Dean Godson - Himself Alone - David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism

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