Читать книгу Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism - Dean Godson - Страница 21

AT 7:02 p.m. on Friday, 9 February, the British and Irish official elites were assembling for pre-prandial drinks at the Foreign Office conference facility at Wilton Park. At that precise moment, a massive bomb detonated at South Quay in London’s Docklands, ending the IRA ceasefire. Within minutes, the news had been relayed to Ted Barrington, the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. Barrington told his fellow guest, Quentin Thomas, what had occurred. The Political Director of the NIO was stunned. So, too, was Martin Mansergh, special adviser to successive leaders of Fianna Fail. The next day, he paced around the gardens, alone, seemingly in a state of shock. The attempt to draw this generation of republicans into constitutional politics – one of his life’s main goals – appeared for the time being to be in ruins. According to Thomas, the two men had spoken a few minutes earlier, when Mansergh had expressed optimism about the future.¹ Meanwhile, John Major was in his Huntingdon constituency when the news came to the No. 10 switchboard at 6 p.m. that RTE had received a call from the IRA stating that the ceasefire was over: the codeword was genuine.² The White House rang shortly thereafter to say that Adams had called with the same information. According to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the Sinn Fein President was ‘elliptical and sounded concerned. But we didn’t know what he meant. And I still don’t know whether he knew what was going to happen.’³ At Stormont House in Belfast, Sir John Wheeler, the Security Minister at the NIO, was making his way through paperwork: it was his turn to be the duty minister. His Private Secretary immediately came on the line with the news. Wheeler stayed up till 1 a.m., reintroducing many of the security measures withdrawn after the ceasefire began.⁴

But despite the shock of the South Quay bomb, the British state did not alter course: there was no fundamental reappraisal of the nature of republicanism. Wheeler says that at no stage did the Government even contemplate the notion that there should be anything other than an inclusive settlement so long as the IRA was on some kind of ceasefire; or, as Cranborne puts it, ‘it was treated almost as though it was a cri de coeur from a delinquent teenager rather than a full-scale assault on British democracy’.⁵ Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary of 21 February 1996 that even as Mayhew expected another IRA ‘spectacular’ on the mainland, the Government still were looking for signals that some kind of process was possible. Indeed, one senior NIO official was shocked within weeks of the blast to find the Government negotiating again with Sinn Fein: he concluded from this episode that if even a Conservative ministry with a narrow majority could do such a thing, then a serious question mark had been placed against the viability of the Union. The official was therefore prepared to toy with the idea that negotiating a federal Ireland was a possible means of ‘getting the Provisionals off the Prods’ backs’ and to minimise their leverage over the system.⁶

John Steele, the then Director of Security in the NIO, states that as he saw it, ‘the IRA were cracking the whip. They were demonstrating that bad things could happen. But the break in the ceasefire was a carefully calculated signal, not a wild lashing-out.’ Steele recalls that even Wheeler – the minister most sceptical of the IRA – only wanted to respond with enhanced intelligence gathering. The Security Minister suggested neither the reintroduction of internment, nor did he advocate letting the SAS use lethal force.⁷ Nor were the prisoners released during the first ceasefire recalled, and the border was not sealed. Mary Holland correctly observed the ‘surprisingly mild’ response to that atrocity. ‘We heard almost nothing from the British side about the spirit of the bulldog breed,’ she noted in her Irish Times column of 29 February.

The British were convinced that such measures would prove counterproductive at home and abroad. At home, they concluded, it could be a recruiting sergeant for the IRA. Abroad, principally in America, old-style counter-insurgency was deemed diplomatically too costly – even if set in the context of an overall ‘carrot and stick’ approach to the republican movement. Thus, Cranborne also had no purist scruples about offering the republicans the ‘carrot’ of political development – provided they were prepared to abandon armed struggle entirely. But he also believed that the political forms of the ‘stick’ were not being employed properly either. He therefore sent Major ‘an intemperate memo’ suggesting that the Government was totally inactive in trying to defeat the IRA. Cranborne wanted ‘to put our money where our mouth is and appoint a counter-terrorist supremo in the Cabinet in charge of winning it on all levels’. This supremo would be responsible to the Prime Minister, special Cabinet committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee of the Commons. Cranborne knew that the ‘mandarinate’ would oppose his plans, on the grounds that they would cut across existing lines of departmental reponsibility and chains of command in the security forces and the police (although the creation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service had shown that there was scope for innovation). Major was deeply uncomfortable with the idea and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, shot it down completely. Butler and Major met with Cranborne and instead offered improved intelligence coordination but no radical overhaul.⁸

Curiously, for all his rhetoric, David Trimble did not really push a return to an old-style security crackdown; nor, even then, did he think that the republican movement would necessarily be beyond the pale in the future. Mayhew notes that Trimble did not ask the Government to scrap the ‘peace process’ as a concept now clearly based upon false premises. ‘I think he always had it in his mind to do something more than spend the whole of his political career leading a minority party in the Commons,’ says the former Secretary of State.⁹ Fergus Finlay also states that Trimble never asked the Irish Government to endorse the concept of a deal without Sinn Fein: without them, Finlay believes, the UUP leader could never realise his ambition to be Prime Minister of a stable Northern Ireland.¹⁰ Again, this was partly because Trimble felt that the British state from the outset was not going to place republicans beyond the pale, and would work tirelessly to restore the broken ceasefire. Indeed, Major told Trimble that the decision to return to armed struggle was taken by a curiously informal grouping of 20 senior republicans and not through the more ‘formal’ mechanisms of the IRA Army Council; the actual operation was run by a very tight group based in the Republic, not involving Northern Irish ‘assets’, though some of the participants were northerners. Trimble drew the inference that the South Quay bomb may not have been the settled view of the whole organisation. Indeed, he says that there are many unanswered questions about the role of Adams and McGuinness in that bombing.¹¹ On 1 March 1996, Trimble told the Irish News that if there were to be an IRA ceasefire which means ‘a change of heart’ he would not want to create ‘unnecessary obstacles about Sinn Fein’s involvement in all-party talks’. All he asked for was adherence to the terms of the Mitchell Report. ‘Mitchell does talk about parallel decommissioning, not prior decommissioning. If we had reasonable commitments we would be able to move in that direction.’¹²

In his first lengthy disquisition on the end of the ceasefire, published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday February 12, Trimble stated that the purpose of the bombing was to stop elections to his proposed body from taking place. This later turned out to be unlikely, for the simple reason that the IRA’s decision to return to ‘war’ was taken well before the Forum idea was accepted by the British Government. But whatever the real reasons for their actions, it was certainly inept of Trimble to identify this as a cause of the bomb: it implicitly validated the nationalist notion that Major’s actions in ‘binning’ Mitchell and alighting upon the glancing reference in the International Body’s Report to the elective route had in some way precipitated South Quay. But did the IRA resumption of violence work from their perspective? Many in nationalist Ireland, and not a few Unionists, certainly believed as much, pointing to the announcement of all-party talks made on 28 February 1996 at Downing Street by Major and Bruton.¹³ Bruton disagrees with this notion, observing that the decision to set a date for such negotiations had been taken in principle when the British Government accepted Mitchell as Commission chairman in November 1994. Bruton also notes that the log-jam on prior decommissioning had already been broken by the elective route of the Forum: he feels that Trimble received insufficient credit for this idea.¹⁴ But the manner and timing of the announcement of a date for all-party talks made it appear as though the Provisionals had ‘put manners’ on the two Governments.

Trimble decided straight after the South Quay bomb to head to the United States to brief Clinton on what had happened, taking the advice of John Holmes, the Prime Minister’s new Private Secretary before he did so. When Ken Maginnis and Donaldson arrived at the White House on Monday 12 February at 2 p.m. they found a President who seemed ill at ease. Trimble said he was surprised at the timing of the bomb. ‘Yeah, it was stupid, damned stupid,’ lamented the Commander-in-Chief, referring to the fact that the blast took place at the very moment that there was a chance of all-party talks. But Trimble says he never asked Clinton to place the Provisionals beyond the pale at this moment: ‘They [the US Administration] know best what leverage they have,’ Trimble explains. ‘There is no point in telling them what to do.’¹⁵ He shares the conventional British wisdom that this blast came as a tremendous shock to Clinton, thus prompting a reappraisal of White House attitudes towards Northern Ireland. In fact, Trimble’s recollection is not quite correct: he asked that Adams’ visa to the USA be rescinded and that there be a ban on fundraising by Sinn Fein, but both these options were rejected by the US Administration. Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, rejected this reasoning, stating that ‘Mr Adams is an important leader in this process because he speaks for Sinn Fein. It is hard to imagine a process making progress towards peace without the active involvement of Sinn Fein.’ Partly, the White House’s unwillingness to place Adams beyond the pale can be ascribed to the fact that the British Government did not want to do so, either: they favoured Adams’ admission to the USA and for the doors then partially to close on him as a sign of displeasure as exemplified by the Sinn Fein president’s exclusion from the annual St Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Trimble did, however, attend a dinner of the American-Ireland Fund on St Patrick’s Day at which Gerry Adams was present – another small breach in the wall of taboos surrounding the republicans (Trimble had initially not wanted to attend, but feared the consequences of ‘exclusion’ if he did not turn up).¹⁶

Once the immediate shock of the South Quay bomb had passed, the attention of the political classes on both sides of the Irish Sea moved to the form of election to the new assembly and to the format of the talks. Trimble and the UUP did relatively badly in this. Indeed, Andrew Hunter noted in his diary of 21 February 1996 that ‘Secretary of State [Mayhew] worried about the case for elections to a Peace Convention. Believes it is difficult to find solid, objective justification. Michael Ancram and I argued that elections justified on pragmatic grounds; no other way to get Unionists into all-party negotiations … Not much optimism in our discussion. Implicit agreement that PM overegged elections in his Mitchell response.’ Yet Trimble was himself partly responsible for affording the British Government the space which it needed to make the elective process ‘work’ vis-à-vis nationalist Ireland. As early as 24 December 1995, he had suggested in a Sunday Tribune interview that the assembly ‘could take evidence from the Republic, from the Irish Government and other interested bodies’ about possible North-South cooperation. The new body would not be a recreation of Stormont, he noted, but rather would be time-limited to two years (though it was a point which he never had much success in conveying). Trimble’s proposal was very considerably short of joint management of the talks but Irish offficials approvingly noted the UUP leader’s flexibility. Later, Trimble indicated that if the questions were framed in the right way and if it was clear that it was not an island-wide referendum, he might under certain circumstances back John Hume’s idea of a plebiscite in both jurisdictions simultaneous with an assembly election (concerning the right of the Irish people, north and south, to self-determination and their right also to determine the method whereby that might be achieved). There was, of course, another imperative behind his need to obtain an elective process: Trimble says that if he won an election, he would greatly increase his authority within the UUP.¹⁷

Trimble’s position within the UUP helps to explain his concerns about nationalist successes in diluting the Assembly idea: he was worried at least as much by the appearance as the substance. In a memorandum to Major, dated 22 February, entitled ‘UU outline talks scheme’, Trimble stated that there was some limited flexibility on when the Provisionals could begin decommissioning – effectively a green light to the British Government considering the other pressures on them. But on the presentation, there was no such hint of flexibility: ‘The announcement of the elections for the Peace Convention and the associated talks should avoid the usual Anglo/Irish style, i.e. it should avoid the language typical of Stormont Castle/Iveagh House joint productions,’ stated Trimble. ‘There should be no references to the two Governments jointly sponsoring or jointly managing the Peace Convention or the talks.’ In the end, the Ground Rules for Substantive All-Party Negotiations paper produced by the British Government in March 1996 gave precisely that impression: to the intense annoyance of Trimble, it was sent out while the Unionist leader was in America and suggested that the Irish Government be the joint coordinator of the negotiations.¹⁸

The crucial next step of setting a date for all-party talks was complicated – and dramatically so – by the Government’s parlous position in the Commons. Lord Justice Scott’s report on the Arms for Iraq affair was scheduled for debate on 26 February 1996. If the Government was defeated in the House, it would trigger a vote of no confidence. Not all Conservative MPs were solidly behind the Government and attention again focused on the Unionists’ intentions. From the Conservative Government’s viewpoint, the initial signs were not hopeful. In an interview with Roy Hattersley, Trimble had told the former Labour deputy leader that he was appalled by the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates (the gagging orders produced by the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, which were said to have prevented ministers from revealing information on national security grounds that would have shown that the defendants in the Matrix Churchill case had acted with the state’s approval).¹⁹ He was thus less worried by the Government’s Iraq policy than by the fact that innocent men might have gone to jail for raison d’état. No less important, the former law lecturer believed that Lyell gave poor legal advice – and had stated as much as early as the original debate on the Arms for Iraq affair in November 1992.²⁰

But Trimble could not now afford the indulgence of thinking like some independent-minded backbencher. The UUP’s stance would have also to be based upon the Realpolitik of Unionist interests. It was a close call. On the one hand, Trimble was dubious about how much he could extract from a weak Government. ‘Major can’t deliver much on his own,’ he told Hattersley. ‘[I would prefer] a strong Government with the confidence to take difficult decisions.’ Hattersley stated that Trimble did not believe that such a Government existed then. ‘Ireland [sic] cannot go right for Major in any big way before the election,’ predicted the UUP leader. ‘It can only go wrong. That means that we are likely to have another year of stalemate.’²¹ On the other hand, although Trimble may then have felt that the prospect of New Labour was more congenial, there was still much short-term business to be transacted with the Conservatives (whom Labour would broadly back as part of the bi-partisan approach towards Northern Ireland). The most immediate item on the agenda was the method of election to the new body proposed by Trimble: he feared that the Government was at this stage leaning to a variant of the DUP’s preferred system (which, for a variety of complex reasons, also benefited the SDLP and thus mitigated nationalist hostility). The Paisleyites wanted a Province-wide poll based on a party list system, as in the European Parliamentary elections, which was well suited to maximising the large personal vote of their chief who would then barn-storm the Province. The Ulster Unionists, by contrast, wanted a single transferable vote in the constituencies, which would maximise their greater strength in depth further down the ticket. If a Paisley-friendly system emerged, it could conceivably destroy Trimble and inflict a serious blow to his conception of New Unionism. His fears of a deal were confirmed when one colleague heard from Paisley himself that the three DUP MPs would not enter either lobby for the Scott vote; indeed, Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, recalls that the Government communicated via NIO civil servants that an electoral system more in line with DUP needs would be introduced – though, as he points out, the linkage was hinted at rather than being ‘crudely made’.²² Trimble believes that the NIO has quietly favoured the DUP over the years as a means of weakening the solidarity of the Unionist bloc and specifically of its largest component, the UUP. But perhaps of greatest significance to the Government was the fact that the DUP might potentially participate in such a representative institution with Sinn Fein at some point in the future – assuming there was a ceasefire and that republicans would then take up their seats in such a body. Quentin Thomas had been impressed from the early to mid-1990s by the point made to him by senior DUP politicians that they could not voluntarily agree to share power with nationalists; but, they added, if such an outcome was forced upon them and sanctioned by a particular kind of electoral process (as on District Councils, where committee chairmanships were shared out proportionately according to party strengths) then the DUP would not decline to fulfil their democratic mandate and take up their allocated slots.²³

But Trimble still had to treat with the Tories, and examine what, if anything, they had to offer. If they offered something very tempting (approximating to the UUP’s preferred system of election) Trimble could not possibly say no. But if the Government made no such offer, Trimble might as well stick to his principles and obtain a bit of credit with an increasingly powerful Opposition. What happened next remains a matter of dispute between the Tories and the Ulster Unionists. To this day, Conservatives assert that Trimble appproached the Government to make a deal; Trimble says that on each occasion, he was approached by the Government. Trimble met twice with Major on the night of the vote, in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s chair. On the first occasion, between 6 and 7 p.m., Major urged Trimble to support the Government. Trimble explained to Major that he was in some difficulty because he had reason to believe that the Prime Minister had done a deal with the DUP: irrespective of the merits of the Scott case, he would look ‘bloody stupid’ if he supported the Government that week and then a week or so later an election system emerged that ruined his party’s chances. ‘I’m not in the business of damaging the UUP,’ replied Major.²⁴ But Trimble noted that the Prime Minister did not contradict his assertion that there was some understanding with the DUP. Major added that he could not say what kind of electoral system he would deliver since he had not told anyone else and could not have it said that he had preferred one party over all others. On the second occasion that night, Trimble says he was approached in the tea room by the Conservative Party chairman, Brian Mawhinney. ‘The boss wants to see you,’ Trimble recalls Mawhinney saying.²⁵ Mawhinney, by contrast, says that he asked Trimble in the course of a more general conversation if he wanted to see the Prime Minister. In other words, states Mawhinney, he gave Trimble the option of speaking to Major and the UUP leader chose to make the effort to avail himself of it.²⁶ When Trimble arrived, Major was in the room with Michael Heseltine; the chief whip, Alistair Goodlad; and Mawhinney. Trimble expected Major to say something, but he did nothing of the kind. Instead, the two just sat there and looked at each other. One witness to the scene recalls Major stating that ‘I will not do a deal with you’ and Trimble replying that ‘I will not ask you to do a deal’: it was as if both men were waiting for the other to make the first move.²⁷

Trimble says he did not believe the Government’s assertion that there could be no deal. He thinks they were, indeed, in the market for trading policy concessions in exchange for UUP support. Rather, it was simply not their first choice to rely on the UUP, especially after the furore in nationalist Ireland over the British response to the Mitchell report. They needed to show that they could not be bought specifically by the UUP. A DUP abstention was, by contrast, somehow a less explicit assertion of the Unionist family’s ‘hold’ over the Government than a UUP vote for the Government. The support of the DUP was arithmetically less valuable and ideologically less predictable than a link-up with the UUP (and they were less close to the Tory backbenches than the UUP). Thus, in a peculiar way, the DUP was in these circumstances less threatening to nationalists. Specifically, a deal with the DUP afforded certain advantages to the SDLP: if enough votes haemorrhaged from the UUP to the DUP, the SDLP might receive the huge boost of becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland. The DUP and SDLP also had strong personalities at the top of the ticket, namely Paisley and Hume. But ministers still entertained doubts over the reliability and deliverability of the DUP. Because the Government was not sure until the last minute what the DUP might leak, it kept its options open. The likeliest explanation of what happened is that once it thought it had the DUP in the bag, Major et al. sought to make a virtue out of not doing a deal with the UUP.

Trimble next remembers coming out into the division lobby after the vote – in which the Government scraped by with 320 votes to 319 – to be met by a torrent of abuse from the Tories.²⁸ This, he suspected, emanated from Mayhew who had alleged that the UUP leader sought to blackmail the Government. Mayhew never felt comfortable with political horse-trading (he himself admits that Michael Ancram was much more comfortable doing such deals) and his distaste for the political arts emerged that night. According to Mayhew, he was crossing the lobby when he was met by the BBC’s Jon Sopel. ‘What do you think of the result?’ asked Sopel. Mayhew replied: ‘Delighted, and the more so because the Unionists tried to do a deal and the Prime Minister sent them away and we’ve still won.’ Mayhew says he thought the conversation was on lobby terms but claims that within minutes his remarks were broadcast to the nation; Sopel denies that Mayhew’s name was used, since as an experienced lobby journalist, he would have known better. Whatever the precise sequence of events, Trimble was enraged and shortly thereafter went up to Mayhew, scarlet with anger. ‘It was a hostile act,’ fumed the UUP leader. ‘It was a hostile act to try and bring us down,’ retorted Mayhew.²⁹ Major was even angrier over the events of that evening. Andrew Hunter recorded in his diary that he twice met the Prime Minister in the division lobby: according to the backbencher, he felt ‘betrayed; furious; he had done so much for them; UUP had tried to make a deal; he would never play party games over peace. What deal [was offered]? About elections.’ Later, Hunter met Ancram in the smoking room, where he was nursing a large whisky. According to Ancram, Trimble had offered a constituency-based electoral system, elections before proximity talks and no guarantee that such elections would lead into proximity talks. On the next day, Mayhew contacted Hunter whilst the latter was at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, on one of innumerable semi-official missions both to Ulster and the Republic which he undertook during these years. According to Hunter’s account, Mayhew told him that the UUP had offered one year’s support in exchange for their tariff of demands, and had given the British Government one and a half hours in which to think about it. Indeed, when Hunter met Trimble in the lobby, he remembers telling Trimble that he had blown it. Trimble did not need to make the offer which he did, asserted Hunter, not least because Hunter believed that in conjunction with other backbench supporters he could guarantee Unionist interests. In so doing, the Tory said, Trimble had demeaned himself. Moroever, he had soured relationships with backbenchers who might lose their seats in any elections precipitated by the UUP voting with the Opposition. It was a further illustration of the point that for all of the complaints of nationalist Ireland, Trimble’s hold over the Government was in practice severely circumscribed (or at least was much more complex than that simplistic analysis suggested).

But the mess illustrates another point: what was Trimble playing at all through the 1995–7 period? What was his strategy vis-à-vis the mainland parties, and from whom did he really think he could obtain the best deal for Unionism? The evidence is contradictory. According to Paddy Ashdown’s diary for 27 February 1996, Trimble said that he would have abstained in a no-confidence vote that might have followed any Government defeat on Scott and added ‘“we hate this crew and the sooner they go, the better”’. Ashdown then commented: ‘The old line. I wonder if he means it?’³⁰ But Woodrow Wyatt’s diary for 27 November 1996 records a Spectator party at the Savoy, at which Trimble told him that ‘it was very much to Major’s credit that he’d managed to get some kind of peace going for so long. “I make a face every now and again for the hell of it, but yes, we’ll back him [Major]. He’ll be quite safe until he wants to call an election.”’³¹ Trimble says that the situation altered sharply in the months between these two conversations: Labour knew by November 1996 that it was on for a big victory and therefore had no need of Trimble to bring down the Conservative Government quickly, lest the situation change to the Tories’ advantage.³² The implication is that he might as well have continued to enjoy a few months more of limited leverage. These contrasting remarks to Ashdown and Wyatt illustrate two other points: the obvious desire that both men report back to Blair and Major, respectively, things that each party leader would want to hear. Indeed, as Paddy Ashdown noted in a conversation with Blair on Remembrance Sunday 1995: ‘I told [Blair] that I had had a brief chat with Trimble at the Cenotaph earlier in the day, when Trimble had made it clear that he couldn’t support the Government. Blair said “but can we trust him?” I said I thought we could, though it was the nature of Irish [sic] politicians to face both ways at once, as it was necessary for their survival.’³³ These contrasting bits of evidence do, however, also show that Trimble had no detailed, preordained game plan and may well have been making it up as he went along.

Indeed, all sides played at horse-trading of this kind during the latter part of the Conservative Government’s life. John Bruton sought to reduce Major’s dependence on the UUP by volunteering to ask John Hume to vote for the Government in the debate (Bruton felt that there were echoes here of the possibilities opened up by Parnell’s flirtation with the Tories in 1885 – a strategy predicated upon the notion of not putting all of the Irish party’s eggs into the Liberal basket. Parnell in the end returned to the Liberal fold when the Grand Old Man outbid the Tories by converting to Home Rule in the following year).³⁴ The leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, attacked Bruton and asserted that it was not the role of the Taoiseach ‘to be helping the British Government as an assistant whip hours before the vote’; but Bruton’s effort was unsuccessful in its own terms, for Hume would not break with his Labour colleagues in the Socialist International. As an exercise in intergovernmental diplomacy, though, Bruton’s intervention was more successful. It contributed to the attainment of a key Irish objective in the summit communiqué of 28 February, which the British withheld until almost the last moment: the start of all-party talks on 10 June 1996 (which would only become inclusive upon the restoration of an IRA ceasefire). The summit communiqué also stated, inter alia, that political parties would be asked to attend proximity talks to consider the structure, format and agenda for the all-party talks, and discussions would be held finally to determine the form of elections that would lead to the all-party talks. Moreover, there was no mention in the communiqué of prior decommissioning.

Trimble now acknowledges that the elections lost a lot of their value to the UUP. In part, he says, this was because of ‘collateral damage’ which he suffered as a result of the bruised relations with the British Government after the Scott vote (though he feels that nationalist pressure would have eroded much of the UUP’s advantage, anyhow). He now concedes that his own inexperience at the time played a part in these reverses and that his own proposal should have made clearer the link between the elected body and the talks. Trimble had in mind something like the Convention of 1975–6, which included serious debates but also had the potential for informal negotiations arising in the corridors. He was alerted to this problem when he met Mo Mowlam, the Labour spokesman on Northern Ireland, in the corridors at Westminster and she informed him that the linkage between the elective body and the talks was not sufficiently explicit. ‘I don’t need to make it explicit – it’ll happen organically,’ Trimble told her. However, he says he underrated nationalist ‘paranoia’ about the Unionists ‘pocketing’ the concession of what the Irish saw as a ‘new Stormont’ – and, having obtained what they wanted, then stalling on the negotiations. The UUP would thus have regained something akin to their Parliament, whilst nationalists would not have obtained their cross-border bodies and other reforms.³⁵ Whatever the alleged diplomatic shortcomings in the presentation of Trimble’s election proposal, the fact remains that both he and the DUP pointedly stayed away from multilateral consultations about the format of the forthcoming talks, which began in the following week at Stormont. In the following weeks, recalls one senior official of the period, much complex mathematical work was done in the NIO to come up with the ‘correct’ electoral system. He believed they needed a system that satisfied the UUP entitlement to a majority of the majority community (though they did not in the end, manage it) but which would at the same time give due weight to the DUP and the smaller loyalist paramilitary parties. At the same time, the NIO obviously also had to consider the effects of any electoral system on the internal balance of forces within the nationalist community. Could they avoid handing a victory to Sinn Fein against the ageing SDLP – and in any case was that so wrong, they asked themselves? After all, senior NIO officials reasoned, the more that Sinn Fein expanded and stretched in support, the more diluted their ideology would necessarily become and they would be unwilling to lose new-found supporters by returning to full-scale violence. Over the long term, the NIO reasoned, this would help Adams and those who wished to go down a more political route. It would enable them to show to the apolitical militarists that the electoral route could yield greater gains than the armed struggle of the old variety. In consequence, the British came up with a hybrid of the constituency and list systems: electors voted for parties rather than people in the new, expanded number of eighteen constituencies, each of which returned five representatives. Two extra seats would be allocated to each of the ten most successful parties in the Province as a whole, thus guaranteeing representation to the small loyalist parties with minuscule levels of public support. The outcome of these deliberations was, in the view of one senior official, ‘the least democratic election of all time. It shows that Governments can tweak voting systems and how careful you have to be with reforming the mainland system.’ In the background all of the time were the Americans: Anthony Lake recalls that he would have long discussions with Sir John Kerr in his office in the West Wing of the White House to determine what kind of electoral method would be used for the elective route (that is, Single Transferable Vote, etc).³⁶ It was a remarkable illustration of the degree of American interference in internal United Kingdom matters.

Indeed, Brian Feeney, a former SDLP councillor in Belfast with a regular column in the Irish News, spotted the irony in the system which was set up for the elective route into negotiations. It was, he asserted, the most un-British, un-unionist formula ever devised. ‘Professor Umberto Eco, who knows about these things, says all structures in the west display a Protestant or a Catholic mentality. If Protestantism is all about individualism the list system is fundamentally the opposite of a political system where people vote for individuals rather than parties. This political Protestantism reaches its peak in the USA where Democrats and Republicans do their own thing on the floor of the Senate … but thanks to David Trimble, we’ve got a Catholic continental system where the individual is subsumed within the party discipline and dogma. Only Sinn Fein has adopted an innovative approach. They have fielded candidates from the Republic who will be elected. Also in a number of areas they have placed at the top of the list prominent figures who have been convicted of high profile IRA activities. No doubt these men unambiguously support the armed struggle. They will certainly be elected. So thanks to David Trimble and his political acumen, the pro-Union vote will be divided a dozen ways and more overtly republican candidates than ever before will be elected under a system as mysterious as a papal conclave. Take a bow, David.’³⁷ Feeney was being customarily bilious about the Unionist leader (whom he nicknamed the ‘Portadown Prancer’ after Drumcree I) and it was undoubtedly unfair of him to blame Trimble for the kind of system adopted. But Feeney’s observations were invested with one underlying truth. Like so many of Trimble’s victories, the elective route into negotiations blew up in his face. Thus, Trimble reproved Robert McCartney for splitting the Unionist vote in the 1996 Forum elections. McCartney replied that but for Trimble’s elective route into negotiations – which required that anyone who wanted to be at the talks table had to stand for the contest – he would never have set up the United Kingdom Unionist Party (prior to that, McCartney sat as an independent Westminster MP for North Down but had no Province-wide party organisation).³⁸

Trimble duly sought to make the best he could of his unexpectedly bad hand in the run-up to the elections, which were to be held on 30 May 1996. As ever, he set a cracking pace. Elaine McClure of the Ulster Society recalls that Trimble was perhaps ‘the only Unionist leader with the guts to canvass the main street of Newry [an overwhelmingly nationalist town]. There was always an excuse for not doing the town, such as the top part of Hill Street. But he took his red, white and blue bus there, and it was a huge psychological boost to those remaining Unionists.’³⁹ But Trimble’s aim was also to reach out to those members of the Catholic community who were not so staunchly nationalistic. The encouragement which Trimble gave to the candidature of John Gorman typified this approach. Gorman was a third-generation Catholic Unionist: his maternal grandfather, Dr Patrick O’Brien, had been a close friend of the moderate southern Irish Unionist, the Earl of Midleton, at the start of the century. Gorman’s father, a native of Co. Tipperary, had served as a major in the Royal Horse Artillery Irish Guards in the First World War and was thereafter the last Adjutant of the the Royal Irish Constabulary. He moved north – as loyal Catholics and Protestants from the south did after Partition – and served as County Inspector of the new Royal Ulster Constabulary for Londonderry and Fermanagh. Later, he became deputy head of the RUC mission in Greece during the Civil War in the Hellenes in the mid to late 1940s. Gorman himself fought in the Second Battalion, the Irish Guards, in the Second World War, winning a Military Cross in Normandy; the Intelligence Officer of the Battalion was Captain Terence O’Neill, later the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963–9. After the war, Gorman joined the RUC, becoming District Inspector for Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. Gorman and Trimble came to know each other when Gorman subsequently headed the Housing Executive, and Trimble was the foremost authority in the Province on housing law. Gorman, who would have become actively involved in Unionist politics much sooner than he did but for the Orange link, was precisely the kind of man whom Trimble admired. For he embodied the diversity of traditions and allegiances that had been obscured by 30 years of Troubles. Trimble further addressed this topic in his speech at the 1996 UUP conference in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, when he extolled the Catholic Unionist tradition as personified by Sir Denis Henry, who was present at the creation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1905, represented South Londonderry at Westminster, and was subsequently appointed as the first Lord Chief Justice of the newly created Province of Northern Ireland.⁴⁰ Forge an enduring settlement, believed Trimble, and such allegiances could reassert themselves. Trimble later recommended that Gorman become the chairman of the elected Forum, and he received a knighthood in 1998.⁴¹

Gorman was not the only Catholic whom Trimble sought to recruit to be a flag-bearer for the Unionist cause. He endorsed the appointment of Patricia Campbell, the daughter of an RUC constable, as organiser of the Unionist Information Office in London. This was set up in 1996 under the aegis of David Burnside, which held twice-yearly receptions and occasional briefings for journalists. Under Burnside’s tutelage, she edited a magazine, The Unionist, brimming with anodyne articles. These were accompanied by pictures of kittens and puppies frolicking with each other, bearing such italicised captions as Reconciliation is possible and a cover photograph of a cherubic sleeping new-born in swaddling clothes headlined Let’s keep The Peace For Their Tomorrow.⁴² It prompted some mirth in journalistic circles that so ruthless an operator as Burnside (affectionately known in the PR trade as ‘the kneecapper’) should produce such sentimental copy; a more serious point was that none of these treacly images did anything to increase any real understanding of the Unionist cause. Even when Unionists finally grasped the importance of PR, they could only rise to the challenge by coming up with images that erased their distinctive message almost completely. Nonetheless, Campbell’s appointment – like that of Gorman – incarnated a mood of change that seemed to abound in certain Unionist circles during this period. Indeed, keen as Trimble was for more women candidates, only seven were actually selected for the Forum elections (out of a total of 78) – of whom only one was successful.⁴³ Selecting standard bearers remained a local affair, where Trimble’s personal preferences counted for little. ‘New Unionism’ was for much of the time a glimmer in his eye, rather than a reality.

Trimble was especially exercised during the campaign by the remarks of the Tanaiste’s special adviser, Fergus Finlay, on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Finlay stated that talks without Sinn Fein were ‘not worth a penny candle’.⁴⁴ Bruton was also furious, because he believed the remark took the heat off the Provisionals.⁴⁵ Why, he wondered, should the IRA call a new and this time more credible ceasefire if they knew that the process could not go on without them? The only way in which republicans would do so was if they feared that there was a possibility that a settlement could be achieved by the constitutional parties alone. Finlay concedes that the remark enabled Unionists to say that his boss was surrounded by fellow travellers of the Provisionals. From an Irish prespective, Finlay’s remarks had ‘reactionary consequences’, as the Soviets used to call them. Finlay remembers Sean O hUiginn’s regretful remark: ‘True diplomats learn early in their careers that the truth is sometimes best served by silence,’ opined the head of Anglo-Irish affairs. As far as O hUiginn was concerned, the problem with Finlay’s remark lay with its overly stark presentation, and not its substance.⁴⁶ The Provisionals could now sit pretty and wait for the two Governments to come to them. The British were doing this anyhow, as exemplified by Major’s Irish Times article of 16 May 1996, in which he further diluted the Tories’ demands on when decommissioning would have to be carried out. But keen as Major was to obtain a renewed IRA ceasefire, he could never move quickly enough for the Provisionals.

Trimble, though, was also in trouble. The novel electoral system, just as he had predicted, would ‘shred’ the Unionist vote: a poster appeared in the closing days of the campaign depicting a splintered Union flag, with the words ‘Division and Weakness, Or Unity and Strength’. Such fracturing also occurred in his own party: at the UUP manifesto launch at Belfast’s Laganside, the late John Oliver recalled Martin Smyth looking round at the large numbers of outsiders whom Trimble had brought in and remarking: ‘You’d have thought this was the Ulster Society campaign, not the UUP campaign.’⁴⁷ Smyth’s observation pointed up the deep unease about Trimble within the UUP, which long predated the Belfast Agreement: namely, that as a latecomer to the party, he was not really one of the UUP tribe. For his part, Trimble also found the party organisation at the grassroots to be in worse condition than he imagined. His fears were vindicated. In the 30 May elections, on a 64.5% turnout, the UUP remained the largest single party, with 24.2% of the vote, winning 30 seats; the DUP won 18.8% and 24 seats; the SDLP won 21.4% and 21 seats; Sinn Fein won 15.5% and 17 seats. Two points were significant: first, despite the IRA’s return to violence, Sinn Fein turned in their best performance ever, garnering 116,377 votes. Trimble was in no doubt as to the reason for the republicans’ success. In a lengthy interview with the editor of the Dublin Sunday Independent, Aengus Fanning, Trimble observed that many SDLP voters had crossed over to Sinn Fein under the illusion that it would be a vote for Adams’ peace strategy and against republican militarists. These nationalists had succumbed to this logic because ‘the boundary lines between Sinn Fein and the SDLP’, he believed, ’had been blurred by the Hume-Adams pact’.⁴⁸

The other significant aspect of the Forum elections of 1996 was the shredding of the Unionist vote, which fell 5.2% on the 1993 council elections result. Consequently, the UUP won under 50% of the vote of the majority community; the DUP took 18.8% of the total; McCartney’s UKUP took 3.6% for three seats; whilst the PUP and UDP took 3.5% and 2.2% respectively. Neither of the latter two would have won seats in the main constituency system, but they squeezed in under the Province-wide top-up system which guaranteed two extra places to the ten largest parties.⁴⁹ Moreover, the UUP’s failure to win half the vote meant that when the rules for the talks were finally settled, the UUP was dependent upon at least one other unionist grouping to push through its policies (under the rule of ‘sufficient consensus’, any important proposal had to win the support of the representatives of over half of each communal bloc). This proved crucial especially after September 1997, when the DUP and UKUP walked out. For it left the UUP dependent upon the smaller loyalist paramilitary parties, who had their own objectives on such issues as prisoner releases that were not necessarily congenial to constitutional unionists. This played a part in forcing Trimble to acquiesce in those demands on Good Friday 1998. Trimble believes that Ancram was very pleased with these results, because they increased the divisions within Unionism. It had long been the policy of the British state, Trimble contends, to wear down the Unionist family, so as to make them more pliant to the broader needs of central government. Ancram disagrees with this analysis: it would have been far easier, he says, if Trimble had won a majority, thus diminishing his worries about Paisley and McCartney (who were then still in the talks).⁵⁰ But whoever is right, what is beyond dispute is that the Forum election was the first of a series of poor UUP electoral results under Trimble’s leadership – though the decline long predated his ascent to the top job.