NI POLITICS: A question of leadership
From Teapot to Turtle
Working for Iain Duncan Smith was an insight into how to lead a political party. Leastways it was if you took the opposite of everything Iain did and resolved that you’d always urge that as the way to do the job. It’s cruel to kick a man while he’s down, but as IDS isn’t politically going to get up again, you’d wait forever being nice and we’ve lessons to learn. Ulster Unionists must learn that when a party’s lumbered with a leader under whom things go from bad to worse to scarcely believable, a party with an urge to exist has to stop being sentimental about its leaders. As things stand, today the Tory party has shown that it still has the will to power, but does the UUP?
Where to start with Mr Duncan Smith’s defects as a party leader? You could try the peevish air he habitually produced in interviews, or you could consider the shockingly silly way he treated party activists and indeed parliamentary colleagues once he became leader. But these in themselves were not his fatal weakness, nor, obviously, unique to him. No, what did for IDS was that his party realised, right as the man might have been when he was elected leader, he had shrunk in office and was leading his party to certain, repetitive defeat. It’s hard to describe the cold fear felt in Central Office that, had IDS survived to the general election, Tony Blair might well have ‘conceded’ a televised debate between the party leaders. The tragedy for the UUP is that while the Tories have produced a clean, swift and mature answer to their leading problem, there still exists in Unionism denial that there even is a leadership problem.
Let us take stock on Mr Trimble’s nine years as UUP leader. This month sees proposals to carry out party reforms substantially promised by him a decade ago and neglected until now. His defence being the Hume-like one of, ‘I didn’t have time to deal with this stuff till now: I was bringing peace!’ But peace drips awful slow in Northern Ireland, and now even Mr Trimble begins to express the doubts the rest of Unionism has been urging on him for some time about our curious ‘peace’.
The great case made for the current UUP leader is that, ‘it wasn’t his fault, he behaved honourably, he was let down by that bounder Adams’. And indeed he was, and by Albert Reynolds, and John Major and, oh, just about everyone else. So yes, the serial, lethal dishonesty of Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein and the Provos has been a problem. Also a problem for the Unionist leader were variously, his own, the Irish and the American governments. Yet the thing is, David Trimble isn’t producing solutions to these problems for Unionism — certainly not solutions which work. There’d be an argument for his leadership if it was squaring these circles, or, if at least it was delivering the electoral goods for his party, but he’s done neither.
What’s UUP strategy under Mr Trimble? Utter Micawberism — that something will turn up, and that the DUP will, er, do something ‘Trimble-like’. Sadly I fear the DUP has learnt all too well the lesson of Mr Trimble’s leadership. Which is hardly surprising given that DUP strategists consider their greatest asset to be not their own, increasingly nominal party leader, but Mr Trimble’s continued leadership of the UUP. Of course, the sad fact is that too many of these backroom boys in the DUP are talent that long ago leeched out of the UUP. Which brings us to what a continued Trimble leadership will bring the UUP: decline, division, defections and defeatism, AKA more of the same.
Contrary to what his more lunatic opponents assert, David Trimble is not an enemy of the Union, still less has he ever intended it harm (which is not something you can credibly say about Ian Paisley). What, sadly and undeniably Mr Trimble has proven to be is, immensely damaging to the UUP. How exactly could things go right for a Trimble-led UUP at this point? If he’s still leader after the AGM, can he bring an end to the recrimination, will he resist the urge to purge? Will he invigorate the party? Would that produce stable policies for the governance of Ulster which will stick? Well since he never has to date been able to do any of those things, it’s a bit much to seriously imagine that he’s about to now.
Parties can have a future as well as a past, as Mr Trimble might almost have said. The UUP does not have to decline into irrelevance. A challenge to David Trimble that unites, if it does, figures such as John Taylor, David Burnside and Sir Reg Empey is hardly a revolt of the yahoos. It’s absurd to see the sort of united leadership for the UUP that is on offer to Mr Trimble’s version as being ‘extreme’. No British political party thrives if divided: David Trimble cannot unite his party. The Ulster Unionist Council has the duty to its own posterity to see that the UUP survives David Trimble. The Tories have avoided the future they were heading for under IDS, the UUP this month can do the same thing.
This article originally appeared in The Belfast Telegraph.
, March 2, 2004 01:05 PM