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

But Trimble still had to treat with the Tories, and examine what, if anything, they had to offer. If they offered something very tempting (approximating to the UUP’s preferred system of election) Trimble could not possibly say no. But if the Government made no such offer, Trimble might as well stick to his principles and obtain a bit of credit with an increasingly powerful Opposition. What happened next remains a matter of dispute between the Tories and the Ulster Unionists. To this day, Conservatives assert that Trimble appproached the Government to make a deal; Trimble says that on each occasion, he was approached by the Government. Trimble met twice with Major on the night of the vote, in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s chair. On the first occasion, between 6 and 7 p.m., Major urged Trimble to support the Government. Trimble explained to Major that he was in some difficulty because he had reason to believe that the Prime Minister had done a deal with the DUP: irrespective of the merits of the Scott case, he would look ‘bloody stupid’ if he supported the Government that week and then a week or so later an election system emerged that ruined his party’s chances. ‘I’m not in the business of damaging the UUP,’ replied Major. 24 But Trimble noted that the Prime Minister did not contradict his assertion that there was some understanding with the DUP. Major added that he could not say what kind of electoral system he would deliver since he had not told anyone else and could not have it said that he had preferred one party over all others. On the second occasion that night, Trimble says he was approached in the tea room by the Conservative Party chairman, Brian Mawhinney. ‘The boss wants to see you,’ Trimble recalls Mawhinney saying. 25 Mawhinney, by contrast, says that he asked Trimble in the course of a more general conversation if he wanted to see the Prime Minister. In other words, states Mawhinney, he gave Trimble the option of speaking to Major and the UUP leader chose to make the effort to avail himself of it. 26 When Trimble arrived, Major was in the room with Michael Heseltine; the chief whip, Alistair Goodlad; and Mawhinney. Trimble expected Major to say something, but he did nothing of the kind. Instead, the two just sat there and looked at each other. One witness to the scene recalls Major stating that ‘I will not do a deal with you’ and Trimble replying that ‘I will not ask you to do a deal’: it was as if both men were waiting for the other to make the first move. 27

Trimble says he did not believe the Government’s assertion that there could be no deal. He thinks they were, indeed, in the market for trading policy concessions in exchange for UUP support. Rather, it was simply not their first choice to rely on the UUP, especially after the furore in nationalist Ireland over the British response to the Mitchell report. They needed to show that they could not be bought specifically by the UUP. A DUP abstention was, by contrast, somehow a less explicit assertion of the Unionist family’s ‘hold’ over the Government than a UUP vote for the Government. The support of the DUP was arithmetically less valuable and ideologically less predictable than a link-up with the UUP (and they were less close to the Tory backbenches than the UUP). Thus, in a peculiar way, the DUP was in these circumstances less threatening to nationalists. Specifically, a deal with the DUP afforded certain advantages to the SDLP: if enough votes haemorrhaged from the UUP to the DUP, the SDLP might receive the huge boost of becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland. The DUP and SDLP also had strong personalities at the top of the ticket, namely Paisley and Hume. But ministers still entertained doubts over the reliability and deliverability of the DUP. Because the Government was not sure until the last minute what the DUP might leak, it kept its options open. The likeliest explanation of what happened is that once it thought it had the DUP in the bag, Major et al. sought to make a virtue out of not doing a deal with the UUP.

Trimble next remembers coming out into the division lobby after the vote – in which the Government scraped by with 320 votes to 319 – to be met by a torrent of abuse from the Tories. 28 This, he suspected, emanated from Mayhew who had alleged that the UUP leader sought to blackmail the Government. Mayhew never felt comfortable with political horse-trading (he himself admits that Michael Ancram was much more comfortable doing such deals) and his distaste for the political arts emerged that night. According to Mayhew, he was crossing the lobby when he was met by the BBC’s Jon Sopel. ‘What do you think of the result?’ asked Sopel. Mayhew replied: ‘Delighted, and the more so because the Unionists tried to do a deal and the Prime Minister sent them away and we’ve still won.’ Mayhew says he thought the conversation was on lobby terms but claims that within minutes his remarks were broadcast to the nation; Sopel denies that Mayhew’s name was used, since as an experienced lobby journalist, he would have known better. Whatever the precise sequence of events, Trimble was enraged and shortly thereafter went up to Mayhew, scarlet with anger. ‘It was a hostile act,’ fumed the UUP leader. ‘It was a hostile act to try and bring us down,’ retorted Mayhew. 29 Major was even angrier over the events of that evening. Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary that he twice met the Prime Minister in the division lobby: according to the backbencher, he felt ‘betrayed; furious; he had done so much for them; UUP had tried to make a deal; he would never play party games over peace. What deal [was offered]? About elections.’ Later, Hunter met Ancram in the smoking room, where he was nursing a large whisky. According to Ancram, Trimble had offered a constituency-based electoral system, elections before proximity talks and no guarantee that such elections would lead into proximity talks. On the next day, Mayhew contacted Hunter whilst the latter was at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, on one of innumerable semi-official missions both to Ulster and the Republic which he undertook during these years. According to Hunter’s account, Mayhew told him that the UUP had offered one year’s support in exchange for their tariff of demands, and had given the British Government one and a half hours in which to think about it. Indeed, when Hunter met Trimble in the lobby, he remembers telling Trimble that he had blown it. Trimble did not need to make the offer which he did, asserted Hunter, not least because Hunter believed that in conjunction with other backbench supporters he could guarantee Unionist interests. In so doing, the Tory said, Trimble had demeaned himself. Moroever, he had soured relationships with backbenchers who might lose their seats in any elections precipitated by the UUP voting with the Opposition. It was a further illustration of the point that for all of the complaints of nationalist Ireland, Trimble’s hold over the Government was in practice severely circumscribed (or at least was much more complex than that simplistic analysis suggested).

But the mess illustrates another point: what was Trimble playing at all through the 1995–7 period? What was his strategy vis-à-vis the mainland parties, and from whom did he really think he could obtain the best deal for Unionism? The evidence is contradictory. According to Paddy Ashdown’s diary for 27 February 1996, Trimble said that he would have abstained in a no-confidence vote that might have followed any Government defeat on Scott and added ‘“we hate this crew and the sooner they go, the better”’. Ashdown then commented: ‘The old line. I wonder if he means it?’ 30 But Woodrow Wyatt’s diary for 27 November 1996 records a Spectator party at the Savoy, at which Trimble told him that ‘it was very much to Major’s credit that he’d managed to get some kind of peace going for so long. “I make a face every now and again for the hell of it, but yes, we’ll back him [Major]. He’ll be quite safe until he wants to call an election.”’ 31 Trimble says that the situation altered sharply in the months between these two conversations: Labour knew by November 1996 that it was on for a big victory and therefore had no need of Trimble to bring down the Conservative Government quickly, lest the situation change to the Tories’ advantage. 32 The implication is that he might as well have continued to enjoy a few months more of limited leverage. These contrasting remarks to Ashdown and Wyatt illustrate two other points: the obvious desire that both men report back to Blair and Major, respectively, things that each party leader would want to hear. Indeed, as Paddy Ashdown noted in a conversation with Blair on Remembrance Sunday 1995: ‘I told [Blair] that I had had a brief chat with Trimble at the Cenotaph earlier in the day, when Trimble had made it clear that he couldn’t support the Government. Blair said “but can we trust him?” I said I thought we could, though it was the nature of Irish [sic] politicians to face both ways at once, as it was necessary for their survival.’ 33 These contrasting bits of evidence do, however, also show that Trimble had no detailed, preordained game plan and may well have been making it up as he went along.