Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism. Dean Godson

of things unleashing those forces – the abolition of Stormont, the IRA campaign. If anything, Craig’s rhetoric provided an emotional safety valve.’²⁸ It was more than just rhetoric, though: Vanguard, after all, ‘saw itself as a resistance movement against an undemocratic regime that could be shown to be unworkable when the time came’. To that end, it aimed for ‘the coordination of all loyalist organisations under one banner to save Ulster’. The largest of these was the Ulster Defence Association, then still a legal organisation probably numbering about 40,000 members.²⁹‘Everybody was in it then,’ says Trimble. ‘I was conscious there were criminal types, but they were not dominant. The organisation then was a broad popular response to a near-civil war situation. But what’s happened to the loyalist paramilitaries is that the criminal types have taken over and the broad popular types have gone away’ (indeed, to this day, he thinks that the conventional police wisdom is wrong and that the Ulster Freedom Fighters are not a mere flag of convenience for the UDA, but are a separate organisation). In retrospect, however, he concedes that Craig’s condemnation of Protestant paramilitarism was inadequate.³⁰

      Trimble never saw himself as a street activist in this cause; his contribution, he thought, would be as a cerebral backroom boy. In 1972, after his flat in Belfast became too dangerous, he moved back to Bangor and resumed contact with some local Orangemen. It was they who provided him with his first public platform at the Ballygrainey Orange Hall at Six Road Ends, between Bangor and Newtownards. In 1973, the British Government had produced a White Paper, which outlined some possible political structures for the Province. The new Assembly would be elected by proportional representation rather than the traditional first-past-the-post (in fact, there had been PR elections during the early years of Stormont, but these had soon been scrapped, largely to maintain the unity of the UUP).³¹ No one knew how to operate the Single Transferable Vote system – except, everyone thought, David Trimble. Trimble, in fact, had to go into the Queen’s University library where he found a book on electoral systems by Enid Lakeman.³² His description of how many candidates to run and how to maximise transfers so impressed one of those present, Albert Smith, that he called on Trimble shortly afterwards. Trimble recalls him asking: ‘“Would you like to give another talk?” I said yes, but when? “Tonight!” came the reply. It turned out he wanted me to speak to a North Down Vanguard meeting at Hamilton House, Bangor. I never looked back.’³³

      There, he met up with a group opposed to the local Faulknerite Unionist establishment. They included George Green, the former County Commandant of the since disbanded ‘B’ Specials, who was by now an independent councillor in the area. More important still to his long-term political development, he also met a Vanguard councillor, Mary O’Fee. Her husband, Stewart, was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, who would telephone Craig and identify himself as ‘the Seaside Voice’. Trimble worried that the ‘tide of history’ was turning against the Unionists, but Stewart O’Fee snorted dismissively and told him to read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, which he found inspirational.³⁴ But O’Fee came to have an even more direct influence: he was the anonymous author of two Vanguard’s best pamphlets, Ulster – A Nation (April 1972) and Community of the British Isles (1973).³⁵ The former, in Trimble’s own words, ‘hurled defiance at our enemies’. It was a trenchant rebuttal of the High Tory case for Ulster’s integration into the United Kingdom along the lines of Scotland and Wales, whose best-known advocate was Enoch Powell. But O’Fee believed this approach contained profound dangers for Ulster. First, the Province would be integrated into the more urbanised, ‘permissive society’ of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ – an unattractive end in itself for a still-religious people. Second, even if it was desirable in principle, integrationists did not possess the means to achieve this: peaceful persuasion would not work since the main British parties did not want it and street protests to attain it would only alienate their fellow citizens with whom they wanted to integrate. Third, Trimble shared O’Fee’s belief that pure integration, without any body which Ulster could call its own to undergird it, contained a political trap. They both believed that integration could only work if the three main parties at Westminster supported the Union. But since many in Labour and the Liberals then appeared to favour the principle of Irish unity, albeit peacefully achieved, as an ultimate outcome, integration would leave Ulster and its tiny twelve-man contingent at the mercy of the 630-strong Commons.

      Ulster – A Nation concluded with a ringing appeal for Ulster to redefine her relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom. It posited the idea of a federated British Isles comprising Great Britain, Ulster and Eire, with three separate but equal regions cooperating to promote common prosperity. These ideas were fleshed out in Community of the British Isles which exerted an even greater impact upon Trimble’s thinking. Great Britain would ‘throw off the trammels of the residual sovereignty’ that she exercises as a legacy of her colonial past and thus free herself of any guilt or international embarrassments which that legacy has caused her. More significant still, this would have profound implications for the Roman Catholic minority: ‘The absence of British sovereignty would remove one of the causes of friction and help confront both communities [within Northern Ireland] with the realities of the situation.’ Trimble was impressed both by its emphasis on taking account of the existence of the nationalist community, which would not go away, and by the possibility of creating new structures that could accommodate everyone’s diverse aspirations without surrendering to Irish nationalism. Indeed, the approach outlined in Community of the British Isles would eventually find expression in the British-Irish Council, established under the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

      Again, such speculations seemed fanciful at the time. For Unionists were then enmeshed in debating the merits of Heath’s attempt to outline the principles governing new political structures for Ulster. The Government White Paper of March 1973 aimed to provide something for everyone (and was the basis of the Sunningdale agreement of December of that year). For Unionists, it contained the guarantee that Northern Ireland’s overall constitutional status would not be changed save with the consent of the Province’s majority. Also, the bulk of Stormont’s functions would be returned to local control (with the exception of security). But Unionists could only regain their parliament at the price of accepting nationalists in the Government of Northern Ireland for the first time. Nationalists would derive further reassurance from the establishment of an ‘Irish dimension’ – North – South bodies which could someday prove to be vehicles for harmonising the institutions of government on both sides of the border into all-Ireland structures. Faulkner accepted the White Paper and received the endorsement of his party’s supreme body, the Ulster Unionist Council, by 381 to 231.³⁶

      Many hardline Unionists had been toying with the idea of creating a new party to oppose the drift of policy, but they had always been deterred from so doing by the feeling that they would have more influence by staying within the existing party structures. The vote to accept the White Paper proposals convinced them that they no longer could prevent such slippage. Craig and his supporters left to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party: the word ‘Progressive’ was included to appeal to the substantial trade union element in Vanguard, led by such men as Billy Hull (formerly of the Loyalist Association of Workers) and Glenn Barr, a shop steward and senior figure in the UDA. Although opposed to the new system, Vanguard nonetheless contested the June 1973 Assembly elections. Trimble was uncertain about whether to stand, but in the end decided to do so. There were several reasons for this. First, he thought if he remained an academic, people would not respect him; he would, therefore, have to ‘get his hands dirty’ in the political arena. But there was another reason, which would continue to motivate him in the coming years. ‘The Loyalist parties were getting a very negative press then,’ he recalls. ‘But I thought “well, it will make the media and the middle classes sit up and think if they find that not