NI POLITICS: Bugs Bunny would do better than this
Inside the comic world of Ulster Unionism
A spin doctor for the Ulster Unionist leader is said to do a good impression of Bugs Bunny and has been known to say, ‘Oh no, Twimble’s in twouble’ at moments of high drama. Well might he do so, for his leader most certainly is, again.
Yesterday Jeffrey Donaldson, David Burnside and Martin Smyth broke cover. At their press conference where they announced their resignation of the party whip, Mr Donaldson spoke briefly and effectively as to why they had taken the action they did. But diplomatically he refused to say directly that Trimble should go. Friend Burnside next to him was less reticent and aimed his stake directly. If half the Tory or Labour Parties had renounced the whip their leader’s position would be untenable, pronounced Co. Antrim’s most charming representative. It was, all in all, a devastating assault.
So why is this happening, asked Tuesday’s Torygraph plaintively. The answer is simple but we have to go back to the beginning. David Trimble wants to seal an historic deal with Irish nationalism and is prepared to make concessions. But if he is going to bring his supporters with him, he cannot afford to be humiliated in the process. Unfortunately, Mr Trimble is only a bit player to the main deal between the Government and the Provos. If he is to stay in the process he must accept the outcome of these hidden negotiations and put a brave face on them. That is why he has accepted the substance of the Joint Declaration (amnesty for IRA men, Stormont oversight role for the Irish Government and still less appealing desiderata). I can safely use the word “accept” because there is no doubt that if the IRA was to make the decommissioning moves demanded then Mr Trimble would return to Stormont on the terms of the Joint Declaration. That was the mood music at the recent Party Executive meeting, according to one dissident. Mr Trimble, however, has used up all his political capital over the years since 1998. He has broken too many pledges and has had his judgment — or perhaps, optimistic faith in others — discredited too often. This really is the final showdown between him and his critics. We won’t have to wait until he formally accepts the Declaration; which, to repeat, he will, should he get the chance. To use a favoured Trimbleite word of the hour: few things have been more disingenuous than the UUP leader’s claim that his position too really amounts to outright opposition to the Declaration as well.
David Trimble has been garlanded for leading his party to the Belfast Agreement and for surviving internal ambushes ever since. Well, allow me to dissent. As a leader, Trimble is a disaster because he pretends his position is not as precarious as it really is. Standing behind the 3 MPs on Monday was the octogenarian Lord Molyneaux. In 1995 he faced a stalking horse challenger from a hard-line Young Unionist who polled about 20%. Later that year, the then party president, Sir Josias Cunningham, and party chairman Jim Nicholson paid him a visit as the men in grey suits — and advised him to go. Jim Molyneaux, on the verge of quitting anyway, soon departed. What must he have felt watching Mr Trimble force deeply divisive positions through the party on wafer thin margins? David Trimble seemingly doesn’t realise that while it is possible to proceed with anything above 50% of your party, it is politically suicidal because you can’t impose unity when “dissatisfieds” amount to half of your party. As a party manager, he makes John Major look adept (which is one of the worst insults I can imagine.) For a mainland Conservative audience, just think back to Maastricht. Both in parliamentary terms, and in terms of the mass membership, the Eurosceptic rebellion never came remotely close to the consistent 45% plus UUP Agreement-sceptics always crest at. In Jeffrey Donaldson’s own words in The Times today, ‘for the UUP to work, it has to be led in a direction that a broad consensus of its members is content to follow’.
So now the Unionist Party has its nightmare scenario. The leader has a majority of his party’s governing body on his side, although his margin corresponds closely to the number of Council members who are directly or indirectly on the Stormont payroll. But his position is well and truly a minority one within unionism. He knows it, and his close supporters know it because they lobbied Tony Blair like mad to suspend the Assembly elections, even after election campaigning had started, to “Save Dave”. David Trimble stands accused of breaking the UUP in two, and for the sake of pursuing a disastrously flawed policy.
It is important to understand the differences between Mr Donaldson and Mr Burnside on one hand and Rev Smyth and Lord Molyneaux on the other. To take Jeffrey Donaldson first, he has established himself as a Guardian hate figure (so well done him). Fortunately for The Guardian’s ease-of-cliché department, he is also is a protégé of that Prince of Darkness, Enoch Powell. It is, though, still a misnomer to call him a hardliner, or, in Guardianiste terms, a serious ontological error. After all, he split from his leader on Good Friday 1998 only on decommissioning and much of the rest of the Agreement would have been quite acceptable. One former friend of David Trimble likes to say at party meetings, ‘I’ve got 2 jokes for you. The first is that David Trimble’s a unionist, the second is that Jeffrey Donaldson is anti-Agreement’. Circumstances, and polarisation by the media into personality clashes, have forced Donaldson to be leader of the dissidents. Yet opponents of the Agreement, particularly outside the party, see him as tentative and unwilling to wield the knife against his leader. David Burnside is not entirely dissimilar to Mr Donaldson, although he did back his leader up to Mr Trimble leading the party back into Stormont after the first suspension. Both men would work the Belfast Agreement with decommissioning. The main difference is that, Mr Burnside comes across as a more inherently ruthless character, whereas Mr Donaldson, as a sincere Christian, probably could not conceive of backstabbing. Burnside has more of the night about him. He also has a grudge, for when he lost the South Antrim bye-election in 2000, Mr Trimble’s spin doctors, covering their own man’s back, had unfairly suggested he had cost the party victory.
The distinction I have outlined between Mr Donaldson and Mr Burnside might not be one that pro-Agreement Unionists, still less Nationalists, can assent to, but my point remains: this is how the constituency crucial to both men, anti-Agreement Unionists, largely sees them. Mr Donaldson’s more churchy reputation in Ulster is not the deficiency it would obviously be in Great Britain.
Martin Smyth and James Molyneaux, the party’s elder statesmen, are slightly different. Both have a more rigid opposition to power sharing and to the Belfast Agreement. Crucially they are veterans of the last major schism in the party over Sunningdale three decades ago. They stayed as internal opponents to Brian Faulkner and succeeded in turning the party around back then. They are not about to defect to the DUP anytime soon after a lifetime in the party. It must be particularly galling for Lord Molyneaux to see all his hard work in fending off the DUP during his time as leader thrown away by his successor.
It was a strange spectacle watching David Trimble being interviewed last night on BBC Northern Ireland. Full of Callaghanesque insouciance, he insisted that nothing was really wrong and that his party was right behind him. It isn’t. Previously, he could summon a disciplinary panel packed with his own supporters to eject the odd dissident, but the Gang of Four is a different matter. Each of them is more representative of unionism than the leader. Throwing them out will be difficult and the messy process will maximise the exodus that will go with them. Alternatively, doing nothing will destroy his authority. Either way, the party will be annihilated at the next election. The only (electoral) hope is for it is to dump the leader. And for those who care about such things, without a viable UUP to underpin it, there won’t be any sort of Belfast Agreement being implemented this time next year.
But is David Trimble listening? At the last executive meeting, Mr Trimble said that he would accept the verdict of the Ulster Unionist Council if it voted to reject the Joint Declaration and implement the decision. In other words, he would not have regarded defeat as a matter for resigning. That is the leader’s dream world. Sooner or later he will go. In the farewell words of Bugs Bunny, which could have been written for Davey boy’s leadership, that’s all folks.
— The Watchman
ERO’s Belfast-based politics column
StormontWatch, June 24, 2003 01:53 AM