NI POLITICS: A comedy of errors
Bumbling into the final act
That’s another fine mess he’s got himself into
Last week (oddly enough, there was a crisis in the UUP to write about) I asked , ‘if you wanted to marginalise a persistent critic, would you make him a martyr and give him an excuse to take the party to court?’ David Trimble obviously mustn’t be a regular reader of the ERO, which is a shame. Otherwise he would have avoided the fresh egg on his face when his rebel MPs got a court declaration that their suspensions were invalid. At least on this occasion, the yolk hit several other Trimble partisans as well, some of whom are at least as legally qualified as their leader.
James Cooper (more of him in a column to come: I can’t see why I should be the only ERO bod to forgo the pleasure of telling a badly run party how to get its head office in order!), the party chairman and an Enniskillen solicitor, said that the court had clearly upheld the referral of the MPs to the disciplinary committee and it was only the terms of reference that were at fault. That’s a brave, near-noble attempt to spin his leader out of trouble but it won’t wash, especially when you read Mr Justice Girvan’s devastating ruling. Here’s a summary:
[1] Under Rule 19 of the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), a referral to the Disciplinary Committee (“DC”) requires a member’s conduct to be (i) detrimental to the interests of Ulster Unionism or the UUP, or (ii) is disadvantageous to the objects of the Council. But the letter sent to the MPs said they were being reported to the DC for acting “in a manner detrimental to the best interests of Ulster Unionism and disadvantageous to the best interests of the Council”. The letter was written by Raymond Ferguson, chairman of the DC — and another Enniskillen solicitor. The judge held that the DC had not been properly constituted under the terms of Rule 19. It seems an incredibly stupid (and expensive) mistake for a highly experienced lawyer to make as the rebel MPs were always going to dissect their suspension with a litigious disposition. But in the words of Jimmy Cricket, there’s more.
[2] At the meeting of UUC officers that voted to set up the Disciplinary Committee, Mr Trimble cast his vote on the proposal. His counsel had to admit that he should not have done so. Mr Trimble may be party leader but is not a UUC officer. Perhaps he was confused through sitting in the Assembly, where he was re-elected as First Minister in 2001 by dubious rule-fixing when the Alliance members designated themselves as unionists for the day. It’s difficult to feel sorry for Mr Trimble (a non-practising barrister) for many reasons, one being his assertion on BBC Northern Ireland’s Hearts and Minds programme before the 1998 Referendum in a debate with Robert McCartney QC that he, Trimble, was the better academic lawyer. He might indeed have an LLB First and McCartney a 2:2 (because McCartney allegedly misspent his undergraduate days on poker), which just goes to prove that book-learning ain’t yet a substitute for common sense. Or to put that another way, you all know easily enough who you’d rather have between you and the rope: Prof Dave, or fighting Bob? Mind you, the latter would probably bore you to death as you sat beside him, but that’s not quite the point at issue.
[3] Under Rule 18, the composition of the DC was a matter for the party officers. Here, Mr Justice Girvan wondered if anything had been decided. The affidavit of James Cooper referred in ambiguous terms to members being co-opted without defining who was to do the appointing. No resolution for appointment was put to the meeting. At that stage, Jeffrey Donaldson, who is a party officer, had withdrawn when the other officers were discussing the issue of referral to the DC. This withdrawal, said Mr Justice Girvan, did not give a waiver to the other officers to do as they liked. There was no provision in the Rules for delegation.
[4] Apart from the failure to be constituted properly, the DC had no power under the rules to suspend the rebels prior to a hearing, as it purported to do. According to Mr Justice Girvan, “the rules of basic fairness were broken in arriving at the decision”.
[5] One of the members of the DC was a Barry Fitzsimons from Mr Donaldson’s constituency. He was the lead signatory of a motion (later withdrawn) of no confidence in Jeffrey Donaldson that was to have been heard by the Lagan Valley Association. The judge criticised Mr Fitzsimons for failing to appreciate the conflict of interest. With generous charity, the judge exonerated the UUC officers for putting Mr Fitzsimons on the DC, as they would not have known of his earlier opposition to Mr Donaldson. I’d happily bet a round in any hostelry near the Law Library that the other officers were well aware that Mr Fitzsimons was not, ahem, entirely supportive of his Member and that it was exactly this which made him a natural choice for the DC in the eyes of the Leadership.
[6] Finally, Mr Justice Girvan said that the members of the improperly constituted DC should be disqualified from serving on a properly constituted one, as an objective observer would “doubt their capacity to conduct a dispassionate investigation and to arrive at an unbiased decision”.
Sometimes you wonder if Mr Donaldson and/or the DUP don’t have a Stakeknife in there somewhere: I mean, has anyone ever met Stephen King in real life?
I wouldn’t start from here
The other fun of the evening has been the vote of no confidence debated by the good folk of Upper Bann's UU constituency association. Now far be it from me to be partial in my explanation of all this, but ordinarily [sic] when a party leader finds himself in this sort of situation vis-à-vis his own political nearest and dearest, you'd have to say that he’s in a spot of bother. And the spinning in advance of the result being announced was suitably pointed: Trimble loyalists claimed that he’d be delighted to get anywhere over 55% of the vote, Trimblephobes claimed that they’d have performed a miracle to get their snouts in front of the 30% mark. Like John Major’s successful effort to present the ballot figures in 1995’s Tory leadership contest as a great-success-in-context, the Trimbleistes knew that managing expectations was the key. Except that in this case, it isn’t. Far from being a decisive, “things will now be sorted out one way or the other” affair, this incident is simply yet another pockmark in the long-running degradation of Fortress Dave. And having just under 40% — the result — of your own constituency activists fail to support you is not just a personal disaster for the sitting MP, it’s also proof of the crisis his ongoing leadership daily plunges the party into.
For a start, a catastrophic failure to secure the very core of the UUP’s Upper Bann base like this will mean only one thing at the next general election: the UUP will lose the seat to the DUP if David Trimble is still the candidate. That undoubtedly will have been a factor in the voting of some. Former area MLA, George Savage, and up until now at least, a firm Trimble supporter, declined to say before the vote whether he would support his leader and sitting MP. Cunningham House groupies (a very strange cult indeed) attribute behaviour like this to venal ambition, and a desire to step into Mr Trimble's shoes. Donaldsonians conversely laud it as realism, and a recognition that the only way to keep Upper Bann an Ulster Unionist seat is by changing UUP policy. The signal event of the last month is that Mr Trimble, having very possibly been knocked on the head by an advisor like Ruth Dudley Edwards, has insanely determined that flexibility is suddenly a thing of the past, and that now, under him of all people, there will be no more changes to party policy, for as long as he is party leader. Hence for both sides, this has become the QED moment as far as regime change is concerned: that now being the only means by which to either preserve, or change, party policy.
Destiny calling Empey: are you there?
On Friday, the UUP leader has decided that there will be another UUP officerial meeting — at which Jeffrey Donaldson, Martin Smyth, and Arlene Foster will all attend (party president Smyth having declined to accept the latter's resignation). What is the purpose of this meeting? A post-mortem perhaps? A ceremonial burning by the concerned parties of their somewhat diminished QUB law degrees? It’s possible, as given David Trimble’s continuing, disastrous ‘leadership’ style, no one yet has officially been told what the point of it is. (I repeat what I have said before of this problem: had David Trimble paid more attention to the needs of party management, had he in fact had the skills and personnel necessary to perform this aspect of his task, his leadership and first ministership would have been immeasurably easier). I suppose what we have to assume it’s going to be is an effort to grind the expulsion process back into life. After all if it isn’t, then the Trimble counter-attack has fallen comprehensively at the very first ditch. So if that’s what it’s to be, will Mr Trimble’s desire to wreck the UUP so as to preserve his leadership of its remnants be allowed to go ahead? Only one man can answer that question, and it’s Ulster’s very own Sir Geoffrey Howe, Cllr Sir Reg Empey. His calculations over the next sixty hours will determine whether the UUP stays in being, and therefore whether an Agreement of any sort stands a chance of staying in existence.
For the broad middle of Ulster Unionism the tipping point has been reached: the Kennedys, Cobains, and Savages have in common their understanding of what the world will look like in five years time. One fork in the road means the destruction of the party they have given their political lives to, and the evaporation of their chances of meaningful political careers (being at the back of the queue when the DUP is doling the jobs out is going to be a boring place to be). The other fork has the solitary merit that it doesn’t have to mean this as an outcome. Thus the choice that ‘responsible’ unionism has to make becomes ever more inescapable. The best case scenario for David Trimble is that he splits the UUP in two; there is no prospect that his continued leadership can unite the party. Professional politicians owe something to their beliefs, and something to their ambition: they don’t owe anything to self-indulgent kamikaze pilots. Sir Reg may not speak up in time to stop Friday turning into another bout of top-down self-mutilation (I predict that John Taylor will do that, and be the first to intone, ‘in the best interests of the party . . .’), but in due course he too will, and that will be an end to it.
— The Watchman
StormontWatch is ERO’s Belfast-based politics column
StormontWatch, July 9, 2003 12:39 AM