These calculations, though, did not necessitate any fundamental reappraisal of the grand strategy of the British state. The officials had a long-held view of where a ‘balanced’ settlement between the two traditions lay. Trimble’s election did, though, affect the state’s tactics, most obviously towards the new Unionist leader himself. The NIO immediately contacted Rod Lyne, the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary for foreign affairs: they then began a pincer movement. It was reckoned that Trimble was open to flattery by No. 10 – few would be exempt from it, especially from a minor party at Westminster – and made sure to advertise that there was an open door to him whenever he needed it. Indeed, on one morning shortly after his election, Trimble spent three hours at No. 10 talking to Lyne, who provided him with further reassurance about the British Government’s intentions towards Northern Ireland: after the Molyneaux years, when the then leader kept the key details of discussions with Government very much to himself, Trimble found that the conversation made him more comfortable about state policy.10 This process of cultivation took place on many levels: Daphne Trimble remembers that at Major’s behest, Lyne gave the whole family a tour of No. 10, including the Cabinet Room, during the Christmas break.11 Meanwhile, Sir John Kerr, who had just taken up his position as British ambassador to the United States, wrote to Trimble suggesting that he come to America as soon as possible to meet with senior administration officials.12 Andrew Hunter, MP, the chairman of the Conservative backbench Northern Ireland Committee was asked twice by Mayhew for an assessment of Trimble’s personality and was then told to maximise his contact with the UUP leader. Later, his instructions became more explicit still: on 22 May 1996, Hunter noted following a meeting with Major that ‘we have a chance of winning the election if we can hang on until May next year. You can help us. Do everything you can to keep the Unionists happy.’ (Discussing the AIA, Major also told Hunter that ‘I’d like to tear it up … Margaret got it wrong … the government assured the UUP that there was nothing going on. All along Margaret was planning it.’) Trimble immediately grasped what was going on here and became defensive, thus making it very hard for Hunter to report back to Government ministers. ‘He didn’t know if I was a spy or a friend,’ says Hunter. ‘He knew that I was playing two roles and that I was partly a spy for the Government.’ Because of his status, Hunter was also regarded as being partly on ‘the team’ and frequently cleared his pronouncements with No. 10. Hunter now says that he is ‘ashamed’ to have been a conduit for so much Government ‘spin’ to the Unionists: this sense of guilt partly explains why he campaigned for a ‘No’ vote during the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement.13 It was the start of a journey which would ultimately take Hunter into the DUP.
The reason for the British state’s curiosity was that Trimble had immediately begun an almost Gorbachevian whirligig of activity. This was not so much antithetical to their interests as it was unpredictable. For if he had a detailed game plan, he certainly shared it with very few people, though the broad outlines – scrapping the AIA, regaining a measure of local control through devolved institutions, and ending the marginalisation of Unionism – were well enough understood. The frenetic round of meetings had been implicit in his Ulster Hall election speech, where he pledged to go anywhere, anytime to promote the Unionist cause (the only exception turned out to be the Forum on Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, which he declined to attend on the grounds that it was a ‘nationalist body’).14 His priority, as he saw it, was to free Unionism from ideological taboos which restricted its freedom of manoeuvre – such as the terms on which Unionist leaders could go to Dublin to talk to the Irish Government. The first opportunity to do this presented itself on the Monday following his election. Notwithstanding his unhappiness over Trimble’s election, one of the UUP’s best-known left-wingers, Chris McGimpsey, contacted Glengall Street with some important information. His fellow progressive, Proinsias de Rossa, the Irish Social Welfare Minister, was in town for one of his regular meetings with his colleagues in Democratic Left. Would a meeting be possible?15
This suggestion was, in the Northern Irish context, less improbable than it might at first glance appear. Democratic Left had emerged from the split in the old Workers’ Party, once the political wing of the Official IRA. These previously pro-Moscow Marxists were arguably the most anti-nationalist political force on both sides of the border and had been deadly rivals of the Provisionals (who had split from them in 1970–1). Many of them regarded the Provisionals as fascists, and the Provisionals reciprocated their loathing, accusing the ‘Stickies’ (as the Officials were nicknamed) of betrayal of national ideals. Prior to embracing constitutional politics, de Rossa himself had been a republican activist: in May 1957, he was arrested at Glencree in the Wicklow mountains, was remanded and then sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for declining to account to the Gardai for his movements – a crime under the Offences Against the State Act. Whilst in Mountjoy jail, the southern Government introduced internment against the IRA, which had begun an unsuccessful border campaign that lasted until 1962. De Rossa was thus kept inside – only this time at the camp run by the Irish Army at the Curragh, Co. Kildare, where he remained until February 1959. But now, he was one of three party leaders in the ‘Rainbow Coalition’ and a member of the Irish Cabinet’s Northern Ireland Committee. John Bruton, the Fine Gael Taioseach – who was more instinctively hostile to the most atavistic forms of nationalism than almost any other holder of that post – felt closer to de Rossa on northern questions than any other member of his Government. Indeed, a poll of UUP delegates conducted at the party’s annual conference by Liam Clarke of The Sunday Times showed that de Rossa was the Irish politician most trusted by Ulster Unionists – and, as such, way ahead of John Bruton, Dick Spring and John Hume. No doubt this was because of his anti-Provisional credentials.16
When Trimble learned that de Rossa was visiting Belfast, he immediately invited him to visit UUP headquarters: had any other Irish Cabinet minister been visiting he would not have moved as he did. Above all, this particular encounter had the virtue of sending out the signal that Unionists would talk to those who had genuinely embraced constitutionalism – whilst simultaneously annoying the Provisionals.17 Its significance