Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 14

TRIMBLE may have been the youngest and most junior UUP MP – but he was already acquiring a reputation as the party’s most intellectual elected representative. Indeed, he did remarkably well to maintain his historical and intellectual interests after his election to Parliament. Trimble’s main efforts lay in two pamphlets for the Ulster Society.¹ The first, The Foundation of Northern Ireland (1991), sold out its complete print run of 2000: it recounted familiar events leading to Partition and immediately thereafter, but gave them a ‘revisionist’ twist. Far from being simply the ‘gallant little Ulster’ taking its stand against the Fenian hordes and a faithless British Government, Trimble painted a much more complex picture. Its real political interest lay in the fact that here – at the heart of the Ulster Society – was a Unionist MP again praising Sir James Craig for going unprotected to Dublin to negotiate with terrorists. ‘At home, there were some who were ready to criticise Craig, but what was not in dispute was his enormous physical and political courage,’ noted Trimble. The paper was written at the time of the Brooke-Mayhew talks of 1991–2 and its aim was to show that Unionists could once again make up for their lack of political power through manoeuvre and tactical adroitness: the Craig – Collins pact, believed Trimble, had worked in the Unionists’ favour. It also provided a sharp critique of Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism at Westminster, following their triumph in the south in the General Election of 1918. By declining to take up their seats, they were unable to affect the direction of the debates on the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and the Unionists had the field to themselves. In the following year, Trimble produced another paper for the Ulster Society, entitled The Easter Rebellion of 1916. Its main interest lies in its rarity value, for few Ulster Unionist MPs had ever bothered to tackle this subject seriously, and it was a competent survey of the secondary literature. Indeed, even so formidable an adversary as Martin Mansergh, who became adviser to successive Fianna Fail leaders, acknowledges the quality of Trimble’s researches in his recent collection of essays, The Legacy of History.

But of greatest significance to Trimble himself was the lengthy preface which he wrote in 1995 to Gordon Lucy’s study The Great Convention: The Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892, again published by the Ulster Society. Trimble describes it as ‘the closest thing to a personal political credo which I have written’. The 1892 Convention was held in Belfast as a response to Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill. Trimble believed that this body had been mis-characterised by R.F. Foster in Modern Ireland 1600–1972 as a symbol of the Protestant Ascendancy, whereas he believed that it was an authentic popular response by the democratic majority in Ulster to the prospect of being coerced into a Catholic state. In fact, Trimble was not entirely fair to Foster on this: Foster certainly employed the term ‘Ascendancy’ but he also acknowledged that ‘[the Convention] constituted a class alliance that was underestimated by Irish nationalist and British politicians alike’.² Whatever the rights and wrongs of Trimble’s analysis, few Ulster Unionist MPs of the Troubles era – with the exception of Enoch Powell – would have had the intellectual self-confidence to challenge Foster.³ Even bolder in the light of Trimble’s own political circumstances at the time was his foreword to the Ulster Society’s republication of C. Davis Milligan’s study, The Walls of Derry: Their Building, Defending and Preserving. Penned in 1996, it contains an intriguingly favourable reference to the trenchworks built before the siege by Governor Robert Lundy. To this day, Lundy is a hate figure in Ulster Protestant lore for supposedly betraying the Williamite cause by virtue of his lack of enthusiasm for resisting the Jacobite forces. Relatively recent scholarship suggests, however, that he was fainthearted or just plain ‘realistic’ in his assessment of the city’s prospects.⁴ Years later, of course, Trimble himself would be accused by his loyalist detractors of being the ‘Lundy’ of this era. Yet, curiously, his attempted rehabilitation of Lundy stirred little controversy at the time it was written. Whatever its actual political significance, Trimble certainly loved being ‘the cleverest kid on the block’ and he would have enjoyed nothing more than penning a quirky, contrarian rehabilitation of such a man.

There can be no doubt that the Ulster Society dramatically raised his profile in the Province at large: the fact that its headquarters was located at Brownlow House helped him secure the nomination for Upper Bann. And the scores of talks which he gave and attended throughout Ulster brought him into contact with hundreds of grassroots Unionists, which helped mightily when he ran for the leadership in 1995. Trimble had plenty of time for such activity, since he was scarcely part of the UUP’s most inner councils under Molyneaux. Michael Ancram, who became Political Development Minister in 1993, recalls that Trimble was not someone that ministers would come across a lot, not least because sustained dialogue had in large measure broken down after the end of the Brooke-Mayhew talks in November 1992; nor, says Michael Mates, did he accept invitations to dinner at the minister’s Belfast residence at Stormont House.⁵ Trimble was thus a peripheral player in the negotiations which led to the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993, issued jointly by the British and Irish Prime Ministers – one the most important statements of intergovernmental strategy issued in 30 years.

Some such pronouncement was a cardinal aim of the republican movement: Major had been told as much by Charles Haughey at their summit in December 1991. Haughey said that the Irish Government’s soundings led them to believe that if the language was right, a declaration of principle could help to bring about an end to IRA violence. Hume, who had been engaged in his dialogue with Adams since 1988, also said as much and had his own draft version of what such a document would look like. In essence, Hume – Adams envisaged that in exchange for a ceasefire, the British Government would become a ‘persuader’ for a united Ireland and would gradually ‘educate’ Unionists into accepting the inevitability and logic of such an outcome. Major was, as ever, very cautious. Contrary to the widespread belief in Irish nationalist circles, this was not primarily a function of his shrinking majority after his narrow re-election in the 1992 General Election, and the need for the support of the nine Ulster Unionists in the Commons. Rather, Major’s caution over the emerging dialogue with republicans owed at least as much to his consensual style of management of the Cabinet and of the Conservative backbenches, whatever the numbers. Patrick Mayhew recalls that he hardly made a move without the support of the whole Cabinet Northern Ireland Committee, for he wanted to be sure that any initiative he took would not be disowned if it went awry.⁶ The sceptics on this inner group included not merely such well-known Unionist sympathisers as Viscount Cranborne, leader of the Lords, and Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, but also the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, and, at times, Michael Heseltine. The reason for their doubts was simple: 25 years of terrorism (not least the murders of Gow, Neave, the casualties of the Brighton bomb, and the mortar attack on Downing Street) had given a new lease of life to the profound dislike and distrust of republicanism within the Conservative political elite (whatever their views of Ulster Unionism as a creed or Ulster Unionists as individuals). Furthermore, many MPs knew of servicemen or civilians from their constituency who had been slain or injured. Indeed, Andy Wood, then Director of Information at the NIO, reckoned that one of the little noticed by-products of 30 years of violence was that Northern Ireland at a human level has become much closer to the rest of the United Kingdom than it had been at the start of the Troubles. He calculates that as many as several hundred thousand troops have made their way through the Province – whereas, by comparison, hardly anyone from the mainland had been there in 1969.⁷

Major’s consensual approach also governed his dealings with the Unionists. Whatever personal feelings, Major was certainly of the opinion that any new arrangements had to comprise at least the Ulster Unionists, if not the DUP. In that sense, there could be no repetition of the AIA. But how were these two objectives – bringing in the IRA whilst keeping the UUP on board – to be reconciled? After all, Hume was hated within Unionism for his dealings with Adams. It would, therefore, have been suicidal for Molyneaux to have accepted any joint declaration which emanated from them, or at least was seen to emanate from them. Major understood that Molyneaux had a hugely difficult act to perform on his own party, and was determined that he be afforded the space to do so by negotiating a formulation that was more acceptable to the UUP. More was the key word. For Molyneaux would never be able to throw his bowler hat into the air over a text designed to draw in the Provisionals. All that was needed, says Michael Ancram, was that he should acquiesce in it.⁸ To that end, Major extensively consulted Molyneaux: Molyneaux recalls that from 18 October 1993 onwards, he and the Prime Minister met on a weekly basis. One British official who participated in these meetings recalls that Molyneaux would often say ‘“I don’t think my folk will wear this”; sometimes, he was acting as a spokesman for the state of party opinion, sometimes he was using it as a vehicle for expressing his own discontents’. The British, in turn, would play this back in their innumerable negotiations with the Irish Government. Such confidence-building measures became all the more vital after the Shankill bomb killed nine Protestants in October 1993 and the revelations of secret contacts between British Government representatives and the Provisionals; thereafter, they would take place three times a week. After all, Major had said that such discussions would ‘turn my stomach’. Was there another secret deal, asked unionists – this time between the Provisionals and the British Government? Molyneaux, who was consulted at an ever more frantic pace along with his advisers, became convinced that there was no such conspiracy. His authority was still sufficient to carry the Ulster Unionists with him – thus also forestalling a revolt from the 30 or so Tory backbenchers who might have baulked at the text of the Joint Declaration had the UUP leader given the signal.

British ministers and officials to this day remain well pleased with their work on the Downing Street Declaration. In Michael Ancram’s words, ‘we delivered a pretty Orange document in green language’.⁹ According to this reading, the British Government was merely reiterating what it had already conceded – that it had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in staying in Ulster – indicating to Hume and the IRA that they were neutral rather than imperialistic in motivation, and that republicanism’s real ‘British question’ was how to deal with close to a million pro-British subjects in the north-east corner of Ireland. The British Government was now a facilitator for an agreed Ireland – again, Hume’s concept – but that was not necessarily a united Ireland. Such a polity could only come about if consent was freely and simultaneously given by the people of Ireland, north and south. Partition was secure in that Ulster folk would determine whether there would be Irish unity and not the Irish people as a whole, as the republicans wanted. Moroever, the British would simply seek to uphold those democratic wishes, be they for unity or the status quo and, crucially, would neither seek to persuade nor to coerce Ulster into any new arrangements. Unionists were told that it was significant that it was the Fianna Fail Government of Ireland – traditionally the ‘Greener’ of the Republic’s two main parties – which acknowledged a united Ireland needed the consent of the majority in Ulster. Both Governments added that all could participate fully in the democratic process if a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods was established. In his subsequent explanation of the DSD in the Dail, the Irish Foreign Minister, Dick Spring, defined a ‘permanent’ abandonment of violence as including ‘the handing up of arms…’. British ministers also made such demands – a point which annoyed Adams greatly in early 1994 when he told the Irish News on 8 January 1994 that ‘they [the British] want the IRA to stop so that Sinn Fein can have the privilege twelve weeks later, having been properly sanitised and come out of quarantine, to have discussions with senior civil servants of how the IRA can hand over their weapons’. The terms on which Sinn Fein/IRA gained access to the negotiating table and even the new institutions of government in Northern Ireland would prove to be one of the most vexing questions of the coming years.

To someone like Trimble, the language of the Declaration ought to have made for very uncomfortable reading. First of all, there was the very fact of the statement itself: a foreign government with an illegal territorial claim was once again pronouncing upon the future of Northern Ireland. Second, it spoke of the ‘people’ of Ireland – whereas Trimble, who subscribed to the B&ICO’s ‘Two Nations’ theory, believed the Ulster-British to be a breed apart. Third, though it acknowledged the right of the majority in Northern Ireland to determine its constitutional future, it repeatedly posited the idea that any changes in that status would inevitably be in the direction of Irish unity, rather than towards still closer relations with Britain. But for all his doubts (which in part centred around the fact that because Molyneaux went alone to Downing Street, he could be outmanoeuvred) Trimble was reluctant publicly to denounce the document in which his leader had such a hand. To have done so, Trimble says, would have pushed him into the Paisleyite camp and would forfeit him such limited access as he then enjoyed.¹⁰ Any fears which the NIO may have harboured that he would be the source of right-wing opposition to the DSD were thus never realised. ‘If we are suspending judgment today on this statement today, it is in the hope that it will lead to a way out of the cul-de-sac in which the people of Ulster have been condemned for the last eight years,’ he observed in the Commons on the day of the signing of the DSD. Instead, he focused upon the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in Northern Ireland – partly a reference to the system of legislating for the Province via Orders in Council rather than properly debated and scrutinised Bills.¹¹

With hindsight, Trimble feels that Molyneaux did a fairly good job in removing the ‘Greener’ elements within the Hume – Adams conception.¹²It was an early indication that Trimble, unlike Robert McCartney, did not regard the peace process as a fraud designed to deliver a united Ireland by stealth; rather, it was something which, if the terms were right, was worth studying and could yield fruit. In Trimble’s eyes, that fruit was the tantalising prospect of no more impositions from above, such as the abolition of Stormont by Westminster in 1972, or the AIA of 1985. This, he hoped, would be a settlement which Unionists would be able to shape for themselves rather than being left to wait ‘like a dog’, in Harold McCusker’s famous phrase, outside the conference chamber as the future of the Province was carved up.¹³ Paisley swiftly detected Trimble’s modulated position, describing him in a speech to the annual dinner of the Tandragee, Co. Armagh, branch of the DUP in early 1994 as ‘plasticine man’ over the DSD: Trimble was ‘being made to look up, look down, look left and look right in whatever way he was punched by events’.¹⁴

The Provisionals, for their part, never endorsed the DSD – if only because they could never then accept that Northern Ireland was the relevant unit within which the consent principle should be exercised – but it nonetheless contained enticing amounts of ‘Green’ language. This was emphasised by both Reynolds and Hume, thus enabling it to become an important building block in the construction of the first IRA ceasefire of 31 August 1994 – although Adams may have gambled that the ‘precondition’ about decommissioning would be waived more swiftly than was actually the case. Whilst republicans debated the DSD’s contents and requested ‘clarification’ from the British Government (in an attempt to draw them into public negotiations before a ceasefire had been called), Trimble urged that they not be allowed to dictate the pace of progress. Hume had told the British and Irish Governments that there would peace within days of the DSD, but it had not been forthcoming. ‘The government have held the carrot,’ Trimble observed. ‘Now it is time for the stick. Militarily they should clobber the Provos.’ He became the pre-eminent advocate in the Commons of the idea of the then Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Hugh Annesley, to allow wiretap evidence to be used in court (partly, he argued, because such evidence could sometimes assist in the defence of the accused).¹⁵ From his knowledge of European law, Trimble also urged that the Italian-style, mafia-busting investigating magistrates be brought in to deal with the IRA.¹⁶ He named a number of alleged provisional IRA godfathers.

Trimble’s interpretation of the IRA’s decision to call its first ceasefire is fairly orthodox. ‘The RUC were slowly winning the war of attrition,’ he now recalls. ‘The security forces were gradually getting on top of them and consequently for republicans in the early 1990s the picture is of a long haul where they were becoming less effective and their campaign could just peter out. So Sinn Fein’s involvement in the peace process is partly about cashing in the armed struggle for a political process whilst it still has some value; but it also has something to do with the rising tide of loyalist violence after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which was starting to hurt Sinn Fein as well.’¹⁷ Whether or not Trimble’s interpretation of the IRA’s rationale for its first ceasefire was correct, there can be no doubt that unionism as a whole was thoroughly unprepared for the new phase of struggle and the challenges posed by the ‘peace process’. It was especially hard for them to endure the adulation which was heaped on the heads of the Sinn Fein leadership as they sought to portray themselves as ‘normal’ politicians. This included visas to enter America, subsequent trips to the White House, and an end to the Republic’s and Britain’s broadcasting bans. Sharp-suited articulate republicans were all over the airwaves; whilst Unionists such as Paisley, remarked Trimble, would protest ineptly at the injustice of the process and be thrown out of the Commons chamber or No. 10. Trimble, though, was not himself immune to such expressions of rage: he stormed out of a Channel 4 studio in the following year, when he found himself unexpectedly appearing on a remote link-up with Martin McGuinness. ‘We do not share platforms or programmes with Sinn Fein/IRA,’ he thundered.¹⁸ Years later, even when he had become a much more experienced television performer, Trimble could still explode – exemplified by his anger when he felt himself provoked by the presenter Noel Thompson on BBC Northern Ireland’s Hearts and Minds programme on 27 June 2002.¹⁹

Again, Unionists asked themselves: had the British Government done a deal at their expense to secure a ceasefire? Trimble himself soon concluded that whilst there was no secret deal between the British and the IRA, there was possibly a deal between Adams, Hume and Reynolds. This would be the so-called ‘pan-nationalist front’ so feared by Unionists. At this period, the Unionists greatly feared this would carry all before it. As they saw it, the republican movement would trade violent methods for the adoption of at least some of its aims by the constitutional parties. Thus, he believed, Hume and Reynolds were more inclined to regard the IRA ceasefire as ‘permanent’ than either the UUP or the British Government, even though the IRA refused to employ the ‘p’ word and hoped that such an impression of reasonableness would force the British into making concessions. If such concessions were not forthcoming, the British would then be blamed by nationalists for ‘foot-dragging’ and for adding ‘preconditions’ to Sinn Fein’s entry into the political process – so validating the fears of IRA ‘hardliners’ that they had been tricked into abandoning armed struggle. Having represented the abandonment of violence as ‘permanent’, the thwarted IRA could then go back to Irish nationalists, and proclaim that they had acted flexibly but that British bad faith made it imperative for them to return to armed struggle. But the ‘upside’ of the British Government’s caution was that Unionists were gradually bound into the ‘process’: Trimble says that he noted in 1994 that in contrast to the ceasefire of 1972 – when the young Gerry Adams was released from internment to negotiate with William Whitelaw at Cheyne Walk within 48 hours of the guns falling silent – this time there was a much longer ‘quarantine’ period before talks could begin. Indeed, when Trimble was asked whether he agreed with John Taylor and the Rev. Martin Smyth, MP, that Sinn Fein would eventually be involved in talks, Trimble replied: ‘Personally, I would put a very big reservation against that … for myself, that’s a matter which I don’t expect to be doing.’ In other words, Trimble rejected this option on contingent rather than principled grounds. Later, at the Young Unionists’ conference at Fivemile-town, Co. Tyrone, Trimble urged the creation of an assembly in which Sinn Fein could take part – thus sidestepping the difficulties which would occur if they sought to gain access to all-party talks too quickly. Trimble was thus publicly raising the question of diluting preconditions for their entry into the political process, in exchange for a local elected body in which Unionists would, of course, enjoy a clear majority.²⁰ It appears to be the first time that he raised the topic on a public platform in Northern Ireland – though he had, in fact, already made a similar suggestion in an article in The Independent on 14 September 1994. This was a mere fortnight after the IRA had declared its first ceasefire.

But in the immediate term, the majority which exercised the minds of everyone in this period was the shrinking Tory margin in the House of Commons. Although nationalist Ireland assumed that as a consequence of this arithmetic Molyneaux exercised vast influence, the UUP did not see it that way (indeed, if anything, the reverse was the case, precisely because the Tories did not want to be seen to be bending the knee to the UUP).²¹ Trimble believes that Molyneaux was wrongly accused at the time by his own tribe of not extracting enough from Major. But from his own subsequent experience as leader, Trimble concludes there was very little that could be extracted from the Tories, since although the British Government was generally weak, it was not weak in the affairs of Northern Ireland and could always call on Labour for bi-partisan support in a crisis. Trimble’s private criticism of Molyneaux, rather, centred around his habit of meeting the Prime Minister alone. His objections were two-fold, on both mechanical and on political grounds. First, it was often difficult both to conduct a negotiation and to take notes – particularly when there were differences in recollection over what had been agreed. This would then expose him to accusations within the UUP of having been gulled by another Tory Prime Minister. Second, such an accusation was harder to maintain when senior colleagues were roped into these discussions.²²

These concerns were felt particularly keenly by the younger cadres in the UUP. They would increasingly look to Trimble as their standard-bearer in the coming months, as the contours of the two Governments’ detailed proposals for the future of the Province became apparent. These built upon the statement of principles in the DSD and were known as the Frameworks Documents – and, as in 1991–2, were based upon the three-stranded approach. Michael Ancram, assisted principally by the Political Director of the NIO, Quentin Thomas, had been working on them since early 1994 and Molyneaux had appointed Jeffrey Donaldson, Reg Empey and the party chairman, Jim Nicholson, as the UUP liaison. Once again, Trimble was on the periphery of his own party. Nonetheless, No. 10 thought it best to keep him sweet: Trimble was summoned to Major’s suite in the Highcliff Hotel, Bournemouth, in October 1994 for a conversation with the Prime Minister. Major asked him what would he do in his position – a stock ploy which often flattered his interlocutor.²³ Trimble was taken aback – he was rather less experienced then in dealing with senior government figures – and informed Major that he would proceed in the same way but that he would test the Provisionals’ sincerity against events. Major, in turn, concurred. Major then added, ‘You know, I’m a Unionist.’ Trimble then replied: ‘I know that, I don’t think you’re going to sell us out in the sense of taking us into an Irish Republic. My concern is that you would see an opportunity for settling the problem and that would involve what would appear to you a minor concession but would to us be a vital interest.’²⁴

The episode was curious for several reasons. Did Major already view Trimble, the youngest and most junior of the UUP MPs, as a potential leader – or perhaps as potential spoiler of the Government’s plans? Trimble himself is not sure. But Major says that he spotted Trimble as ‘able and ambitious. I thought it would be useful to get to know him. He was likely to be the voice of the grassroots.’²⁵ This view was widely held in Whitehall by the officials, too, and they may well have drawn it to Major’s attention. Thus, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee and later became Political Director of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, states that Trimble was already seen as a potential counterweight to Paisley – and a clever one, at that.²⁶ If so, it was a rare instance during the post-ceasefire period when ministers actively cultivated and sought the views of Unionist MPs. For though they handled the UUP with great skill in the run-up to the DSD, Major’s whips’ office touch deserted him and his colleagues during the run-up to the Frameworks. Partly, this was because after the DSD and the first IRA ceasefire, their attention was mostly focused upon the political and ‘military’ intentions of the republican movement. Indeed, many Unionists believe to this day that the Irish Government showed a very ‘Green’ draft of the Frameworks Documents to Sinn Fein/IRA before its publication in order to secure an IRA ceasefire and to bind them into the process – though Irish officials still deny that this was the case. Whatever the truth of the matter, Trimble himself believes that in the attempt to draw republicans into conventional politics, they tacked so far in a nationalist direction that they forfeited the UUP’s acquiescence, for a short while at least. Thus, at the time of the IRA ceasefire Molyneaux – seeing that his three appointed representatives were no better informed of the two Governments’ plans – again offered to run an ‘Ulster eye’ over the Frameworks, as he had with the DSD. Mayhew wrote to Molyneaux to say that this would be very helpful but that the document was still very much at the drafting stage and that it would not quite be the done thing for the UUP leader to talk to civil servants.

In the eyes of the civil servants, there were sound, time-honoured reasons of Whitehall practice about this: the Frameworks were, they insist, a quite different kind of document from the DSD. First, Frameworks was a negotiating document, not a definitive statement of principle. It was a starting point, and therefore to prenegotiate it with any one party, especially one which almost held a balance of power in the Commons, would expose the British to accusations of adopting an uneven approach. Such pious formalism contrasted with rumours emanating from Dublin. Most worrying from a Unionist perspective were the claims made by the former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds (whose Fianna Fail-led Government had fallen in November 1994 following a scandal and had been replaced by a coalition led by the more instinctively anti-republican Fine Gael leader, John Bruton) that all-Ireland bodies with executive powers had been agreed between the British and Irish Governments. This, of course, would have been a reprise of the Council of Ireland which had proven so offensive to Unionists during the abortive Sunningdale experiment of 1973–4 – or worse. Trimble was also receiving his own warnings from his old Vanguard colleague on the UUP liaison committee with the NIO, Reg Empey. These indicated, he believed, that NIO civil servants had ‘run amok’.²⁷ Molyneaux tried to engage Major in a ‘control’ exercise, but by the time Major was prepared to show him a draft it was too late. Indeed, Molyneaux remembers that when Major invited him into the Cabinet room to look at the draft version, the Prime Minister said he would leave him sitting at the Cabinet table whilst he went upstairs – and the UUP leader should ring the bell when he was finished. Major pushed the explosive paper across to the septuagenarian Ulsterman; the Ulsterman promptly shoved it back in the direction from whence it came. Molyneaux pointed out that he could not influence its basic direction and that by looking at it on Privy Council terms he would thus become acquiescent in its provisions.²⁸

Such concerns soon ceased to be the preserve of the Unionist political classes and became dramatically clear to the Unionist population and to the world at large. In January 1995, David Burnside was shown a draft copy of the Frameworks Documents. Before he placed it in the press, Burnside went to see Molyneaux. ‘I have seen them and it is terrible and disastrous.’ ‘What do I do?’ asked Molyneaux, taken aback. ‘Go and see Robert Cranborne,’ said Burnside, referring to the most ardent Unionist in the Cabinet. ‘I don’t want to compromise his position in the Cabinet.’ Burnside flared up: ‘For Christ’s sake, this is the Unionist cause we’re talking about here.’ Burnside also told Trimble of its contents, though the latter never saw the document and thus was unable to evaluate any later changes that were made when the final paper was actually published.²⁹ The extracts were then shown to a Times leader writer, Matthew d’Ancona, a prominent Trimble fan in the London print media. It turned out to be one of the greatest journalistic coups of recent years. No. 10 and the NIO were enraged: the ‘spin’ was that d’Ancona had endangered the ‘peace process’, although ultimately it had the opposite effect. The Times front page pronounced that the Frameworks brought ‘the prospect of a united Ireland closer than it had been at any time since partition in 1920…today’s disclosures will alarm many Unionists who were promised by Mr Major last week that the draft would contain “no proposals” for joint authority’.³⁰ It posited extensive all-Ireland bodies with executive powers. Although it was pointed out that some of the proposals in this draft had already been excised in the intergovernmental negotiations, the damage was nonetheless done. Major’s pep talk to the Conservative backbenches and to the nation rallied the party and mainland opinion; but in Unionist circles, Trimble recalls, Molyneaux was once again seen to have been overly trusting of a British Prime Minister.³¹ No. 10 felt that the leaks were less about the substance of the proposals than about the internal power struggle within the UUP. Realising that his flank had been exposed and that he had been unable to pull off the same success as over the Downing Street Declaration, Molyneaux asked Major to see three members of his own party in the Prime Minister’s room in the Commons behind the Speaker’s chair. The three included Trimble – potentially his most dangerous internal party critic – and two close allies, William Ross and Rev. Martin Smyth. Trimble took the lead, employing his lawyerly skills to assault the leaked paper. Nothing that Major said in any way reassured the Ulstermen.³² Trimble had already appeared to distance himself from the Tories: the Government noted that along with John Taylor, he abstained in the tight Commons vote on fisheries policy on 18 January 1995. With the exception of Ken Maginnis, the other UUP MPs voted for the then Government.³³

Major had to persist, even though he knew that the Frameworks Documents were still-born: to have abandoned them, he felt, would definitively have proven to nationalist Ireland that the British Government was in hock to the Unionists. Instead, he opted to shave down the most controversial parts – much to the irritation of the Irish – in the hope that elements of the Frameworks would prove to be a basis for negotiation at a later date. When the Documents were published in Belfast on 22 February 1995, Unionists were not mollified. Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Fein seemed happy enough, telling a conference at the University of North London that ‘John Major, by the very act of publishing the Frameworks Documents in the teeth of opposition from right-wing Conservatives and the Unionist leaderships has demonstrated that his government is not totally hostage to the mathematics of Westminster’.³⁴ The Strand I proposals posited a 90-member assembly, elected by PR, serving four- or five-year terms, with all-party committees overseeing the work of the Northern Ireland departments; their activity would be scrutinised by a three-man elected panel (Hume had envisaged a six-man panel, with EU and British and Irish Government representatives: this was his way of circumventing Northern Ireland’s in-built Unionist majority, but it was negotiated away by the British, not least because they feared that it would inflame neuralgic Eurosceptic sensibilities on the backbenches and in the Cabinet: ministers were mindful of the problems that might arise if the causes of Euroscepticism and Unionism became bound up with each other). Strand II, on the North-South dimension, reiterated many of the principles of the December 1993 Joint Declaration and stated that such bodies were to exercise ‘on a democratically accountable basis delegated executive, harmonising and consultative functions’. The designated topics for harmonisation would include agriculture and fisheries; industrial development; consumer affairs; transport, energy, trade, health, social welfare, education and economic policy. The remit of the body should be dynamic, enabling progressive extension by agreement of its functions to new areas. Its role should be developed to keep pace with the growth of harmonisation and with greater integration between the two economies. Furthermore, the Irish Government pledged to make changes to its Constitution which would fully reflect the principle of consent and which would show that no territorial claim of right contrary to the will of Northern Ireland’s majority be asserted.³⁵

Major claimed that this renunciation was ‘crucial’ and that any such North-South bodies would not be free-standing but would rather be democratically accountable to the assembly. Nor, he said, was there a predetermined list of such functions as they would exercise: indeed, the definition of harmonisation in education, as revealed under paragraph 33, included such prosaic notions as mutual recognition of teacher qualifications. The NIO held this to be evidence that they had, once again, delivered an ‘Orange document in Green-speak’. Despite these glosses, and despite Major’s reiteration of the ‘triple lock’ – the formulation whereby any deal had to have the endorsement of the Westminster Parliament, and the people and the parties of Northern Ireland – the Unionists were not reassured. Nor were many on the Tory backbenches. If devolution, proportional representation and a Bill of Rights were so unsuitable for Great Britain, why were they suddenly so beneficial for Northern Ireland? In and of themselves, these were not great issues for David Trimble, though. Certainly, Ulster’s anomalous treatment vexed as much as it always had done, but Trimble was no purist defender of English constitutional norms as he saw them and he believed in a continent of empowered regions. Rather, Trimble’s worries focused on paragraphs 46 and 47: as Unionists interpreted them, these held that if the assembly ever collapsed, the default mechanism would allow the two Governments to continue to operate North-South bodies without any local input. Those bodies would be free-standing and not be set up by the assembly. They could, therefore, easily become the vehicle for creeping, even rolling unification. That this would be the case was proven by the fact that their functions were invested with a character that was described as ‘dynamic’, ‘executive’ and ‘harmonising’. The ‘d’, ‘e’ and ‘h’ words assumed a great importance to Trimble, as did the authority under which they operated: during the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement of 1998, Trimble devoted great amounts of his energy and political capital to excising these atrributes and to making sure that the Strand II institutions were explicitly accountable to the assembly. Even as they stood, the listed of areas of cooperation – such as health – were amongst the most sensitive for many unionists. After all, Catholic values still held sway on the medical ethics committees of hospitals in the Republic. How would greater integration with such a system affect the freedoms of Ulsterwomen within the NHS? Moreover, any hint that priests might have a hand in the upbringing of Protestant children was potentially explosive. Trimble further warned that British-Irish ideas for harmonising key welfare policies would threaten the right of the Province’s taxpayers to equality of treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom, for which Sir James Craig had fought so hard. Would Northern Ireland be harmonised down to the Irish level or would the Republic be harmonised up to the British level? Nor was Trimble satisfied with the apparent withdrawal of the Irish constitutional claim over Northern Ireland. Whilst the Irish undertook in Frameworks to withdraw the claim to jurisdiction, they did not satisfactorily expunge the claim to territory and thus denied Northern Ireland explicit legitimacy in southern eyes.

But the failure to keep the Ulster Unionists on board was much wider than just Major’s inability to tie the Irish down more precisely. Some senior figures in the Government felt that the failure to repeat the delicate balancing exercise of the DSD could be ascribed to the fact that whereas the DSD was mainly formulated out of No. 10, the Frameworks was mainly drafted in the NIO; and that officials such as Quentin Thomas had become too close to their Irish opposite numbers such as Sean O hUiginn and that they failed to see the political wood for the bureaucratic trees. Certainly, Molyneaux believed this and told Major that ‘they’ve double crossed us again’ – a variant of his old line that ‘the rats have been at work’.³⁶ Was this really the case, though? It was always easy to blame civil servants, especially under the circumstances of direct rule in Northern Ireland. There, they wielded exceptional powers under ministers who were not MPs in Ulster and thus were not democratically accountable in the normal way. Moreover, much of their information on the correlation of political and military forces inevitably derived from secret organs of state. Certainly, Michael Ancram believes that Thomas had an instinct to undo Lloyd George’s historic error in agreeing to partition Ireland and that he frequently restrained Thomas from going too far.³⁷ Not so, says Thomas. He claims that he was, in fact, trying to stabilise the status quo but that he also believed that British rule in Ulster was inevitably subject to a higher set of legitimacy tests than was the case for the Irish (as exemplified by the vastly greater protests whenever the RUC would shoot terrorists than when the same act was perpetrated by the Gardai). He says, rather, that he always believed that Northern Ireland’s general position should be determined by the consent principle.³⁸ Other colleagues, such as Peter Bell, say that Thomas’ key conception was that Sinn Fein were lobsters and that the task of British statecraft was to tempt them into lobsterpots.³⁹ At the time, Trimble also believed that attitudes such as those attributed to Thomas did much to explain why the Irish had won ‘hands down’ over the Frameworks. But there was also a bit of useful play-acting in all of this: officials such as Thomas were convenient bogeymen for Unionists, since it was much easier to lay the blame on treacherous advisers rather than the ruler himself. Appealing over the NIO’s head to No. 10 thus became a stock Unionist ploy, and one which would be played even by Trimble – who himself had little faith in the leaders of the modern Conservative party. Sometimes, it even worked, for successive occupants of No. 10 liked to flatter themselves that they could work their magic in ways that mere departmental ministers could not. At other times, the dance might even have been pre-choreographed between No. 10 and the NIO as part of a ‘hard cop, soft cop’ routine: it was sometimes useful to give Unionists the illusion that they were making progress, thus binding them ever more thoroughly into the process.

The effects on Molyneaux of the Frameworks debacle were immediate. Ken Maginnis, for one, told John Bruton that he thought that William Ross, a robust opponent of power-sharing, would be the beneficiary and succeed Molyneaux.⁴⁰ On 18 March 1995, at the AGM of the UUC, a 21-year-old student named Lee Reynolds ran as a ‘stalking horse’ candidate against him. Reynolds declared that ‘the leadership record since 1984 is one of successive defeats and an ongoing weakening of the Union’. His seconder was one of Trimble’s closest associates and a Unionist intellectual, Gordon Lucy. Many supposed that Trimble was behind the challenge. Not so, says Trimble – a point confirmed both by Lucy and John Hunter, another close associate at the time. If anything, Trimble was worried that people would think just that and accuse him of disloyalty. Normally, the post went uncontested, but Reynolds received 88 votes to Molyneaux’s 521 or 14 per cent of the total.

Worse was to come for Molyneaux. Two days later, the independent Unionist MP for North Down, Sir James Kilfedder, suddenly died of a heart attack. The UUP chose Alan McFarland, a former regular Army officer, as its candidate in the by-election in this most middle-class of seats (many NIO civil servants also lived there, helping to make it in some ways the most recognisably ‘English’ division in Ulster). It was not, though, promising DUP territory. Who, then, would carry the torch for Carsonian Unionism and the concepts of equal citizenship? A more than suitable candidate emerged in the shape of Robert McCartney, a QC originally from the Shankill Road who had become one of the Province’s top-paid silks and lived in a spacious house at Cultra near Belfast Lough. Not only had he carved out a reputation as the most trenchant critic of the ‘peace process’; he was also a non-Conservative who refused to join the Loyal Orders. He thus appealed both to the prosperous middle classes and to ordinary voters (although that summer, substantial portions of the bourgeoisie were also in a militant mood, as exemplified by their hostility to the attempt by Queen’s University to stop playing God Save the Queen at graduation ceremonies and to replace it with the EU hymn, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy).41 McCartney – running under the ‘United Kingdom Unionist’ label but without a formal party organisation – beat the UUP candidate by 10,124 votes (37.0%) to 7232 votes (26.4%) on a 38.6% per cent turnout.⁴² Even though his native Bangor was in the seat, Trimble did not canvass for the UUP candidate: he says that he was not asked to do so.⁴³ After 17 years in the UUP, he was still not a conventional party man.