Graham was elected Chairman of the Young Unionist Council in 1981 and in the following year was elected Honorary Secretary of the full Ulster Unionist Council. Ian Clark, a Queen’s Young Unionist and Devolution Group activist who later became election agent to John Taylor, recalls feeling a sense of despair that Trimble, by contrast, could not have managed to be elected a party officer on the Devolution Group slate.19 At one point, Trimble was even thrown off the Ulster Unionist Executive as representative from South Antrim and in the 1981 local elections he failed to be elected as a councillor in Area D of ‘Loyalist’ Lisburn.20Moreover, the space which he might potentially have occupied within the party was further ‘crowded out’ by two other capable lawyers who had recently joined up – Robert McCartney and Peter Smith. Significantly, both were critical of the drift of Molyneaux’s policy. McCartney became chairman of the Union Group, which according to Trimble was founded to perform a function akin to the Bow Group or the Tribune Group. In 1982 the Union Group published Options: Devolved Government for Northern Ireland. McCartney wrote the foreword, while Trimble contributed the main paper. Trimble acknowledged that there could be no return to old Stormont-style majority rule and urged that a coalition be formed of all parties prepared to support common policies – that is, something along Voluntary Coalition lines. It also endorsed Sir James Craig’s flexibility at the time of Partition: ‘Before the 1921 Treaty, Craig had gone south to speak to de Valera while the latter was still on the run. [Trimble’s added emphasis] This meant putting himself into the hands of a go between, allowing himself to be taken, blindfolded, to an IRA hideout … Craig negotiated the Craig-Collins pact with Michael Collins which covered the whole range of law enforcement in Ulster, including the proposal that Catholic reserve constables should be recruited specifically for the policing of Catholic districts.’ The favourable reference to these discussions is significant: according to Marianne Elliott, ‘the Craig-Collins pacts had held out the prospect of peaceful collaboration by the minority with the northern state. Not until the Sunningdale agreement of 1973 was another such effort made.’21 But few invested these lines with much significance at the time; and as James Cooper, a prominent Fermanagh Ulster Unionist notes, Trimble was a master draftsman, who would be careful to emphasise that he was simply putting forward options, which were not necessarily his own views.22 Trimble says he was even perfectly prepared to place his academic expertise at the disposal of political rivals. Ulster: The Facts, published in 1982 under the names of Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and John Taylor, was, he says, largely drafted by the Unionist writer Hugh Shearman and himself. It was written in preparation for the trio’s visit to America and was described by John Whyte in his bibliographical study, Interpreting Northern Ireland as ‘the fullest recent attempt to give the Unionist case a factual basis’.23 However, Peter Robinson and Cedric Wilson – a director of Crown Publications, the company which produced this work – state vigorously that they have no knowledge of Trimble assisting in this endeavour. But Robinson concedes that Trimble might have worked privately with Shearman. By contrast, John Taylor states that he clearly recalls Trimble playing a leading role in drafting of the document. Whatever Trimble’s precise role, it is clearly symptomatic of the divisions in Unionism that even so apparently uncontentious an issue as the authorship of a two-decades-old pamphlet should prompt such disagreement on basic facts!
Despite his skilled advocacy, much of the UUP hierarchy still regarded Trimble with suspicion as the most dangerous of the devolutionists. Those suspicions were further fuelled by the style as well as the substance of Trimble’s politics. For Molyneaux’s boycott of the Atkins talks and the attendant mistrust of the NIO were the antithesis of Trimble’s approach: he believes in engaging political opponents head-on. In 1978, Trimble had several meetings with Allen Huckle, a young civil servant on secondment from the old Civil Service Department and later a senior member of the Foreign Office. He also met Stephen Leach, a rising civil servant in the political affairs division of the NIO, who contacted him out of the blue after reading his contributions to the Convention debates. The dialogue was a two-way process: the officials were out to influence the Unionists, and Trimble was out to influence them. Later, Leach introduced Trimble to a more senior figure in the NIO, David Blatherwick, who was on secondment from the Foreign Office and who later became ambassador to the Irish Republic and Egypt. ‘Trimble came to us with a lot of suspicion not of the British state but of the Foreign Office and the NIO,’ recalls Blatherwick. ‘All of them, in his view, were selling out and pandering to the nationalists. You can’t, of course, provide reassurance through mere words. You can only do it by consistency, by trying to explain what government is trying to do. If I had been in his position, I would have been suspicious, too. Everything normal about the Unionists’ early lives had been swept away and here were these funny foreign guys from London put in charge temporarily and why should you trust them?’24
Trimble says he learned an important lesson from these conversations – that the Government had no master plan for the future of the Province and that Blatherwick was, in fact, grateful for ideas. Far from seeking a ‘sell-out’ or ‘scuttle’ from Ulster, Trimble contends that Blatherwick was looking for some formulation that would quieten things down.25 The two men spoke in particular about the ideas which Trimble, Craig and David McNarry had expressed in their personal capacities as UUP members in February 1980 in a paper entitled Towards the Better Government of Ulster. The document proposed a phasing of devolution which in the first stage could cover those services presently administered by the six Northern Ireland departments (Health, Education and so on), thus reserving more controversial matters for later. These reserved matters, it went on, could then be transferred within a specified period following a vote by a special or weighted majority of the members of the Northern Ireland Parliament. It added that the advantages of this procedure would be that there would be a clear incentive for all parties to work towards such a transfer. Some of these ideas were later incorporated into the ‘rolling devolution’ plans of Thatcher’s second Ulster Secretary, Jim Prior, and the ensuing 1982–6 Assembly. Although the UUP participated in the Prior Assembly, many integrationists – and, above all, Powell – saw the body as a NIO stratagem to perpetuate the semi-detached status of the Province.
Trimble may have found discussions with officials informative, but they cost him dearly in the short term. In 1982, Enoch Powell raised a grave matter in the Commons, which came to be known in unionist circles simply as ‘Sloan-Abbott’. The sequence of events was as follows: in February 1981, a young postgraduate researcher at Keele University called Geoffrey Sloan approached an upcoming NIO civil servant called Clive Abbott, for the purpose of interviewing him for his thesis. Sloan passed a record of this interview on to Harold McCusker, who in turn passed it on to James Molyneaux, who in his turn showed it to Enoch Powell. The contents of Sloan’s notes were sensational. Abbott had apparently informed him that when the Tories entered office in 1979, the NIO had to tell them that the Neave (and therefore the Molyneaux) policy of greater integration was ‘just not on’, both because such an approach would forfeit the cooperation of the Republic in security affairs and because of past secret undertakings given to the Irish Republic on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. The message was in line with Powell’s worst fear: that civil servants were working actively to undermine the policy of the elected government of the