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.