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

Curiously, the press speculation about what kind of an MP Trimble would turn out to be was rather more accurate at the time of his arrival in the Commons than when he became UUP leader in 1995 – especially in the southern press. Thus, Marie O’Halloran in the Irish Times prophesied that ‘some consider him a potential future leader with a close association with the maverick Strangford MP John Taylor, while overall he is viewed as a middle class intellectual with an understanding of both sides of the integration/devolution divide’. 22 The NIO was divided within itself about the implications of Trimble’s election: in this period, they were seeking to find a formula that would afford Unionists the latitude to participate in talks without scrapping the AIA. ‘We were trying to break the permafrost,’ recalls one former senior official. ‘The election of David Trimble, who was a volatile loose cannon, was seen as changing the internal Unionist party balance, and thus could lead to what we called “creative instability”.’ 23 The following Tuesday, he took his seat in the Commons for the first time in the presence of Daphne Trimble, his mother and his sister-in-law and her husband. John Kennedy – who for many years was clerk at Stormont to the suspended Assembly – spoke to one of his counterparts at Westminster. ‘Brains at last in the Unionist party’, was their verdict. 24 Indeed, within a month or two of his election, Trimble recalls half the Tory Cabinet came and sat down next to him at the large table in the members’ dining room: he was particularly pleased to come to know Malcolm Rifkind, who had been greatly admired by William Craig. ‘My impression was some were coming over to have a look,’ Trimble observes. 25

It did not stop him from rebuking the Tories and Labour in his maiden speech during the Appropriations (No. 2) Northern Ireland Order debate on 23 May 1990. Initially, Trimble’s speech was a fairly routine tribute to his immediate predecessor and a discussion of the history of the seat – although, characteristically, it was much more learned than the contributions of the bulk of new MPs. The former Land Law lecturer delighted in describing the critical role of the ‘Ulster custom’ (a special provincial form of landholding arising out of the customary rights that tenants had won for themselves) which some have claimed provided the basis of the indigenous growth of the industrial revolution in the Lagan and the mid-Bann Valleys. 26 He described the role of another predecessor, Col. Edward Saunderson, reminding the House that the father of Ulster Unionism had started out as a Liberal MP for Cavan before representing North Armagh. (Trimble would have been conscious that his Colhoun great-grandfather voted Liberal, prior to Gladstone’s embrace of Home Rule.) His purpose here was to emphasise that the UUP was not a provincial party. Rather, he asserted ‘we are the British national parties’ in the Province, formed as an alliance of Tories, Liberals and latterly of Labourites who had to band together in defence of their constitutional rights; indeed, Trimble reminded Labour MPs that their party did not organise in Northern Ireland. But his main target was the Conservative decision to fight the by-election. As saw it, the poll showed that there was ‘no mandate’ for the Government’s policies. Their real aim in standing for the first time in 70 years was to ‘divide and diminish’ the Unionist voice. 27

Whatever effect he had on his colleagues, there can be no doubt that Trimble took to the Commons with great gusto. He was a staunch defender of its traditions, and well after he became UUP leader denounced the new Blair government’s decision to curtail the rights of backbenchers by cutting down the number of Prime Minister’s Question Times from twice a week to once weekly. 28 On social and cultural matters unrelated to the Ulster crisis, he developed a moderately conservative record: he is pro-hunting; opposes the 1967 abortion legislation on the grounds that it has become abortion on demand; and on homosexuality, he takes a cautious line on lowering the age of consent. 29 Important though these issues were, they were not fundamental to the nature and scope of Trimble’s parliamentary mission. Of far greater significance was Molyneaux’s decision to invite him to become home affairs spokesman. Trimble duly immersed himself in the details of criminal justice and Prevention of Terrorism legislation; it was during the committee stage of one of these debates that he came across his young Labour counterpart – Tony Blair. 30 Indeed, Frank Millar was struck by the fact that like all Unionist MPs who come to Westminster, Trimble became much more of an integrationist. 31 The consistent thread of his contributions was to illuminate how Northern Ireland was treated in a fashion very unlike the rest of the United Kingdom. Thus, Trimble spoke up when an IRA terrorist, Paul Magee, received a 30-year sentence for murdering a special constable in Yorkshire: he was outraged that the average tariff for security-force killers in Northern Ireland was a mere twelve years. Likewise, he spoke out against the fact that the only major government department without a Commons Select Committee was the NIO. 32 But these were staple Unionist themes over the years, albeit put forward with rather more eloquence and erudition by Trimble than by most UUP MPs. What was really distinctive about his contributions was his eye for the international dimensions of the Ulster crisis: he said the principles of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed by 34 countries at the Paris summit of November 1990 (where the Cold War formally ended), should apply to Northern Ireland: these held that existing frontiers ought to be recognised, but that the rights of national minorities should be provided for, too. What was good enough for eastern and central Europe should, he reckoned, be good enough for Ulster. 33

Inevitably, Trimble also took much time over his duties as a constituency MP. At first, he did not know where to collect the mail at the Commons and it piled up in a great mass for a month before he discovered what to do. He located his constituency office in Lurgan: this was closer to his home in Lisburn than any of the other possible sites, and was ably run by his wife Daphne and Stephanie Roderick (whom he met whilst she worked at the Ulster Society). He may not have been the authentic grassroots politician that McCusker was, but his academic skills could still be very useful. Thus, in 1993, the fifteen-strong Economic Development Committee of Craigavon District Council visited La Grange in Georgia, where the world-wide headquarters of Interface carpet tiles was located: it was his first visit to the United States, and Trimble played his part in persuading the Americans to create 30 jobs in Lurgan with a masterly exposition of their shared Ulster-Scots heritage (the forebears of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the USA, came from the Ulster area, along with those of four other Presidents. At least two further holders of the office appear to have been of southern Protestant origin). 34 But in truth, his work in Upper Bann has never defined his identity as a parliamentarian as completely as it did Harold McCusker’s. Bob Cooper, former chairman of the Fair Employment Commission claims that Trimble was far less active than his predecessor in bringing anti-discrimination cases on behalf of Protestants – though, as he adds, this opinion is only possible because McCusker was so unusually hyper-active on behalf of his constituents. 35 Trimble was, deep down, far more of a creature of Westminster than McCusker and he would rarely miss a division at the Commons in order to attend a meeting of his private (Orange) lodge, after the fashion of his predecessor.

The hardest part of the job, Trimble found, was visiting the families of murdered constituents, whether Catholic or Protestant – though he usually rang the RUC beforehand to make sure that the deceased had no paramilitary links. Since his own constituency was a centre of terrorist activity, dealing with security matters occupied more of his time than had he been MP for relatively unmolested seats such as North Down or Strangford. Large IRA bombs went off in the constituency at Craigavon in 1991, Lurgan in 1992 and Portadown in 1993. 36 He also campaigned assiduously, with the DUP, on behalf of the ‘UDR 4’ (a quadrumvirate of soldiers convicted of the murder of a Roman Catholic in Armagh in 1983: all of them asserted their innocence, and three of them were subsequently released on appeal). 37 Trimble went to HMP Maghaberry with Ian Paisley, Jnr, and then presented materials on the miscarriage of justice to the then Secretary of State, Peter Brooke. Unusually for a Unionist MP, he was not a supporter of all forms of capital punishment: in the Commons division of 17 December 1990, he favoured it as a penalty for the murder of police and prison officers, and for killings committed with firearms and explosives, but not for any murder. Indeed, since the defeat of Enoch Powell in the 1987 General Election, probably only Ken Maginnis was a more consistent opponent of capital punishment in the voting lobbies within the Unionist family. 38 Partly, this was because of Trimble’s acute sense of the possibility of miscarriages of justice. Indeed, he believed that mainland juries, in particular, had a tendency to react with excessive emotion to atrocities. ‘Because of the nature of terrorism and the emotional response to it, the response of the man in the street cannot be trusted,’ opined the former law lecturer during the debate on the renewal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1991. He believed there was a good case for replacing juries with judge-only, Diplock-style courts throughout the United Kingdom. 39