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

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. 20 Moreover, 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!

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