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

It was a huge risk, as is attested to by Trimble’s nervousness during the crisis (Gordon Lucy remembers that at moments, his arm went into a spasm) and he knew he would suffer the brunt of any recriminations if either they did not go down the road or else did so with large-scale casualties. Indeed, Gordon Lucy recalls that he shouted to Trimble on the Monday night, ‘this will be the making of you’, but that Trimble demurred. Trimble also said to Lucy afterwards that he feared that 1996 would be an unmitigated disaster and that the Orangemen would not ‘get away with it’ two years running.⁴⁶ Drumcree was, therefore, subject to too many variables for it to be a truly satisfactory launching pad for Trimble’s leadership bid, at least when the crisis began. Rather, Trimble appears genuinely to have been swept along by his sense of duty as the local MP. It was a predicament which even internal rivals such as John Taylor understood. ‘If I’d have been the MP for the seat, what on earth would I have done?’ asks the veteran politician.⁴⁷ But Trimble was also swept along by the emotion of the occasion, which was bound up with such hallowed loyalist concepts as the right to ‘walk the Queen’s highway’ – to which he heartily subscribed. During the crisis itself, he told several people that if the march went through, it would be as significant a development in the history and folklore of Orangeism as the events at Dolly’s Brae in 1849 (when, according to Protestant lore, the Catholic Ribbonmen sought to prevent Co. Down Orangemen from completing their march via their preferred route through the Mourne Mountains). As Trimble’s friend Ruth Dudley Edwards observes the historical romance of the events at Drumcree would have appealed to the theatrical streak in his personality – and it explains his request to Lucy to write his book, which was begun in August 1995.⁴⁸ In so far as he was thinking in a calculated way about political effects, Trimble felt that street protest was the only way to obtain results under direct rule – a system which he once described to me in deliberately hyperbolic terms as ‘dictatorship moderated by riot’.⁴⁹ ‘Old thinking’, perhaps, to use Gorbachevian terminology, but scarcely evidence of a preordained stratagem on Trimble’s part to advance his career. Indeed, for much of his career, he has drifted into situations and improvised rather than pursued a detailed, preordained game plan.⁵⁰

      Joel Patton, who went on to found the ‘Spirit of Drumcree’ group within the Orange Order as a vehicle for protest against what he saw as the insipidity of the leadership, says that one of the weaknesses of loyalism is that they need men on white horses: they cannot accept that Drumcree was their victory, so they alighted upon Paisley and Trimble as explanations for that success. But Patton also expresses the view which many loyalists have held since the Belfast Agreement – that the British state, and particularly elements of the British intelligence services, wanted to give Trimble such a victory in order to build up an apparently ‘hardline’ Unionist who would then have the credibility to effect an historic compromise with Irish nationalism.⁵¹ In Trimble’s eyes Patton’s views are just another example of loyalist conspiracy theories. ‘Many of these anti-Agreement Unionists decided after the Belfast Agreement of 1998 that I was a bad ’un and therefore had to have been a bad ’un all of the time,’ responds Trimble. ‘These anti-Agreement Unionists have a problem. They have to avoid the lurking doubt that I might still have good reasons as a Unionist for what I am doing post-1998. If I was a good ’un in 1995, how can I have been a bad ’un? People like simplicity and they have difficulty in coping with the complexity of political life.’⁵²

      What is certain, both during Drumcree 1995 and 1996, is that the British politicians, including the Prime Minister, were taken by surprise.⁵³The point is confirmed by Sir Robin Butler, the then Cabinet Secretary, who recalls that ‘there were problems with marches the whole time and to us, it seemed as though all the protagonists were like a child crying wolf’. According to Butler, Major’s attitude was to ask whether ‘it was reasonable that the loyalists be so insistent about marching down this piece of road’.⁵⁴ Indeed, after the second ‘Siege’ of Drumcree, Mayhew told Paul Bew that ‘no one told me what would happen’. By this, Mayhew did not mean that he was totally ignorant of the fact that some sort of trouble was brewing, simply that it was possible that many of those Unionists who were telling him that such crises would occur may have had a vested interest in hyping them up to secure the result they wanted (such as Trimble himself). Some of those within the NIO who were meant to provide advice on what would actually happen may not have done so with sufficient vigour: when he subsquently raised Mayhew’s concerns with a senior civil servant, Bew was told by the official that it was not his role to provide this sort of ‘tribal advice’. As the official saw it, the best traditions of the British mandarinate were those of impartiality. Bew also derived the impression that after the AIA it became perceived career death amongst some officials to state the ‘Unionist line’; and in any case, everyone had seen the Protestants faced down before, as in 1985–6, and may simply have assumed it would happen again.⁵⁵ Peter Bell, then British joint secretary of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat, recalls that at this point, Drumcree was seen as a public order issue. It was therefore primarily a problem for the RUC and the Army (from which the Government could and arguably should stand back) rather than as an issue of the first political magnitude. This perhaps reflected an enduring lack of empathy for Unionist concerns on the part of many NIO officials from outside the Province and a reluctance on the part of some local civil servants to speak out lest they be thought of as ‘sectarian’.⁵⁶ Speaking to loyalists on 12 July 1996, Trimble offered his own interpretation why the state was blind-sided during successive years’ disturbances. He said this was because the leading intelligence operatives had all perished in the RAF Chinook crash on the Mull of Kintyre in August 1994. Had they lived, Trimble opined, it is unlikely that they would have failed to see the loyalist protests coming.⁵⁷ Again, this is pure speculation – and in any case, grievous as the losses were, men such as John Deverell (the senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland) would have been retired by the time of Drumcree 1995. As with the disaster over the Frameworks Documents, the likeliest explanation is that the state as a whole was so focused on republican intentions during the first IRA ceasefire that they became tone deaf to sensibilities on the loyalist side. If so, Trimble was again the unexpected beneficiary of a Government cock-up – although he denies that Drumcree had much to do with his subsequent election as leader. Justly or unjustly, though, it was the benchmark by which much of the world, and his own community, judged his subsequent performance.

       ELEVEN Now I am the Ruler of the UUP!

      AFTER a year of set-backs, James Molyneaux finally resigned as UUP leader on 28 August 1995 – the day after his 75th birthday. Trimble says he was surprised by the timing of the departure, of which he had received no advanced warning (in contrast to Major, who was notified by Molyneaux some two weeks before).¹ Indeed, John Hunter remembers Trimble dismissing the notion of a Molyneaux resignation when he raised the subject shortly beforehand at a barbecue given at the home of Drew Nelson, a leading Co. Down Orangeman. But when the news came, Trimble rang Hunter and said, ‘well, you’ll be happy this morning, the sun is shining’. Trimble knew that Hunter was a staunch opponent of Molyneaux, but insisted he had made no definite decisions himself.² However, Daphne Trimble recalls her husband saying that if he did run, he would win.³ By contrast, the man who definitely thought that the sun was shining that morning was John Taylor. Trimble knew that the Strangford MP would seek the leadership,