NI POLITICS: Lost in Translation
The Purple Turtle still won’t accept the game is up
In at the creation
On 2nd May 1997, Tony Blair wasn’t the only party leader to feel satisfied. David Trimble could also feel very pleased at how the election had gone. Although the inter-party talks had been going for a year, the Ulster Unionists had held all their 9 seats in the face of a strong DUP challenge which seemed to have fizzled out. He had even gained one after a fortuitous boundary change.
This background of UUP dominance is important to understand. It was no small achievement to have been Northern Ireland’s largest party from 1905. The UUP had survived the turmoil and breakaway splits of the early 1970s when it could easily have been shattered into smithereens. Its timely rejection of Sunningdale and of its leader Brian Faulkner meant that it remained true to mainstream unionist opinion. When the breakaway groups ran into the sand the UUP came to encompass the wide spectrum of unionist opinion that disliked Paisleyism. In the early 1980s, it fended off the seemingly inexorable rise of the DUP. The closing of unionist ranks after the Anglo-Irish Agreement helped the larger party by neutralising the DUP’s vote-winning belligerence. When David Trimble took over from Jim Molyneaux in 1995, the party was at its strongest point in 25 years. He even speculated that a post-Paisley DUP would be so unviable that Peter Robinson would jump ship.
Well, well, how times change. Today, that hegemony is chicken feed.
Let’s go back to the beginning
On 10th April 1998, the day on which the Belfast Agreement was made, standing on the outside were the DUP and Bob McCartney’s UK Unionists. Inside Stormont there were 8 parties and two governments. Of these twelve groups, the only group with a split were the Ulster Unionists: even their negotiating team was divided. When it was put to the vote at the Ulster Unionist Council, over a quarter opposed the Agreement, including a number of highly influential figures.
Looking back, it’s easy to forget just how ferocious and divisive that Referendum campaign was. (Three years later, this bitterness cost a unionism a Westminster seat.) Nationalism went on holiday for the month as the various factions of unionism bared their claws in an enormously fierce contest. The Referendum campaign was really all about 2 groups of unionist opinion: those who habitually vote for the UUP, and, non-voters — from what in Fair Employment terms is judged to be a unionist background. The most vitriolic political exchange I have ever seen was a BBC Newsline interview of Mr Trimble and Mr Paisley together, which degenerated into each man shouting down the other and taunting each other over their paramilitary links. It was a far cry from that Drumcree victory jig.
The point about the turmoil within the UUP over the last 5-6 years is that it is an echo of the turmoil within unionism at the time of the Referendum. And the person who triggered the initial turmoil that has dogged the party since is . . . David Trimble.
It might have turned out different, of course. Ken Maginnis has bemoaned the way in which his leader was constantly left exposed by nationalism and Mr Blair. There’s some truth in this. There was often little understanding of the pressures faced by Mr Trimble in hauling a hunted and fractious party along. Even when there was some understanding, the result was often counter-productive. The likelihood that a majority of unionists would reject the Agreement in the Referendum vote led to the ill-judged pledges of Blair on decommissioning and prisoner release. Yes voters, including my aunt, didn’t forget.
But the problem with the Maginnis argument of Purple Turtle Victimhood is that, having been left exposed, Trimble responded with an increasingly dogmatic insistence that the Agreement be preserved and with several u-turns. Even when the Joint Declaration of 2003 offered more concessions for decommissioning, Trimble’s response was dilatory. No wonder then that upon joining the DUP in 2004, Arlene Foster, the UUP’s most prominent woman, noted contemptuously that, ‘there’s no fight left’. Of course, in proceeding with implementing the Agreement, David Trimble had entrusted the fate of his party to others, notably Sinn Fein. Any failure to meet their obligations would inevitably reflect badly on Mr Trimble and weaken him internally.
That brings us to the Ulster Unionist Party itself. The Donaldson haters therein point angrily at how wee Jeffrey kept recalling the UUC when he couldn’t live with the policy settled the previous time. Perhaps, but remember this. It was Mr Trimble who called the first three special UUC meetings. The first one has already been mentioned; the second and third ones were even more divisive as the UUC wrestled with entering government with the still armed IRA/SF.
The problems of managing change in such a body were outlined by the former Presbyterian Moderator, Dr Samuel Hutchinson, who spoke of his experience in the Presbyterian General Assembly:
I always had an unofficial two-thirds rule. If an idea for change was in the air, I waited until there was two-thirds support in the General Assembly rather than trying to move on a 51% majority. Some people thought I was too cautious but I got most of my changes through without pain.
I hope we can all agree that, yes, David Trimble got his changes through but, hey, were they without pain? Not hardly. Leave aside merits for a second. An exceptionally controversial proposal of a leader inevitably becomes a vote of confidence. In November 1999, 41% opposed him. In March 2000 Martin Smyth’s challenge to him got 42%. By May 2000, 47% opposed him. Perhaps David Trimble saw the Agreement as his personal Clause Four battle. But winning it didn’t strengthen him. A large opposition that thinks it might easily win with one last push was never going to slink away, especially when they suspected that (a.) most unionists agreed with them and (b.) that their voters would soon start defecting to the DUP, if they didn’t offer them what they wanted. The loss of South Antrim, a fiefdom for a century, to Willie McCrea in September 2000 (the DUP hadn’t even contested a Westminster election in nearly 2 decades) was a telling portent. The leadership, who blamed the hapless candidate David Burnside, ignored it. Over the next 3 years the UUP was to drift with hatreds deepening, with net Westminster losses in 2001, and with devolution itself becoming unviable in 2002.
A clue to this decline can be found in the latest musing of Barry White (no, not the singer, rather the liberal doyen of the Belfast Telegraph a.k.a. my old friend, the Bellylaugh). After Mr Trimble had let fly at Paul Murphy in early 2004, a glum Baz said, ‘good. He’s learning to say “no” when it is appropriate and there’s no one better equipped to make it sound justifiable. Pity it’s coming a bit late’.
Uh huh.
Deconstructing Donaldson
In February 2002, it was a windswept Saturday evening in Lisburn. In a wee gospel hall there was an old-time evangelistic service. This may be the era of the internet, post-modernism, and microwave chips, but these fly-by-night notions seemed to have left this gathering unscathed. This was a special meeting and the little hall was packed out. The speaker who was to testify of his conversion to Christ was the local MP, Jeffrey Donaldson.
The occasion offered a startling private insight into a prominent politician who had previously spoken rarely about his faith. Always a polished speaker, Mr Donaldson’s talk was still very different from the standard fiery exhortation to turn or burn. His tone was modest, humble and sincere. Most people know how his interest in politics was sparked as a child by the murder of an RUC relative in Crossmaglen. In the hall, Mr Donaldson also spoke of the murder of one of his YU friends in Kilkeel, who was a UDR reservist, of listening to “Abide With Me” at the funeral and the effect that it had on him. After his conversion to Christ, Mr Donaldson said he asked the Lord whether he should continue in politics and only did so when he felt he was being called to it. (Secular readers or even nominal Christians may snort at this but requests for divine guidance in life are taken seriously in the evangelical world to which Donaldson belongs).
All of this doesn’t mean that Donaldson is unambitious. But I suspect Jeffrey Donaldson wrestles with his conscience and wonders if his ambition to lead unionism could easily turn into idolatry. He seems to lack any sense of being ‘God’s man for the hour’ which allows “Dr” Paisley to justify his own political involvement. Lagan Valley’s member is active in the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, along with people like Simon Hughes. On his MP’s website, he is pictured with Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham, who used to be denounced from the Martyrs pulpit. No wonder Mr Donaldson chose the UUP over the DUP. His evangelical Christianity is rather more apolitical than that of Big Ian’s. Some might even say rather more Christian, but that is a point I will forbear from making.
Jeffrey Donaldson grew up in Kilkeel, a small staunchly loyalist fishing town in County Down. That’s important. The heart of unionist Ulster is to be found in these small towns and their environs, far away from the would-be sophistication of middle class Greater Belfast. Yet although Mr Donaldson had the quintessential Orange, Black and UDR background that would assist him politically, he was not quite the conventional unionist. Perhaps his friendship with his MP, Enoch Powell, widened his perspective from conformist small town thinking. As chairman of the Ulster Young Unionist Council from 1985-7, he was a staunch integrationist, even sympathetic to Robert McCartney’s Campaign for Equal Citizenship. Soon after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the UYUC published a booklet entitled The Equal Citizen which went far beyond traditional thinking. Other UYUC contemporaries would drift out of the party toward purer forms of integrationism but Mr Donaldson did not.
On stepping down as UYUC chairman, he was elected a party honorary secretary, one of the key officer posts, where he established himself as a leadership loyalist. This is important. For some reason, people have got into their minds that Donaldson the Bad is an essentially truculent troublemaker, ready to undermine all and sundry on his rise to the top. In fact he was solidly loyal to Jim Molyneaux through the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, the 1994 ceasefires and the 1995 Framework Document. I had a personal insight to this when I spoke to him just after the first IRA ceasefire. I impolitely suggested that his party had been less than robust in its response. Donaldson exploded and we spent the next quarter of an hour shouting down the phone at each other. At the end he apologised, rather unnecessarily — Yours Truly had been less than diplomatic. Until the Belfast Agreement, Mr Donaldson was the quintessential party loyalist.
Why did he change? I don’t think it was ambition. After all, being on the wrong end of the initial UUC vote of April 1998 was hardly the fast track to leadership. Many anti-Agreement people at the time were exasperated with Jeffrey the Reluctant, for ploughing his own furrow during the Referendum campaign, for not thereafter stabbing David Trimble. Even afterwards there was some suspicion that he would return to the Trimble camp. As time went on, however, and the party divisions deepened, Mr Donaldson’s own distance from the leadership, politically and personally, grew and he established himself at the head of the Molyneaux Old Guard and the Baby Barrister dissidents. Instinctively, Jeffrey Donaldson realised that David Trimble’s implementation of the Belfast Agreement would be ruinous to the party. What’s more, he was a dangerous enemy to make.
At those keynote UUC meetings, onlookers felt that Mr Donaldson was making the speeches of his life on each occasion. Yet his multiplying enemies frequently belittled him as a telegenic plodder. (A variant of this criticism also appeared from anti-Agreement unionists who felt that Donaldson was simply not in Trimble’s class and that someone like the Great McCartney, the sulphurous Robinson or the Dull Dodds would have seen speccy Trimble off. That’s significantly unfair, and I think that Donaldson near certainly maximised the anti-Trimble vote ie no one else could have done as well). Another criticism was indeed that Mr Donaldson is too good a Christian to wield the knife. People would point to his hesitancy in backing Martin Smyth’s leadership challenge of March 2000 and his failure to press home Mr Trimble’s weakness following the 2001 Westminster losses. After the latter, many of the YU critics lost confidence in Donaldson ever striking and started clearing off to the DUP. This affected the balance of the UUC and together with a resurgent liberal vote meant that the ceiling of Donaldson’s support was in the low to mid 40s. It left the party stalemated in purgatory.
Tiochfaidh ar la Big Mon – or, why the Demon Doc’s day came
There is some wonderful black and white footage of Ian Paisley and Willie McCrea standing outside Stormont throwing snowballs at the departing car of Eire premier Jack Lynch. Now the outsiders are on the inside. For most of the last 30 years, Mr Paisley defined unionist politics. If you saw the conflict as a religious battle, subscribed to a set of anti-intellectual knee-jerk reactions to politics, or (let’s be blunt here) simply hated Catholics, the DUP was the party for you. Only a minority of unionists did so (despite often voting for Paisley in the European beauty contest) and the UUP thrived accordingly as the larger, more successful and better organised of the two parties. If you were a young person with political interests you probably would have joined the UUP, rather than the DUP. The Old DUP with its hectoring, multitudinous Free P ayatollahs and its yahoo backwoodsmen would never win over the kind of voters without whom the DUP could never overcome the UUP. That’s why, as mentioned earlier, many people thought that, post-Paisley, the DUP would wither away. Some hope now.
The New DUP (and we can used that loaded nomenclature) is different and a quick tour of its flashy funky website shows why. If you look at its eye-catching posters, you see one warning of a rates rise under a picture of a young blonde with child and a brilliant white smile (and presumably also a wedding ring). What would the likes of John Wylie or other departed Free P warhorses have made of it? It’s not just a matter of slick advertising although the DUP is better at it than most. Rather, it reflects the fundamental change in the DUP from the hard-line to the mainstream, with the rigid discipline of genuinely hungry politicos.
Look at the DUP below the grandfather figure of Rev. Ian. Peter Robinson is one of the province’s sharpest operators who built up a council fiefdom in the Belfast suburbs. Nigel Dodds is the articulate, very hard-working voice of the urban middle class with the polish of a Cambridge educated barrister, who destroyed the UUP in North Belfast. Gregory Campbell is the angry but measured voice of minority west of the Bann loyalism. There’s also Iris Robinson, glamorous wife of Peter, who wears some of the strongest perfume in the world. When I shook her hand I was still smelling of perfume an hour later. That, whatever my friends the ‘officials’ would like to think, is a well-rounded, talented and well respected second rank leadership. Still more urgently, it therefore stands in sorry contrast to the post-Donaldson talent left behind leader Trimble. Let’s just take one constituency at random: North Down — supposedly the most “liberal” of all the Ulster seats. In November it elected 2 DUP men, both in their 30s, one Presbyterian (former UUP man Weir) and one Church of Ireland, proof that the DUP doesn’t just have a second rank leadership but it also doesn’t have worrying generation gaps. It is far more than the Free Presbyterian Church on the hustings.
Talented individuals aren’t enough, of course. The DUP was helped by the fact that David Trimble just about kept control of the UUC, unlike Faulkner in 1974, meaning that the UUP could only lurch from one sapping internal crisis to another. But the splintering of the smaller unionist groupings also helped them. Eight other anti-Agreement unionists were elected in 1998. Five belonged to Bob McCartney’s UK Unionists and three were UUP members who had stood as independents and who allied themselves as a separate group after the election. In early 1999 the UKUP subdivided and gave birth to the NIUP. None of the three groups had much credibility or effectiveness in terms of providing a unionist third force (if you excuse the pun). The disciplined DUP was confirmed as the only real rival to the larger UUP, in a strange echo of 1975 where the break-up of Vanguard in the Convention (fingerprints of D. Trimble everywhere) had had the same effect. In the Assembly, the DUP was often fiercely criticised by the NIUP for selling out on opposition to the Agreement by taking seats in the Executive and the scrutiny committees. This carefully crafted DUP stance must have unsettled traditionalists. It was, though, probably in tune with the wider unionist electorate which would have been switched off by traditional DUP boycotts and stunts.
For these reasons, I don’t accept Dean Godson’s recent argument in The Spectator that the DUP victory was unpredictable and owed much to the last disastrous bout of decommissioning choreography. There were signs for years that the DUP was changing itself into something quite different and was winning over a new kind of mainstream unionist that would once have been reliably UUP.
All is changed, changed utterly
I generally don’t like making predictions because if they come unstuck you end up looking like Conor Cruise O’Brien; sometimes sounding like the Cruiser too, but that’s another story. So let’s be cautious here. The Assembly election does not necessarily mean that the DUP is in the driving seat as the dominant voice of unionism for the next decade, with the UUP doomed to play wifey. But it’s safe to say that it is up for the DUP to drop the ball. It has done so before when it failed to consolidate its wafer-thin advantage over the UUP in the 1981 council elections, a costly mistake it has taken two decades to recover from.
So why did the UUP lose out to the DUP? The simple (and downright obvious) answer is that the DUP wanted renegotiation of the Agreement and the UUP leadership wanted to stick with it. The election merely crystallised an existing sentiment. Given that, why did so many party elders who had lived through the Sunningdale trauma back the Purple Turtle? (A few months ago, the patron of the South Down Association, Commander W.J. Martin wrote almost despairingly in the press calling for Jeffrey to support David. There was precious little excuse for such naivety, since Commander Martin sat under Enoch for over a decade and has even less excuse for this nonsense than most.) They could have said, ‘Right, David, we will back you up to the election but if the party does as badly as we fear then you are to have your desk cleared by the following Monday morning’.
Even after the debacle, incredibly, there was no sign of Dave shifting. Indeed, IDS-style, he acted as if nothing had happened and pledged to carry on, but only more so. He even turned round and said that 70% of Assembly members supported the Agreement and that was that. It was a man who wasn’t in touch with reality. Yes, it might have been a debacle, but the aftermath would help to determine if the next election wasn’t going to be a rout.
The answer came in Ciaran McKeown’s ludicrous, pro-cabal twittering in the Snooze Letter in the run-up to the crunch Party Executive meeting on 12th December. Under the judicious and balanced headline of, ‘Donaldson Nettle Must Be Grasped Now’, he reported [sic] that the party was being “bombarded” with demands for Jeffrey Donaldson to be hung, drawn and quartered. Actually, the letters were obviously mass-produced, a characteristically bungled job by Trimble partisans. (Quick aside. One such partisan is David McNarry, although I’m not saying he wrote or arranged for the writing of any letters. My view of Mr McNarry is shaped by the time he represented the Orange Order in a discussion on the institution at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in 1999. Someone from the audience told him that flute bands in Comber — McNarry’s patch, so not much scope for ignorance — had upset a Roman Catholic pensioner on the Twelfth. Mr McNarry promptly asked him if he would give him the address of the pensioner so that he could reassure her in person. He was surprised to see the audience giggling in derisive amazement.)
There has always been a type of unionist who sees the 40 year old Donaldson as a naughty schoolboy who really ought to behave himself. Sadly this tendency dominates the tame Executive. That meeting on 12th December may in the long run be more important in the demise of the party than even the 2003 Assembly election. It passed a resolution telling Donaldson to toe the line or else. To him, it must have been the final insult. Not only had David Trimble led his party to defeat, the same party was not going to force him out. A party can recover from a defeat but not when it doesn’t have the hunger to do so or if it lacks the basic motor functions to appreciate when it has been defeated. The future points to a declining vote. Within a week, Jeffrey was en route to the DUP, with his running mate Norah Beare and party rising star Arlene Foster. There was then a hypocritical burst of breast-beating from the Trimble supporters about betrayed mandates when they had been willing Jeffrey’s departure for months.
One such bovine partisan was on the gallery at Stormont gazing down on the media scrum as Wee Jeffrey shook Big Ian's hand for the cameras. He took great pleasure at Jeffrey’s apparent lack of enthusiasm. That’s not surprising, it must have been an extremely difficult moment for Jeffrey when he shook Papa Doc’s hand. It says much about the cement-headed idiot who couldn’t grasp that this moment really had left his party paddle-free but creek-bound. It wasn’t just that the DUP now could stretch its lead over the UUP to 9 seats in the Assembly. Far worse, Donaldson, the election’s biggest individual vote winner, could now be liberated to join the DUP’s front rank and to fire with all barrels on his old party.
The best outcome for the UUP after the election would have been Trimble’s summary resignation or removal, followed by a leadership election. Donaldson would ideally have been deputy leader to the likes or Empey or Taylor. They could have been effective caretakers (like Michael Howard) for Jeffrey their natural successor. The key would have been to revive the party before Big Ian finally departed the political scene: a Robinson DUP would not have Big Ian’s baggage and thus be still more lethal to the UUP. That offered the best chance of holding back the DUP tide. Now it is lost.
Northern Ireland will have 3 more elections over the next 18 months. The European in June will be Big Ian’s last shout and is sure to be bad for the UUP, especially if the DUP run Donaldson as a second candidate to pick up Papa Doc’s surpluses. 2005 will see likely Westminster and local elections. The DUP is already, thanks to Donaldson, the largest party with 6 seats and realistically will not lose any of them. Of the 5 UUP seats, three of them have majorities of 128, 1100 and 2200. The DUP was the largest in the first two seats in November and if the various anti-Agreement independent votes in Upper Bann go to them, Mr Trimble is on course to lose his seat — very probably to Arlene Foster. It might be the only way to prise the man from his leadership, such is the state he has reduced his poor party to.
The future’s bright, the future’s bright Orange
All manner of things may go wrong along the way for the DUP. So far Big Ian has been able to keep it as a big family where the patriarch calls the shots. That might change as the families Robinson and Dodds jockey for the succession and as the party itself changes to reflect the influx of new members. (Some other parties would, mind you, die for such problems.) Its youth and young professional profiles are set to grow further as the DUP takes over from the UUP as the nursery for young unionist talent. The people who stand to lose out are traditionalists like McCrea who see their party evolving into an UUP sans Purple Turtle. But they have nowhere to go.
And the UUP? Well, PR will keep it alive. It can look forward to squeezing the Alliance vote further as it attracts exotic creatures like North Down councillor Diana Peacocke to its diminsihed and vacant front rank. Unkind souls may consider that this will be akin to filling an empty space with a hole, but I disdain such cattishness. Some critics may, of course, remain unwanted even by the DUP (we call this the Cedric syndrome). And, obviously, Mr Donaldson’s departure won’t end the infighting as plenty of his people remain. That means the party’s transformation into UPNI Reborn, the vaguely political wing of the Ulster Tatler, will still be bumpy though she’ll get there in the end. What this paltry outfit won’t have is any appreciable influence, as the big political decisions will be made elsewhere. Strikingly, Mr Trimble’s most vocal supporters are generally ageing. The UUP has not been recruiting new members in any number for a long time. Its youth wing, which produced Donaldson and all those baby barristers, is lost to the DUP. The Grim Reaper will take care of the white-haired party loyalists, the same fools who challenged Donaldson to jump and who had the Wee Man oblige them. It will continue to pursue those nice people in North Down who don’t normally vote. And they’ll repay them much as they repaid their fathers when they went canvassing, and gave up an evening’s opera fundraising for Castleward. Which is to say, they’ll, uh, continue not to vote.
So here’s to the Purple Turtle: the only party leader in history to turn a broad church into a suicide cult. What’s left for our David? Well, he could take a leaf out of Bill Murray’s book and shoot a whiskey commercial in Tokyo . . . he’s probably still fairly big over there.
— The Watchman
StormontWatch is ERO’s Belfast-based politics column
StormontWatch, January 16, 2004 12:38 AM