BOOKS: The Passion of a Passive Man
Himself Alone by Dean Godson
The piecing it together process
Dean Godson started out on The Daily Telegraph as an obituary writer. In an interview with Gail Walker on his mammoth study of David Trimble and the “peace process”, Ms Walker asked him wryly if his career had gone full circle. Certainly the book has a valedictory air. Five years in the writing, it stops just after the Assembly election that saw the province’s major party for the previous 99 years finally eclipsed. At the time of writing, David Trimble retains the leadership but his career, at least in regards to Northern Ireland, is going nowhere.
Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism is notable for being a study of Trimble written from an anti-Agreement standpoint. Generally the media, whether in Belfast, London, Dublin or Washington, is clearly pro-Agreement, which has meant the moral compromises of the “peace process” and “conflict resolution” have been downplayed for pragmatism. Godson, to his eternal credit, is unsparing of the fat-headed rhetoric that passes for political discourse. That’s not to say the book is in any way polemical; actually he clearly admires Trimble. This admiration of a flinty Ulsterman, coupled with profound scepticism of his strategic direction, is fascinating, if not unprecedented. In 2000, Michael Gove wrote a searing critique of the Belfast Agreement and yet could still write a warm foreword to the collection of Trimble’s speeches published that same year. (Godson’s book has few of the factual howlers that littered Henry McDonald’s Trimble.)
This history dressed up as biography may come to be the definitive study of Ulster’s “peace process”. It is certainly comprehensive but often difficult to read. That is not because of inadequacies in Mr Godson’s writing, which is lucid throughout (and his 40-odd page essay of a conclusion is exceptionally well written). What may exhaust and overwhelm some readers will be the sheer volume of minutiae required to honestly record David Trimble’s life this last decade. All those always ongoing talks and negotiations, all the stuff that happened out of sight after the BBC talking head had finished his two-way in front of Stormont. Persistence, however, is rewarded and by the end as clear an understanding of all the twists and turns of recent Northern Irish politics as anyone is going to have is end this book.
The Long March
So just how did David Trimble become the most highly regarded unionist leader outside Northern Ireland, at least since partition? Charles Moore speculated after the 2001 general election that Trimble could be the man to revive the Tory Party. High calibre politicians reared and educated in the Celtic fringe have done well in national politics before of course. Crucially, the likes of, say, Malcolm Rifkind, John Smith or David Steel had a relatively easy entrée to Westminster by dint of winning seats for parties that could realistically aspire to government or a share in it. David Trimble had no such advantage living in the one part of the state quarantined from national politics. His rise to prominence, as Godson relates, was unconventional, via the pseudo-paramilitary Vanguard, the Ulster Workers Council strike, the Ulster Clubs, and above all Drumcree, all of which sat uneasily with his otherwise impeccably petit-bourgeois tendencies.
In explaining Trimble’s story, Godson also explores the story of Protestant middle Ulster which is crucial to understanding Trimble’s attachment to the Belfast Agreement. Once power had shifted from Stormont to the NIO in 1972, the comfortable Protestants of Northern Ireland ceased to show their garrison flintiness of old. From the first-generation-with-a-degree professionals upwards, an entire scale disengaged from a politics that had become physically dangerous and didn’t even offer access to decision-making. As part, just about, of that class, Trimble noticed its absence both from local political activity and then later from the ballot boxes. Trimble’s belief was that only an historic accommodation with Irish nationalism which returned power to local hands could revive this voting base and prevent nationalism from punching above its communal weight.
Trimble came to the leadership at the age of 51, the youngest leader of the party since Faulkner, a man who mirrors Trimble in so many ways. He owed his election to his record as an articulate and intellectually sharp defender of grassroots unionist interests. The last couple of Molyneaux years had been difficult for the party. This new UUP leader looked as if he could appeal right across the unionist spectrum. Some even believed that he could make the post-Paisley DUP unviable. Against this optimism were the facts of life that have faced every recent leader of mainstream unionism. Ever since O’Neill, UUP leaders have found themselves squeezed between Westminster’s desire for progress in a particular direction and the reaction from their Ulster voting base. After the fall of Stormont, it was obvious what Whitehall would suffer to replace it. The outcome was non-negotiable: some form of power-sharing with some form of Irish Dimension.
David Trimble was the first leader since Faulkner who was able and ready to make that deal. If Jim Molyneaux was, dare one say it, a watchman who saw his job as repelling the enemy from behind a raised drawbridge, Mr Trimble was always the man ready to negotiate. It shouldn’t really have surprised people although it did. In 1975, Trimble had been instrumental in a dramatic acceptance of power-sharing by the Vanguard leadership. Voluntary coalition was ultimately torpedoed by Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell, and it wrecked Vanguard for good, but the importance of it, as Godson suggests, is that it showed Trimble’s gambling streak. When he finally reached the leadership of unionism, was he an ambitious man in a hurry?
But the 1995 terrain was different even from that faced by Faulkner. The Belfast Agreement is evidence not of one accommodation but rather two. The first accommodation (let’s call it the UUP-IRA accommodation) was the unionists agreeing to return to the power-sharing template and do a deal with both wings of nationalism. Probably Trimble was prepared from the moment he came to the leadership to make that deal, even if, as he later admitted to Godson, he was unsure of what its precise lines would be.
That brings us to the second accommodation (to be called the HMG-IRA accommodation): conflict resolution between Britain and the IRA/Sinn Fein. Its terms, essentially, were (and are) that Britain would ease the Republicans into the mainstream, dismantle its security infrastructure and permit the greening of civic life if the Provos kept to low-level criminality. The boon from Britain’s perspective was that if the IRA did suspend the “armed struggle” its resumption would be increasingly difficult until it would become impossible. By definition, this accommodation is ongoing, and short of unification, unending. It did not end in April 1998. But the HMG-IRA accommodation rested on the UUP-IRA accommodation, because the Provos would have to wield power as part of the conflict resolution and this needed the tacit approval of a majority of unionists.
Of course, there were angry words along the way. But it was always likely that there would eventually be a deal given the political capital invested by each side. Having concluded the Agreement, Trimble has clung doggedly to it ever since, despite the divisions it spawned from his negotiating team to the Westminster MPs, and all the way down to Ballygobackwards Orange Hall. This doggedness overrode an established Trimble tenet, namely that unionism was at its strongest when it was united. In the early 1990s, he looked ahead to a day when there would be only one unionist party and that unionism would be stronger for it. So it was that a man once wedded to unionist unity took unionism into the most bitter of internecine battles: all for the sake of the Belfast Agreement.
New Unionism, New Danger?
After Trimble’s elevation to the leadership, the Young Unionist magazine Ulster Review had a front cover of the Man Himself under the title “New Unionism”. What did the writer think this meant? In those early days of Blairism, the concept of renewal was in vogue. Probably it meant Trimble was to be the hard-line but articulate leader who could stand up to the fork-tongued Shinners. Trimbleism did indeed mean New Unionism but it was different to what soon to be former allies imagined it to be.
Summing it up brilliantly, Dean Godson avers: New Unionism was as “minimalistic as the drawing room of Peter Mandelson’s erstwhile Notting Hill home”; indeed he considered “minimalistic unionism” to be the more accurate term. Since the Belfast Agreement was founded upon the principle of consent, it meant that unionists had won. If aspects of the New Northern Ireland were unpalatable to unionists, well, unionists could live with them. It is not true to say (and Godson does not) that for Trimble, everything else was up for negotiation. But he would not jeopardise what he saw as his hard-won gains to prevent or reverse the assault on British symbolism in public life following the Agreement. Unfortunately, this pragmatism was and is simply not shared by most unionists. On this analysis, republicans had stopped their violence because a New Northern Ireland, stripped of its British ethos, would demoralise and soften up enough unionists over the following decade or two to win a referendum on unification.
New Unionism was so centred on the consent principle that according to Godson:
[It] very rarely offered a specifically unionist/loyalist analysis of the Troubles: instead, it made democratic arguments that could just as easily have come from such Irish constitutional politicians such as John Bruton.
Additionally, its tendency to use Republican language to advance its position seemed to signify a deeper ideological corrosion. Incredibly, in the run-up to the establishment of the Executive in 1999, the UUP and Sinn Fein each made input into the draft of the other. As Godson says, ‘the UUP’s position had been shaved down by years of negotiation into something closer to the British state’s position, which concerned itself more with republican means than ends’. It no longer spoke with a recognisably unionist language. (Eventually one Trimble MLA, David McClarty, would even publicly use the Sinn Fein phrase “rejectionist unionist” to describe anti-Agreement people in his own party.)
Another key facet to New Unionism lay in its sensitivity of past poor public image. Ecumenical emollient rhetoric would be the order of the day when the institutions were established. But this resulted in what Godson calls “ideological passivity”. The decision by Trimble to give Republicans considerable leeway over decommissioning seemed to transmit apathy to the UUP Assembly Party, which was collectively unwilling, and perhaps given its background, unable to challenge nationalism even within the confines of the Belfast Agreement. Steven King, the UUP’s present director of elections claimed that Sir Reg Empey pulled punches in regard to Sinn Fein because of a fear of being accused of sectarianism. (Having heard many Empey speeches, I personally could well believe it.) In rejecting this, Reg Empey said, tellingly, that unionists could not attack Sinn Fein ministers when trying to form an inclusive Executive. Unwittingly thereby making Godson’s point for him. When they did get their Assembly, the UUP Assembly members — disproportionately pro-Agreement, as compared to even the party membership, let alone its electoral base — were reluctant to challenge Republican ideology and instead were on the ideological back foot, unable to assert themselves, never mind showing their confused and demoralised voters that they were doing so. Leader Trimble never gave a lead, perhaps because he was determined to give political cover to Sinn Fein to make acts of decommissioning.
This analysis of New Unionism is helpful in a number of ways: it explains why David Trimble and many of his team failed to appreciate the salience of decommissioning, prisoner releases and policing reform to the unionist electorate, and the extent to which the Belfast Agreement failed to satisfy them. Indeed one theme of the book is Trimble’s increasing failure to read his voting base, as opposed to Paisley’s virtual telepathy. For example, Trimble failed to appreciate instantly the incendiary nature of the Balcombe Street Gang’s appearance on the Sinn Fein platform. It was only when he went to canvass in Armagh the following day and saw party members almost scared to do so that it dawned on him. Godson is particularly scathing when it comes to the UUP and policing: to him they simply did not take it seriously perhaps because Trimble simply didn’t share the attachment of the plain and inarticulate people who always backed his party to these symbols and the British ethos behind them. He was never going to bolt over Patten. That limited his leverage to get concessions that he really needed to shore up his own position which was under constant attack from 10 April 1998.
To give another example, his position on decommissioning was radically different to that of Robert McCartney, one of his deadliest critics. McCartney, in his submission to the Talks when the UK Unionists were still part of them in 1996, stressed that the process of decommissioning had to be autonomous to the course of political discussion, i.e. that the IRA would be prevented from using the issue as a bargaining chip during the negotiation, and presumably also after it. In order to get a deal, David Trimble could not possibly follow such an absolutist position. The issue could be fudged in a soundbite culture, particularly where the largely pro-Agreement local media turned a blind eye to it. For McCartney and others, decommissioning meant a continuing and continuous process that would turn the IRA, effectively, into a green Royal British Legion. For the two governments and Trimble, the need for decommissioning would be transmuted into the need for individual act(s) of decommissioning that could be taken as sufficient evidence of the IRA’s good faith and commitment to exclusively peaceful and democratic means. In the course of 1999, during an intensive period of activity, Cedric Wilson of the Northern Ireland Unionist Party asked, “Are you holding the line, David?” Trimble replied, “I can’t find the line.” Much of Godson’s book is taken up with the attempts by Trimble to find some formula to secure something, anything, from the IRA that he could then sell to an increasingly restive party as evidence that he was keeping up the pressure on decommissioning.
The essential phoniness of David Trimble’s efforts is encapsulated by his willingness to set up the institutions in November 1999 in advance of decommissioning. In The Times, David Trimble wrote that:
for our part, we have reluctantly accepted that it was not possible to persuade the IRA to lay down its arms prior to setting up the Executive, nor even to do so on the same day . . . such simultaneity would have been more than fair, but considerations such as this cut little ice with the paramilitaries.
For Godson, ‘there was almost a pathetic quality to his acceptance of the new terms’. At this point, Trimble was convinced that he had some understanding with Adams that decommissioning would happen, an illusion that would prove costly. His funereal colleague Michael McGimpsey crowed, ‘Trimble is delivering the IRA’; Ruth Dudley Edwards even asserted that Trimble would be in a stronger position to defend the RUC. Trimble’s pragmatism went to extraordinary lengths. In January 2000, he and Ken Maginnis went to see Sir Ronnie Flanagan to ask him if he could use his influence to get some contentious security installations in south Armagh removed, as opposition to decommissioning was fierce there amongst local IRA men. Godson is rightly scathing:
Here was the leader of the UUP and First Minister of Northern Ireland — who was meant to look after the interests of all law-abiding people — quietly ‘inquiring’ of the Chief Constable of the RUC whether he, in turn, could ‘inquire’ of the Army commander to lower his guard in one of the most lawless parts of the country.
Maginnis related this immensely damaging episode to Godson. Expect it to appear in the DUP’s election literature next time in the Newry-Armagh constituency.
By November 1999, Trimble had seemingly finalised the UUP-IRA accommodation. The Assembly, the North-South and East-West bodies had all gone live. Decommissioning remained. It was the element that straddled both the UUP-IRA and HMG-IRA accommodations: Trimble needed something to shore up his position and HMG needed it to justify scaling down the security presence and to deliver on the creeping “greening of the North”. This put the UUP leader in an awkward position. He was not formally a party to the conflict resolution of the HMG-IRA accommodation. At the Weston Park talks of July 2001, when he thought the spotlight would be on arms, he found that the agenda included policing, demilitarisation and the stability of the institutions also. His lacklustre response to these issues is explained by Godson as such:
Essentially, he accepted (the NIO’s) Quentin Thomas’s colourful analogy: that republicans were the lobsters who had to be enticed into the lobster pots. But in order to entrap such creatures, you need bait – and the only problem was that the bait in this case came off the hide of the unionist community, and sometimes from very sensitive spots in the unionist body politic.
As Godson argues, this reasoning reflected David Trimble’s contention that unionism had won, given that Sinn Fein was operating British institutions. But a nervous unionist electorate felt like it was living through a period of revolutionary change, seeing its society turned upside down with institutions of the state denuded of their British trappings under an “anti-discrimination” agenda. New disputes over the legality of flying the Union Jack from local councils were deeply shocking to a population that saw the price of Trimble’s Assembly as the banishment of Britishness from public life.
The issue of Education, always likely to be controversial, hurt Trimble in a slightly unexpected way. Martin McGuinness let it be known that the province’s grammar schools were under threat. Protestant Middle Ulster squealed in protest: here was the Godfather of Godfathers about to turn their schools into sink bog-standard comprehensives that would deny Oxbridge and the ancient Scots to their offspring. The most vigorous protesters were those unionists opposed to the Belfast Agreement who could point to the discord as the logical out-workings of Good Friday 1998. (Grammar school teacher Sammy Wilson of the DUP quietly gained a lot of kudos for his party in the golf clubs.)
Trimble and those increasingly strange creatures, the Trimbleites were not exactly silent but they were plainly more relaxed about such matters than their main unionist peer-competitors. After all, Gerry Kelly, the Old Bailey bomber, was showing schoolchildren around Parliament Buildings. But the problem for Trimble was that the out-workings of the HMG-IRA accommodation destabilised the UUP-IRA accommodation. And at this juncture many, many chickens began to take wing — with perhaps only Trimbleites being unable to foresee their certain inclination to return home to roost.
Ulster’s Branch Davidians, from broad church to suicide cult
The UUP’s internal problems predated Trimble, and the Agreement. As power disappeared brutally from it in 1972 and deadlock set in, the old political class attached to it started to fall apart. By the 1980s, the party had a key generation gap in early middle age. That said, it had resisted the DUP’s surge and had established itself decisively as the major party by the time the Anglo-Irish Agreement put UUP-DUP rivalry into deep freeze until the mid-1990s. The UUP found it could win elections without always putting forward high calibre candidates and this only bred idleness and dilapidation.
Not all was lost. Edgar Graham, in his short life, did much to revive the Young Unionist movement and its offspring arrived in the senior party hardened by the H Block Republicanism encountered at Queen’s University. They were better educated and more proactive than older and often more emollient members. Trimble was their pin-up and they became known as the Baby Barristers (although most weren’t at the bar). New Unionism, as it would develop, brought those tensions into the open and caused even more problems. On the pro-Agreement majority side were Trimble, the party’s liberal wing and the loyal party stalwarts. On the anti-Agreement minority side were the Molyneaux Old Guard and the Baby Barristers. Although Trimble could in the end count on just about getting his way at the endless series of UUC crunch votes, the narrowness of his victories precluded ceasefires. The simple lesson is that a party can be run in such circumstances but it won’t win the race its in. Each UUC ‘win’ for David Trimble was another lap coasted ahead by the DUP. The Belfast Agreement did to the UUP what Europe did to the Tories and what Iraq is doing to New Labour. Every party has crunch issues where divisions just can’t be resolved or papered over. Trimble decided to fight his critics when he lacked the support to do so without, even in victory, fracturing his party.
A worrying feature in the 2001 general election was the polarisation within unionism. In elections for nearly 20 years, unionists had been able to unite to take advantage of nationalist splits west of the Bann. That came badly unstuck in Fermanagh-South Tyrone where Jim Dixon polled just enough votes to hand the seat to Sinn Fein. It was a reflection of how deeply unionism had been divided by the Belfast Agreement that anti-Agreement people there could not bring themselves to vote for the UUP candidate James Cooper who was closely identified with the UUP leader. (One of Cooper’s ancestors, another James, sat for Fermanagh in the first Northern Ireland Parliament where he was a fierce critic of Sir James Craig’s dealings with Michael Collins. The later Cooper took time out of his election preparations to play a key role in the deselection of the anti-Agreement Peter Weir in North Down. He then drove back down the M1 to Fermanagh to be photographed with the close friend of Weir, Arlene Foster, to ensure anti-Agreement unionists voted for him. You could almost admire the cheek.)
Perhaps Trimble was so far disengaged with his own side that he decided to brush the poor results to one side. In fact, 2001 was for the UUP what 1992 was for the Tories. It gave Trimble breathing space but it did not halt the decline in his party’s fortunes. But there may have been another reason. Alex Kane, a News Letter columnist and critical Trimble supporter, believed the party needed to chase that middle class segment of unionism that had given up voting, the so-called garden centre Prods. Here was the theory: get more of them out to vote and perhaps squeeze Alliance support at the same time, the overall unionist vote will rise and the UUP will be able to outpoll the DUP, even allowing for the lost right wing support. It looked a good idea at the time, but there were several reasons why it didn’t work. First of all, the garden centre Prods were more interested in their geraniums than in saving Trimble. Second, Trimble was so busy fire-fighting that he never had the time to devote his energies to it. Then third, should a garden centre Prod decide to vote, why get involved in a party with a barely disguised civil war? And fourth, there may indeed have been an Assembly, ceasefires and rising house prices, but there was also rising paramilitary thuggery, drug-dealing and organised crime. This was hardly life before the fall of ‘69. For all these reasons, Trimble never mobilised the people he needed to bolster his position. Instead traditionally disgruntled voters were increasingly ready to support the DUP.
As Kipling might have said …
One of Trimble’s main selling points on becoming leader lay in his articulacy. Whilst Wee Jim often spoke apparently without moving his lips, Trimble seemed to possess the ability to walk with kings whilst keeping the common touch, as it were. But this was misleading. He didn’t have the common touch (see above, and if not, you really should have seen him in a room with folk who were his supporters) and he was patchy in dealing with the kings. Godson thinks he was too indulgent of Blair and Clinton where a more robust attitude might have maximised his input and hence secured more UUP goals. He notes that Sinn Fein was expert at obtaining collateral for its retreats, whereas the UUP was never going to risk devolution for, say, the RUC. More to the point, there was a certain gaucheness to his dealings with supporters and potential sympathisers. Trimble has always been given credit for the improving press that unionism got in Britain over the 1990s. In fact, he benefited from the coming of age of Conservative journalists who had been much influenced by T.E. Utley and Enoch Powell (his old nemesis). This was a crucial constituency and although it always admired him (and still does), Trimble never did enough of the glad-handing or made an effort to keep in touch with key opinion formers. (Godson gives the example of Charles Moore at The Daily Telegraph whom Trimble went a year without contacting.) The articulate voice of unionism also misfired when criticising the BBC’s Rebel Hearts programme. Instead of attacking the republican mind-set, Trimble chose to concentrate on a defence of the independent Stormont MP, D.I. Nixon, who had been attacked in the programme for his alleged involvement in sectarian murder. It was another example of what Robert McCartney called Trimble’s train-spotting mentality: unable to see the wood for the trees.
Trimble also failed to punch at his weight in Washington. Clinton conspicuously refused to blame the IRA for the suspension of the institutions in February 2000 and then refused to come to the aid of Trimble over the RUC in May 2000. (One fascinating aside, uncovered by Godson, is the snide joke of the Administration’s scouts to Stormont prior to Clinton’s visit there in late 1998, that “the RUC used to torture my ancestors in the basement”.) Yet he refused to cultivate links with the rising Republican Right in order not to antagonise Clinton or Blair. When he had the opportunity to network at a Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Virginia in 2001, he made little impression. In fact, he got into an argument with the president of the Centre for Security Policy over, of all things, anti-missile defence. Trimble also failed to arrange a meeting, via an intermediary, with John Ashcroft, the new US Attorney-General, a key figure concerning any future extraditions of IRA men from America. Among other claims to fame, Mr Ashcroft was a Pentecostal singer and a recipient of an award from Bob Jones University, previously notable in Ulster for its granting of an honorary degree to Big Ian. No wonder Sinn Fein activists in Washington still feel Trimble made little effort to make their lives difficult, when in the post 9/11 world he had an open goal to do so. Instead, according to Godson, he wished to apply pressure on the IRA within the process, rather than trying to exclude it altogether.
Melt down?
What then, other than Unionism's painfully evident ordeal, is David Trimble’s legacy? When he led his party to third place in the 2003 Assembly elections, he could not point to any vast benefits supposedly flowing from devolution since Stormont was empty. Trimble always accepted that the existence of gain and pain for unionism in the Belfast Agreement. But his problem was that the gain was substantially revocable. He could not hail the advantages of devolution if there was no Assembly or even the prospect of one. He may have been prepared to make it work under almost any circumstances, if only unionist opinion would allow him. But it did not. He could point to acceptance of the consent principle, but this simply reiterated a principle that had long been granted to the unionists. He could point to prosperity, but this really had very little to do with the Assembly and in any event, sectarian tensions were relentlessly rising. He could point to key procedural victories and acts of decommissioning, but how significant were these?
The pain, though, was irrevocable. The prisoners would not be returned to jail, the RUC could not be raised to life and the IRA still murdered, smuggled, extorted, thieved and tortured. By 2003 Trimble had outlived his usefulness to Tony Blair who had saved him on many previous occasions. He had too few prizes on show. Unionism accordingly plumped for the DUP.
The pre-emptive strike against Jeffrey Donaldson and his supporters in the aftermath of the election was typically ill-advised. Donaldson et al had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UUP had passed the point of no return. It lacked the infrastructure and the dynamism to compete with the DUP and Trimble was not going to be deposed by an excessively indulgent and possibly senelescent activist base. The inevitably botched strike only hastened the Donalsonians’ departure from the party. So Trimble won his battle with his opponents but at the expense of his party losing its centre-right future, a symbolic reflection of which is the party’s virtual disappearance from Queen’s University. Following its lowest ever province-wide vote in the Euro elections, the UUP faces the real prospect of a total Westminster wipe-out. Nothing is safe any longer. The party won’t die, because the single transferable vote in PR elections will preserve it. But the DUP has a lot of ammunition still to use against a Trimble-led UUP, not least of all in Dean Godson’s book.
As Godson writes, near the end of that valedictory conclusion, Trimble is the sacrificial lamb that the DUP needs to slay to relieve their burden of guilt in embarking down the path already trodden of dealing with Sinn Fein. The Passive Man must meet his Passion, the blood sacrifice that will allow Trimble’s heir presumptive, not Sir Reg Empey but Peter Robinson, to try again.
— The Watchman
StormontWatch is ERO’s Belfast-based NI politics column
Dean Godson, Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism [HarperCollins, £35.00, pp1024]
StormontWatch, July 8, 2004 11:08 PM