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

(which may partly explain why Trimble chose to pre-empt them by implictly waiving the Washington III criterion, and in exchange cashing in other gains that he thought were of greater long-term value). Indeed, Trimble recalls that whilst he and his fellow party leaders assembled in the first-floor waiting room at the Foreign Office for his first Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph, he was approached by Blair and Paddy Ashdown: was Major really committed, they asked, to decommissioning? If so, they would support him as part of the new tri-partisan consensus. Trimble confirmed that Major was committed. Blair again stated that he was prepared to support Major on the weapons issue, but said that he thought it was the wrong issue: he preferred to fight on the consent principle. If Trimble staked everything on that, he would have the support of every democrat in the land. What again impressed Trimble was the solidity of Blair’s commitment to the consent principle. He did not have the same degree of confidence in the Tories’ adherence to it: no Unionist could do so, he long thought, after the AIA of 1985. Indeed, the attitudes which led to that debacle were, in Trimble’s view, still there. He appeared to believe that ‘imperialistic’ attitudes lurk deep in the heart of English Conservatism (vide the Frameworks Documents). By contrast, at least Labour – for all its faults such as its powerful Irish nationalist fringe – was a genuine believer in the democratic imperative.³² But Trimble’s distrust of the Conservatives in this period was not just a matter of Tory culture; it was personal as well. Unlike all of the other Unionist MPs, Major had not known Trimble when he served as Northern Ireland Office whip from 1983–5. Trimble certainly enjoyed the ritual of going to Downing Street, yet he felt that Major was such a constructed personality that he was never sure whether he was meeting the real man – nor did he ever quite understand where Major’s much-vaunted ‘Unionism’ came from.³³ Trimble was also disconcerted by Major’s habit of starting off meetings by giving an apparently off-the-cuff summary of the current situation at any given moment, but which in fact he contended was a carefully calibrated way of guiding the discussion in a direction that he wanted. Andrew Hunter also recalls that much as he (Hunter) enjoyed going to No. 10, briefings from Major could often become worthless because the PM would repeat back what Hunter said at the last meeting in order to illustrate that he (Major) was basically on the same side.³⁴

      The failure to establish a truly trusting relationship with Major was all the more surprising because Trimble – like all UUP leaders – would seek to cultivate a ‘special relationship’ with the Prime Minister of the day. The purpose of this gambit was to circumvent the NIO officials and ministers, whom Unionists alleged were in hock to Dublin’s agenda. To some extent this was a delusion (or convenient fig-leaf). Coordination between No. 10 and the NIO was very close and Mayhew and Major enjoyed an excellent personal rapport. Driving a wedge between No. 10 and the NIO became all the more of an imperative for Unionists because the personal relations between Trimble on the one side and Mayhew and Ancram on the other were so bad. Again, in the first instance, this may seem peculiar. Mayhew had been widely criticised by nationalists for the decision not to prosecute on the basis of the findings of the Stalker-Sampson inquiry on the RUC’s alleged ‘shoot to kill’ policy when he served as Attorney General and was also a known sceptic of the way in which the AIA of 1985 had been secretly negotiated.³⁵ Ancram was a Catholic Scotsman who now sat for an English seat and who frequently touted his Unionist credentials. But whatever credentials either man had enjoyed beforehand, they counted for little with Unionists once in office. For despite his track record, Mayhew says he had made little time as a Law Officer to come to know the Unionist MPs; rather, he made it his particular business to look after the Northern Ireland judiciary.³⁶ Even his admirers thought, in some ways, this quintessentially viceregal figure was oddly un-political (in contrast, Trimble notes, to the highly political Ancram). ‘Paddy was a patrician who saw politics primarily as declarations from above,’ says Andrew Hunter, who observed the relationship from close up for some years. ‘He never understood the subtleties and innuendoes of pavement politics.’³⁷

      But Mayhew’s difficulties were more personal still. His height (six-foot-five), bearing, voice and family background all counted against him in the eyes of hardline Unionists. Daphne Trimble recalls that ‘David was famously public in criticising Mayhew’s “grand” accent – which really is something the poor man couldn’t help. Maybe it was inexperience in dealing with secretaries of state – not that he liked Mowlam, either.’³⁸ Andrew Hunter ascribes the deteriorating relationship in part to the petit bourgeois academic lawyer’s sense of social and professional inferiority to an eminent silk and scion of the southern Ascendancy (though Trimble says that what he really objected to was Mayhew’s exaggerated patrician manner).³⁹ Mayhew’s forebears had come to Co. Cork in the 13th century but as he himself observes, ‘families like mine had very few connections with Protestants in the north. Living in the south, Anglo-Irish families tended to think of northern Protestants as denizens of the wild woods; and one of the things I was so grateful for as Secretary of State was coming to know them.’⁴⁰ Andrew Hunter, though, feels that Mayhew had little sympathy for Unionists.⁴¹ Sir John Wheeler, who served as Security Minister from 1993–97, also says that ‘Mayhew never understood Unionists or the Loyal Orders. Even though he was the first Secretary of State to visit an Orange Lodge [at Comber, Co. Down, in 1995], I don’t think that he had that instinctive understanding of how they feared their position within the United Kingdom was being eroded. It took me a little while to understand it but when I did, it enabled me to deal with them.’⁴² There was, notes Michael Ancram, a further reason for the mutual antipathy: ‘David Trimble was very good at being very, very rude – to both of us. Paddy would sit there afterwards and ask me why did I take it whenever David accused us of being liars or whatever. It was mutual hatred. David’s nostrils would flare, his eyes would go very wide and his cheeks very red. Partly, it was histrionics, but partly it was genuine. David was a new type of Unionist who was far more mistrustful of the Conservatives.’⁴³ Trimble preferred Ancram on a personal basis: ‘He was good company and one could even trade insults with him in jocular fashion,’ says Trimble. Moreover, he felt that Ancram (the heir to the Marquess of Lothian) had fewer airs and graces than his boss. That said, Trimble never took Ancram’s ‘Unionism’ terribly seriously either and he was intensely suspicious of his key officials in the Political Development Directorate of the NIO – principally Quentin Thomas and Jonathan Stephens.⁴⁴

      One minister who kept a close eye on Thomas’s activities was Viscount Cranborne, leader of the House of Lords. To Cranborne, Thomas embodied ‘the habits of decades of imperial decline. This habit brought about the cast of mind of British officialdom of assuming that the most expedient way of tackling any difficulty is finding the most elegant path of retreat – and most emphatically so in Northern Ireland. Considerations of improving or advancing the interests of your own loyal people are now totally alien to the British official mind, and I suspect have been since the 1920s. As a result, I think they saw David Trimble as yet another little colonial problem to be managed.’⁴⁵ Probably no senior Tory has enjoyed so dark a reputation in nationalist Ireland since F.E. Smith, who was loathed for his part in the Home Rule crisis of 1912.⁴⁶ Cranborne’s Unionist credentials derived partly from the record of his forebears, but also from his own career: when he retired from the Commons, aged 40, in 1987 he cited his disgust with the Anglo-Irish Agreement as one of the reasons. And now, it was alleged, he was placing obstacles in the way of the ‘peace process’. He was credited with so much influence that one senior Irish official describes him as having been ‘effectively Prime Minister in respect