddenly, the incumbent Chairman of Lagan Valley announced he was not standing again. Since Trimble had put himself forward for Vice Chairman, it could reasonably be inferred that he was prepared to run for the top job. This he duly did and Trimble squeaked by at the AGM, with votes 55 to 53. Thus it was that Trimble became chairman of one of the largest Ulster Unionist associations. More important still, Trimble – one of Molyneaux’s main critics – was now the local party chairman of the party leader. Although Molyneaux could not but acknowledge his abilities, the two men were never natural soulmates – to say the least. In Molyneaux’s eyes, politics and policy were the prerogative of the Member of the Imperial Parliament. Ulster Unionist associations, like their Tory cousins, were supposed to be election-winning machines which collected subscriptions and raised funds, but did not bother themselves with great affairs of state. Indeed, even in times of great crisis, such as in 1985–6, the Lagan Valley Association minute books show that surprising proportions of meetings were still spent on such routine matters as fulfilling branch quotas and the payment for the use of Association facilities for jumble sales. Trimble, by contrast, was keen to ‘politicise’ Unionists and accordingly set up a monthly discussion at the Lagan Valley Management Committee meeting called the ‘Current Political Situation’. For example, the minute books for 11 January 1985 record that Trimble suggested that Lagan Valley affiliate to the National Union (of Conservative and Unionist Associations) to influence the ruling mainland party. This initiative was noted with interest by Workers’ Weekly on 2 February 1985, which stated that Trimble ‘has not been foremost amongst those anxious to bring Northern Ireland’s wretched local politics into the British mainstream. He has been a leading spokesman for the devolutionist wing of the UUP.’