Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 12

WHEN the University term resumed in January 1984 many colleagues of Trimble feared that he would be next in line for assassination. But short of leaving Queen’s – where any lecturer working to a set rota of lectures and tutorials would be desperately vulnerable – there was little that he could do. Ian Clark, a Queen’s Ulster Unionist student who was friendly with Graham, recalls an intimidatory atmosphere at the University in those days and remembers Trimble telling him that ‘if he needed any protection’, he could help to provide it: Clark understood this to mean physical muscle, but Trimble says that he meant he would intercede with the Queen’s authorities and the RUC.¹ Whatever Trimble actually meant, the one thing which he was determined not to do was to be cowed by the University authorities into relinquishing all political activity: if nothing else he is ‘thran’ (an expression common to Ulster and Scotland spelled in three different ways, meaning in this instance ’obstinate’).² An opportunity arose in 1984, when his old friend John Taylor – who was running for his second term as a member of the European Parliament – picked Trimble as his election agent. For the first time, he found himself running a campaign from party headquarters. Although personally disorganised, Trimble proved a good organiser on behalf of the party – and Taylor won the third of Ulster’s three seats in Strasburg (Paisley again secured the highest number of first preferences and Hume took the second seat).³

In Lagan Valley, too, Trimble sought to burnish his credentials. In 1983 he became Vice Chairman of the constituency UUP and in 1986 sought renomination for the same post. He found himself opposed for this largely honorific job and assumed that it was a renewed attempt by elements of the local Unionist establishment to be rid of him. Suddenly, the incumbent Chairman of Lagan Valley announced he was not standing again. Since Trimble had put himself forward for Vice Chairman, it could reasonably be inferred that he was prepared to run for the top job. This he duly did and Trimble squeaked by at the AGM, with votes 55 to 53. Thus it was that Trimble became chairman of one of the largest Ulster Unionist associations. More important still, Trimble – one of Molyneaux’s main critics – was now the local party chairman of the party leader. Although Molyneaux could not but acknowledge his abilities, the two men were never natural soulmates – to say the least. In Molyneaux’s eyes, politics and policy were the prerogative of the Member of the Imperial Parliament. Ulster Unionist associations, like their Tory cousins, were supposed to be election-winning machines which collected subscriptions and raised funds, but did not bother themselves with great affairs of state. Indeed, even in times of great crisis, such as in 1985–6, the Lagan Valley Association minute books show that surprising proportions of meetings were still spent on such routine matters as fulfilling branch quotas and the payment for the use of Association facilities for jumble sales. Trimble, by contrast, was keen to ‘politicise’ Unionists and accordingly set up a monthly discussion at the Lagan Valley Management Committee meeting called the ‘Current Political Situation’. For example, the minute books for 11 January 1985 record that Trimble suggested that Lagan Valley affiliate to the National Union (of Conservative and Unionist Associations) to influence the ruling mainland party. This initiative was noted with interest by Workers’ Weekly on 2 February 1985, which stated that Trimble ‘has not been foremost amongst those anxious to bring Northern Ireland’s wretched local politics into the British mainstream. He has been a leading spokesman for the devolutionist wing of the UUP.’

There was one other contrast between the two men. Molyneaux was Deputy Grand Master of the entire Orange Order and Sovereign Commonwealth Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution, the senior branch of the Loyal Orders; whereas Trimble was an Orangeman out of a sense of duty and was rarely concerned with the plethora of meetings which office-holders in the District or County Grand Lodge had to attend. Trimble felt that the Orange Order with its rituals and procedures was institutionally not suited to combating the Kulturkampf which Irish nationalists had launched against the Ulster-British way of life: in consequence of this campaign, many outsiders regarded Unionists as the ’Afrikaners’ of the island of Ireland. Trimble’s view of this matter had been given an extra urgency by the text of the joint communiqué which followed the 19 November 1984 summit at Chequers between Mrs Thatcher and the Irish Prime Minister, Garrett Fitzgerald. At the press conference, Mrs Thatcher had famously ruled out the three recommendations of the New Ireland Forum of the Republic’s constitutional parties and the SDLP – which then became known in ‘tabloid-speak’ as her ‘out, out, out’ pronouncement. Unionists were delighted, but Trimble counselled caution. One of his reasons for caution was that in an attempt to slow down the momentum of Sinn Fein/IRA, the British and Irish Governments had agreed to give greater recognition to Irish culture in the life of Northern Ireland. Trimble could, therefore, see this emerging as the next great battle-ground.

Trimble believed that even the most balanced accounts of the island’s history did not, taken as a whole, accord equality of treatment to Unionism.⁴ Unless Unionists found an organisational vehicle to rectify this asymmetry, governmental support would go entirely to the Gaelic/Catholic/Nationalist side rather than the Orange tradition. Trimble reckoned that although the Orange Order was an entirely bona fide body, the ‘cultural commissars’ (his words) at the NIO would never dispense funds to it.⁵ In some ways, he thought the Order was too exclusive a body, for the wider unionist community of Ulster was not coterminous with Orangeism. Likewise, to insert ‘Protestant’ into the title of any new body would also be unsatisfactory, for neither was the British community of Ulster synonymous with Protestantism: some of its most loyal citizens were Catholic. He was also anxious to avoid any hint of anti-Englishness, to which so many loyalists were prone after being let down by successive British Governments. Trimble now thought that anti-Englishness only played into the hands of Irish nationalists, and served to detach them from their natural moorings in the broader, more cosmopolitan community of the British Isles. What, then, would provide the broadest basis for fighting the dilution of Ulster’s cultural identity?

‘Ulster-British’ – hyphenated – seemed the most satisfactory formulation. It implied a community capable of autonomous existence but which was also invested with wider associations in these isles as a whole. So following a seminar at the Park Avenue Hotel in Belfast on 25 April 1985, it was decided to set up ‘the Ulster Society for the Promotion of Ulster-British Heritage and Culture’. On 28 September 1985 (the 73rd anniversary of the signing of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant) the organisation was launched formally at Brownlow House in Lurgan. Brownlow House – a mid-19th-century sandstone structure that served as world-wide headquarters of the Royal Black Institution and was also the largest Orange Hall in the world – became its home base. Trimble became the chairman, and a young activist from Fermanagh, Gordon Lucy, became general secretary. The first project focused on loyalist folk music and entailed the collecting of the words and tunes of traditional Orange songs and ballads which were in danger of being lost to posterity (surprisingly or not, Trimble’s musical tastes do not extend to loyalist bands). The second subject concerned Orange banners, with questionnaires to be sent to every lodge. Another study focused on the original UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division, which would trace and interview survivors of the carnage which that unit endured on the Somme. Nor was the international dimension neglected: the Ulster Society also sought to rekindle awareness of the contribution of Ulstermen to the American Revolution.⁶ Later, he was instrumental in securing a reprint of Cecil Davis Milligan’s Walls of Derry, the authoritative work on all aspects of the defences of the Maiden City, first published in the Londonderry Sentinel in two parts in 1948 and 1950.⁷ Trimble also reviewed books on Ulster’s contribution to the development of science and technology – including Sir Hans Sloane and Lord Kelvin – and wrote a new introduction to the third volume in the Tom Barber trilogy of novels by Forrest Reid, an early to mid-20th-century Ulster author.⁸

Maintaining the self-confidence of the Unionist community turned out to be even more necessary than Trimble had imagined when he determined to set up the Ulster Society. For on 15 November 1985, the British and Irish Governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which for the first time gave the Republic a formal say in the affairs of Ulster – on everything from security, public appointments, to the official use of flags and symbols.⁹ As Trimble later noted, the 1985 Agreement did not even contain any declaration – as in the 1973 Act – stating that Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, nor that it was the policy of the British Government to support the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland.¹⁰ Worse still from a Unionist viewpoint, the Republic had achieved this role in the internal affairs of the Province without rescinding its claim over Northern Ireland contained in Articles 2 and 3 of the 1937 Constitution, which was illegal under international law. In the words of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s report on the AIA – largely drafted by Trimble – ‘the agreement clearly diminishes British sovereignty in Northern Ireland by admitting a foreign government into the structure and processes of government of Northern Ireland’. The Intergovernmental conference – with its secretariat at Maryfield, on the outskirts of Belfast – was ‘a joint authority in embryo, which if allowed to develop will become the effective government of Northern Ireland’.¹¹ Trimble now believes that the British state was disappointed with the results of the AIA and pulled back from the logical drift towards joint authority. But even though today he prefers the description of ‘direct rule with the Greenest of tinges’, he still shudders at the thought of the AIA effectively placing the Irish Government inside British ministers’ private offices.

It was an even greater blow than the suspension of Stormont in 1972. As such, it fulfilled the Ulster-British people’s worst nightmares, both in the contents of the treaty and in the manner of its negotiation. For the UUP leadership had been ruthlessly excluded from consultation about the document. But should Molyneaux have seen it coming? As is shown by his Calvin Macnee article in Fortnight of 2 February 1985, even a relatively peripheral figure such as Trimble spotted that something was in the works as early as November 1984, when Thatcher and Fitzgerald held their press conference at Chequers (as has been noted, the occasion of her famous ‘out, out, out’ pronouncement – on the findings of the New Ireland Forum of the south’s constitutional parties and the SDLP). Her words had delighted Unionists, and horrified nationalists. But Trimble was not so sure. He watched the whole press conference on television with fellow delegates to the UUP’s annual conference at the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, Co. Down. What she actually said was: ‘A United Ireland was one solution. That is out. A second solution was confederation of the two states, that is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out. That is a derogation from sovereignty.’¹² Trimble noted, though, that she had hesitated when the third option was mentioned and had to be prompted by a civil servant – an odd slip for someone as well-briefed as she was. He concluded from this lapse that if the two Prime Ministers really had been discussing the New Ireland Forum, she would not have needed to be prompted. It followed in Trimble’s mind, therefore, that they must have been discussing something else.

But what was that something else? Thatcher, who feared that the Cabinet might leak, left the negotiations largely in the hands of her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and one of his officials, Sir David Good-all. Increasingly desperate efforts to find out what was going on were met with ever more evasiveness as proposals emerged in the Dublin press. At one meeting at No. 10 between Molyneaux, Paisley, Thatcher and Douglas Hurd (the Northern Ireland Secretary) on 30 August 1985, the Prime Minister and Ulster Secretary simply listened and took notes but offered no guidance whatsoever on the contents of the negotiations. Many Unionists, including Trimble, could not grasp why Molyneaux – who had been aware of the seriousness of what was being negotiated for some time – waited till August 1985 to start agitating against the emerging deal; only then was a joint working group between the UUP and DUP set up. Trimble shares the conventional view of many Unionists that Molyneaux had relied excessively upon Enoch Powell, who believed that such an agreement would not be reached (and whose utility was diminished by his own highly ambivalent relationship with Thatcher). Trimble also thinks that Molyneaux might have relied too much on Ian Gow, who had left his original post as Thatcher’s PPS for a ministerial slot and who inevitably no longer enjoyed the same access as in the first term.¹³ Frank Millar – who was then general-secretary of the party – remembers that although Molyneaux went along with his contingency planning in anticipation of an Anglo-Irish deal, the UUP leader nonetheless believed to the last that there would be no agreement.¹⁴

Why had Thatcher done it? Many were astonished, especially after Anglo-Irish relations suffered during the pro-Argentinian tilt of the Haughey Government during the Falklands War of 1982.¹⁵ First, she felt that ‘something must be done’ over the rising tide of violence and the growth in Sinn Fein’s electoral support after the Hunger Strikes of 1981: the SDLP needed to show that constitutional politics could deliver something and the AIA would comprehensively demonstrate that capacity (though Fitzgerald admits that he continued to emphasise the degree of the republican threat during the negotiations, even after the Sinn Fein challenge had begun to wane during the May 1985 local government elections).¹⁶ Second, she was told that it would yield all sorts of new security cooperation: a top-ranking Gardai agent in the IRA, Sean O’Callaghan, had recently supplied the information which aborted the attempted assassination of the Prince and Princess of Wales at a Duran Duran concert. She may, therefore, have believed that signing the deal would open the door to more such successes.¹⁷ Third, her old friend, Ronald Reagan exerted some pressure: according to an authoritative biography of Tip O’Neill, the Irish-American Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the White House mollified O’Neill’s anger over Administration policy in Central America by ‘delivering’ something to the Massachusetts Democrat on Ulster.¹⁸ Moreover, by associating the Irish with decision-making on Ulster, the Government hoped to minimise the international costs of this engagement. And fourth, as Trimble believes, she may well have been fed up with the UUP leadership for turning down every government initiative after she did not automatically proceed with their favoured proposals in the 1979 election manifesto.¹⁹

Trimble actually heard about the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement during his sabbatical year whilst on holiday in the Costa del Sol. Daphne Trimble recalls them turning to one another and saying, ‘This will mean civil war.’²⁰ Like so many Unionists, Trimble erroneously thought the British state was on the verge of a complete scuttle from Northern Ireland. ‘After the AIA, it was perfectly obvious that normal constituency activity was useless and the MPs had completely failed,’ he recalls.²¹ The effects of all of this were swift and dramatic: between 100,000 and 200,000 Unionists assembled to protest at Belfast City Hall on 23 November.²² But how would the initial surge of protest be sustained? As in the early 1970s, Unionists felt themselves to be in a bind. If they played by the rules, no one would take any notice. Yet if they resorted to large-scale violence, they feared that the rest of the United Kingdom would be disgusted and would accordingly resolve – in Peter Robinson’s memorable phrase – to keep Ulster on the ‘window ledge of the Union’.²³ Trimble, therefore, had three reasons for immersing himself in the gathering storm of protests. If someone such as himself did so (known to the NIO as a moderate of sorts after the voluntary coalition episode of 1975–6) then it would send a powerful signal to the system about the depth of feeling within the Unionist camp. The second reason was that if the protests were not to damage the Unionist cause, it was vital that there be some guiding form of political intelligence behind them. The third reason owed much to his responsibility as constituency chairman: he says he wanted to protect Molyneaux’s back from the more extreme elements.²⁴

Nonetheless, Trimble was not a figure of the first rank and was probably more peripheral than he had been in 1974–6 – as is illustrated by the fact that he registered only just in the consciousness of senior servants of the British state. Sir Robert Armstrong, for instance, recalls ‘a shadowy figure, but little more than that’.²⁵ Trimble’s chosen vehicle for protesting the accord was the Ulster Clubs: originally created before the AIA to oppose the re-routing of traditional loyalist parades, they had since then recanalised their energies to oppose the Agreement. Above all, they felt that neither the mainstream politicians nor the Orange Order were doing enough. Trimble became the founding chairman of the Lisburn branch, whose inaugural meeting was held at the town’s main Orange hall. But Trimble was depressed by the combination of loose fighting talk about taking on the British Army and a lack of a coherent strategy to deal with the crisis. Indeed, he took it as a measure of how bad things were that the deputy supreme commander of the UDA, John McMichael, was the most sensible person at many of these meetings. McMichael, also from Lisburn, was the political brains behind the UDA, and the two men had a healthy mutal respect.²⁶ John Oliver remembered that ‘McMichael thought the world of David’ and over the next few years took to heart many of Trimble’s strictures about the legitimate parameters of protest.²⁷ This contact proved important to Trimble, for without McMichael’s help, he would have been unable to keep a grip on the wilder elements. But Trimble also used his own skills to chair the meetings of the Ulster Clubs. Nelson McCausland, later a Belfast city councillor, remembers Trimble’s technique for dealing with the grassroots: ‘What struck me was how people were talking a load of nonsense. David-Trimble would then summarise their ramblings in a very articulate way, “I think what you’re really saying is…” and the person would be gratified that he had hit upon some new insight.’²⁸ Trimble would also do all the talking at meetings of the Province-wide executive of the Ulster Clubs, where his colleagues again seemed to him to be equally clueless. He directed them to the strategy of the Militant Tendency. ‘I said to them, “if you’re aligned to mainstream organisations, but oppose their strategy as a ginger group, one thing you can do is to set up a newspaper to influence the wider debate”.’ So it was that Ulster Defiant, the Clubs’ newspaper, was born.²⁹

To demonstrate that the AIA had no support in the majority population, the fifteen UUP, DUP and independent Unionist MPs resigned to create a massive Province-wide by-election: the SDLP put up candidates in only four of the most marginal constituencies. On 24 January 1986, the Unionists secured an overwhelming 418,230 votes and held all of their seats bar Newry-Armagh. This took the gloss off the victory. Indeed, the rise in the SDLP vote at the expense of Sinn Fein allowed the Government to claim that its strategy of strengthening constitutional nationalism was working. The collapse in the pro-Agreement (but loosely unionist with a lower case ‘u’) Alliance party vote showed the virtual unanimity within the Unionist family against the diktat. Gradually, all of Ulster-British society mobilised. Eighteen councils with Unionist majorities, including Lisburn, adjourned; rates protests followed; and southern Irish goods were boycotted (Trimble thought this last form of protest to be silly, but went along with it in the spirit of the times). The culmination of this phase of struggle was the Loyalist ‘Day of Action’, held on 3 March, whose purpose was to bring the whole of Northern Ireland to a standstill. Lisburn, of course, was to do its bit and set up a municipal coordinating committee comprised of representatives of the UUP, DUP, Loyal Orders, Ulster Clubs and farmers’ bodies. After a series of road blocks, to shut off the town, they would then adjourn for a mass rally at Smithfield Square in the town centre.

It was, though, an organisational nightmare. Trimble knew that street protests had to be managed. And the only people who could exert sufficient influence to prevent things spiralling out of control were the paramilitaries themselves. When tempers frayed, such crowd scenes could easily degenerate into full blown riots. Trimble participated in an ad-hoc action committee of 20 that included McMichael, whose purpose was to discusss the arrangements for the event. They decided on peaceful pickets of all the main arteries leading in and out of town. Trimble went around the traders in Bow Street, asking for their support: only one of them, he recalls, gave a dusty response. On the day itself, he positioned himself on the Hillsborough Road. During the course of the protest, some UDA men began to thump a bus which had been stopped. Trimble tried to stop them and they told him in no uncertain terms where to go. He rang McMichael, who duly told them to cease, and was always grateful to the UDA leader for sticking by what they had agreed.³⁰ Later in the day, Trimble presided at the mass rally in Smithfield Square, packed with families and farm vehicles. The Ulster Star – a local newspaper – reported on 7 March 1986 that he saluted the work of the coordinating committee. ‘Mr Lawson Patterson and Mr Eddie Blair were thanked for arranging the tractor cavalcade and there was praise for the representatives of the Loyal Orders and Mr John McMichael, of the UDA.’ But there was an uglier side to some of the subsequent protests as well. Lisburn RUC men who were put in the front line of policing the demonstrations were burned out of their homes and Seamus Close of the local Alliance party claimed it was significant that these had come on the heels of ‘sinister and intimidatory’ comments by UDA spokesmen.³¹ Indeed, later that year, the Housing Executive reported 114 instances of intimidation against Roman Catholic families in the greater Lisburn area. ‘It was a very unhappy time,’ recalls Trimble. But he was determined not to allow that element to spoil the legitimate demonstrations of others.³² In May 1986, on the occasion of the intergovernmental conference, Trimble and his fellow loyalists took over the rates office, urging householders and businessmen to withhold payments for as long as possible. He hoped that if enough people did so, the temporary shortfall would cost the Treasury £100 million in interest payments. When he eventually paid up, he did so with a giant, blown-up four foot by ten hardboard cheque for £616.16 drawn on his own and Daphne Trimble’s personal account: he had derived the idea from A.P. Herbert, who once wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. When Peter Barry, the Irish Foreign Minister, visited Northern Ireland on 17 June 1986, Trimble and others chained themselves to the railings at Hillsborough Castle; he arrived at work on the next day to find a photograph of the stunt displayed on the front page of the News Letter: it certainly annoyed his supporters at Queen’s such as Herb Wallace, who at the time was ‘managing’ his campaign to be elected Dean of the Law Faculty. In the eyes of the university authorities, it may well have confirmed their impression that Trimble was someone unsuitable for preferment.³³ Indeed, Trimble received two convictions for minor public order offences, such as parading without a permit in Lisburn with his own branch of the Apprentice Boys of Derry.

As time went on, it became clear that the Government would not budge. It correctly calculated – on the advice of Sir Robert Armstrong and other senior officials – that there would be no repeat of 1974.³⁴ They also came to this conclusion on the basis of assessments from the security forces.³⁵ For in 1974, there was a locally-based political experiment to bring down. This time, there was an unassailable international treaty signed by two governments which could not be pressurised like the Faulk – nerites were. The ‘Irish dimension’ had thus been used to outflank the Unionist majority in Ulster. Or, as John Hume was reported as saying, ‘I always expected a furious Unionist reaction to the Agreement, but the Protestant boil had to be lanced.’³⁶ The Government also saw that hardline loyalist protests, such as the 1977 strike and Paisley’s much-vaunted ‘Carson Trail’ of 1981 had been damp squibs: in the more straitened financial circumstances of the 1980s, loyalists were less prepared to engage in the kind of industrial militancy which had proven so successful across the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Partly, this was conditioned by the growing dependence of both the Protestant and the Catholic working classes on the subvention of the United Kingdom Exchequer. Above all, the British Government correctly reasoned that the ultra-respectable Molyneaux and the UUP would never sanction a mass uprising: indeed, Molyneaux and his party only accepted the March 1986 Day of Action when they were left with no other choice.³⁷

Unionist protests became ever more desperate, partly out of frustration with the Unionist leadership. In his first major interview in the News Letter, on 6 November 1986, Trimble said: ‘If you have a situation where there is a serious attack on your constitutional position and liberties – and I regard the AIA as being just that – and where the Government tells you constitutional action is ineffective, you are left in a very awkward situation. Do you sit back and do nothing, or move outside constitutional forms of protest? I don’t think you can deal with the situation without the risk of an extra-parliamentary campaign. I would personally draw the line at terrorism and serious violence. But if we are talking about a campaign that involves demonstrations and so on, then a certain amount of violence may be inescapable.’ In fact, Trimble’s course in this period was seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, he wanted an escalation of protests, warning that unless the Unionist leadership improved its performance, the paramilitaries would soon take over. On the other hand, during the June 1987 General Election, he was struck by the reaction on the doorstep in Lisburn. There was hostility to the council boycott – as reflected in the Lagan Valley Unionist Association minute books – but more especially to the MPs’ policy of staying out of the Commons chamber. Boycotts were to Trimble a tactic, not a principle, and if they were undermining the struggle then they would have to be wound down. But if Trimble’s methods for attaining his goals were variable, so were his goals. On the one hand, he lent his support to those Unionists who responded to the AIA by urging complete integration into the United Kingdom; on the other, he flirted with constitutional forms which resembled independence. He was the most senior Unionist to campaign in a personal capacity in the 1986 Fulham by-election for his Queen’s colleague Boyd Black, then a B&ICO activist, who ran as Democratic Rights for Northern Ireland candidate. And although many integrationist themes found their way into Ulster Clubs’ literature (indeed, Boyd Black’s election address was printed on the front page of Ulster Defiant), Trimble’s own pamphlet for Ulster Clubs explored a much wider range of options, ranging from Powellite-style total integration to independence. The treatise was entitled What Choice for Ulster? and it came down on the side of Dominion status – in other words, a relationship that bore more similarity to full independence than integration. It was an unusually glossy publication by the Samizdat-like standards of Loyalist pamphlets: the front cover bore the famous propaganda poster entitled Ulster 1914, with the Province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair. She defiantly carries her rifle against a Union Jack background, proclaiming the words ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone’.

Trimble declared that Ulstermen were aiming for negotiated separation rather than UDI. Not only, Trimble declared, would this new Ulster be able to rely on ‘native ingenuity’ but it would also enjoy food provided by provincial farmers and energy supplies from Antrim lignite and Fermanagh gas. In echoes of his first speech to the Assembly and to the Nobel Prize-winning ceremony in Oslo, Trimble acknowledged that more could have been done during the 50 years of Unionist domination to make nationalists feel at home. ‘We should say to the nationalists in our midst, “a united Ireland is impossible, but a united Ulster is possible, and we invite you to be part of it”,’ observed Trimble. Workers’ Weekly regarded such thoughts as ‘twaddle’ produced by an ‘introverted Unionist’. and in its edition of 22 August 1987 opined: ‘What is being said here in code is more or less the equivalent of what the Provisionals are saying – get out of the house but leave the money on the table.’ These musings would not be forgotten by Trimble’s rivals: years later, in a televised debate on the eve of the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement, Paisley dusted off the pamphlet to illustrate his belief that the UUP leader was soft on the Union.³⁸ Trimble, though, never took such reasoning to its logical conclusion to advocate full-scale independence – such as the ‘Republic of Northern Ireland’. He held several meetings with a Presbyterian cleric from Co. Tyrone, Rev. Hugh Ross, who headed the Ulster independence movement, but remained unpersuaded. Trimble believes that the bulk of Ulster Unionists would never wish completely to relinquish the link with the Crown.³⁹

How does Trimble reconcile these varying positions? After all, one of them (integrationism) is based upon the notion of the inherent inclusiveness of Unionism; the other is based upon the ‘apartness’ of the Ulster-British from both the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic. Trimble argues that equal citizenship is very much the first choice of all Unionists, as was the case in 1921; but that if that is not on offer, then they will have to find some alternatives which preserve their way of life. He had concluded that the Union was in such peril that he had to set as many hares running as possible – including contradictory approaches in which he did not necessarily believe himself. If integrationism took off, all well and good. If not, then alternatives would have to be found. Another reason why Trimble could embrace both apparently contradictory approaches is that there is an element of intellectual gamesmanship in Trimble’s personality, which owes much to his training as an academic lawyer: he will draft anything for the sake of an argument. What is certainly the case is that Trimble was one of very few people who straddled the two, mutually antagonistic strains within Unionism: one was the world of integrationism, of the vision of Northern Ireland as part of a broader, more cosmopolitan entity. This attracted many Unionist colleagues in the professional middle classes and amongst Queen’s undergraduates after the AIA. The other world was that of ‘little Ulster’ which, more often than not, had its roots in evangelical Protestantism and was much remoter from the British mainstream. He was not, though, the only Ulster politician to adopt a dizzying array of positions: as Clifford Smyth notes in his study of Paisley, ‘the Doc’ was also perfectly capable of adopting integrationism, devolution, or independence – depending upon which of them most advanced the Protestant interest at a given moment.⁴⁰

Such activities, which were widely reported, can have done little to endear Trimble to the authorities at his workplace. The Queen’s of the 1980s was very different place from the Queen’s of the 1960s and 1970s. Political activism, once regarded as a public service, was now seen as less of an asset. It was not merely that the controversy-aversive University was determined to avoid a repetition of the killing of Edgar Graham for Trimble’s own sake; it was also because under the cumulative impact of fair employment legislation designed to eradicate sectarianism in the workplace, the University had become far more sensitive to such matters and its ‘image’. A campaign had been launched primarily (but not exclusively by nationalists) to allege that there was religious discrimination in the composition of the teaching staff. Most of them were Protestants – if not necessarily from Ulster – whilst the undergraduate population was ever-more Catholic. It thus echoed recent allegations contained in the MacPherson report that the Metropolitan Police is ‘institutionally racist’. In the words of Alex Attwood, who was president of the Students’ Union in the early 1980s and subsequently vice chairman of Convocation (a body comprised of all graduates) ‘Queen’s succeeded Short’s as the representative employment management issue in the North’.⁴¹ Queen’s responded by settling many cases out of court.

Although Trimble was never sued for harassment or discrimination (nor, indeed, was any complaint ever lodged against him) his face did not fit in this not-so-brave new world of pious neutrality. He says that Colin Campbell bluntly told him that he would never hold a professorial chair; Campbell says that he simply gave Trimble the advice which he gave to all colleagues at that stage in their careers – that Trimble would not obtain a professorship unless he increased his output of published materials.⁴² As editor of the Northern Ireland Law Reports, he would be summarising and synthesising, rather than doing original work of his own. What is beyond doubt is that Trimble did not fulfil his ambitions. The first chair which came up – to replace the departing Campbell – went to Simon Lee, a ‘superstar’ academic with good media credentials, and the second to his old friend Herb Wallace. Wallace, for example, also came from a unionist background, but he was not an active politician and he was thought less likely to blow his top in a crisis. Trimble also believes that his political commitments may have played a part: as Iain Macleod observed of R.A. Butler, ‘Rab loves being a politician among academics and an academic among politicians; that is why neither breed of man likes him all that much.’⁴³

Professorial chairs were not, though, the only avenue for advancement. In 1986, the post of Dean of the Law Faculty came vacant – an administrative post that involved much persuasion and cajoling. Normally, elections went uncontested and Trimble seemed to be certain of winning: indeed, to make absolutely sure of things, Trimble authorised Herb Wallace, as his unofficial campaign manager, to say that if elected, he would cease all active politics. Colin Campbell, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, asked Judith Eve, a colleague of Trimble’s from the Law Faculty to run. According to Herb Wallace, Campbell might have viewed Trimble’s political activities as detracting from the Law Faculty’s reputation (a third candidate, Geoffrey Hornsey, also entered the contest though he soon withdrew).⁴⁴ In the ensuing battle royal, the ‘jurisprudes’ formed the core of the anti-Trimble camp, whilst the ‘black letter’ lawyers of his own department were the core of the pro-Trimble operation. Trimble was the more senior, and had more administrative experience, but the elegant Eve was viewed as the ‘safer pair of hands’. ‘She was cooler, and without moods,’ recalls Sylvia Hermon, then – as now – one of Trimble’s most ardent supporters. The election was so close a contest that postal votes from faculty members travelling abroad were solicited, yet the Trimble camp still thought they had the edge. One morning, Sylvia Hermon came in and picked up the News Letter: there, she found Trimble pictured on the front page, tied to the railings at Hillsborough Castle as part of an Ulster Clubs’ protest against the intergovernmental conference.⁴⁵ ‘Short of raping the vice-chancellor’s wife on the front gates of the university, he could not have done much worse,’ wryly recalls Brian Childs, a colleague in the department of commercial and property law.⁴⁶ It may have been decisive, for Eve scraped home by 18 votes to 16, with one abstention.

Trimble’s friends began to despair of his prospects. Trimble, though, was not to be deterred for long. Some months later, the post of the director of the Institute for Professional Legal Studies became available. The Institute was part of Queen’s, but was independent of the Law Faculty and was governed by the Council for Legal Education. It had been set up in 1977 for professional training of law graduates.⁴⁷ Again, he seemed to have all the experience and duly applied; and, once again, a presentable younger woman entered the field. Her name was Mary McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic, the 36-year-old Reid Professor of Criminal Law at Trinity College Dublin.⁴⁸ Her publications portfolio may have been less voluminous than compared to that of Trimble, but she had two skills which he conspicuously lacked: she marketed herself superbly and was immensely adept with people. The 10-strong interview panel was chaired by Lord Justice O’Donnell, who led the questioning. He was assisted by Lord Justice Kelly, who as Basil Kelly had been Unionist MP for Mid-Down at Stormont and was the last Attorney General of Northern Ireland under the ancien régime. Trimble performed poorly, whilst McAleese dealt with the questions adeptly and she was duly appointed.⁴⁹ The upward trajectory of McAleese’s career was maintained and she later became Pro-Vice Chancellor. In 1997, she received the Fianna Fail nomination for the presidency of the Republic and won the election.

Trimble’s record of disappointment in university politics contrasts very sharply with his successes since his election to Parliament in 1990. ‘The difference between university politics and party politics is that university politics are a closed hierarchical system, whereas party politics are open,’ he explains. ‘In terms of the UUP, oddly, my position wasn’t very different from that at Queen’s. During the Upper Bann by-election, very few unionist figures were favourable to me. I thus came in 1990, and more particularly in the 1995 leadership race as an outsider. The great thing about politics is that they are decided by wider groups. My position vis-à-vis the Unionist hierarchy was just the same as vis-à-vis the Queen’s hierarchy.’ So why does he have such bad relations with his academic and political peer groups? ‘It’s my lack of diplomatic skill,’ Trimble declares. ‘I know that’s a rather big failing. I’m argumentative by nature and get into arguments without any consideration as to who they are with and the career implications. As I get older my arguments are couched in less aggressive terms. From the point of the view of the “Good Ole’ Boys” in Glengall Street [the tightly knit clique of men who ran the party headquarters in central Belfast for years] I’m never one of them. I come from the outside and I’m a bit too ready to tell them what they should do.’⁵⁰