Trimble was well satisfied with Clinton’s visit to Belfast, which on this occasion he found very even-handed; he particularly liked Clinton’s address at the neutral venue of Mackie’s plant on Springfield Road, where the President told the paramilitaries that ‘you are the past, your day is over’ (it was not, of course, to be: whilst Clinton was there, the IRA was making preparations to end the ceasefire).9 That night, the two men took their short drive together back to Clinton’s hotel. ‘He was tired, I was tired,’ Trimble recalls. ‘But he referred to the books I had given him in Washington. He had read them, and especially liked Ronnie Hanna’s’ (on American servicemen in Ulster during the Second World War). Clinton asked Trimble what he saw as the final outcome: the Unionist leader dwelled very much on Strand III of the Talks, outlining his vision for a Community of the British Isles. Trimble was thrilled with the meeting, and spoke about it to colleagues for some days afterwards. But contrary to what some believe, Clinton applied no direct pressure whatsoever on Trimble, either then or in the subsequent negotiations.10 Clinton would never say, for example, ‘don’t make decommissioning a precondition to all-party talks’. It was a more subtle process than that. Rather, Clinton would call Trimble and say something along the lines of ‘now what can I do for you at this stage in the process?’ or ‘how can we help?’ Often, the mere fact of a call from the President was pressure enough to maintain the momentum of the process. Clinton’s involvement was thus not a case of rape, but of seduction. Trimble undoubtedly gave the Americans a greater understanding of his position, but this ‘influence’ over American policy was bought at a price: the Americans now had a purchase upon the party leader’s calculations which they had never enjoyed before. Indeed, Jeffrey Donaldson recalls that Trimble’s fear of forfeiting unionist ’gains’ made in America was an important factor in his decision to remain in the talks after Sinn Fein’s admission on easier terms in 1997.11
Mitchell met with Major three times during his deliberations, with Ancram more often. Mitchell recalls that ‘the British repeatedly told me that David Trimble was in a difficult position politically, that there’s a political division in Unionism and we’ve got to help him work his way through that’. Ancram, he says, ‘told me that the elective route is very important to David Trimble and we want to see it in there’.12 Trimble, obviously, made similar points.13 Trimble’s position was strengthened by a poll in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 January 1996, which revealed that seven out of ten respondents in Ulster wanted a new elected body as the next step towards negotiations, including two-thirds of SDLP supporters and half of Sinn Fein’s constituency. But when Mitchell showed his report to the British Government, prior to publication, the results were not what they had hoped for. Mayhew’s secret paper, sent to his colleagues on the Cabinet’s Northern Ireland Committee on 23 January 1996, noted ’Senator Mitchell and his team were given a hard task … not surprisingly [they] have produced something of a curate’s egg. It is disappointing that they have accepted, without question, that the paramilitaries will not start decommissioning in advance of negotiations.’ Instead, it suggested decommissioning in parallel with negotiations. Mayhew had no problem whatsoever with the six Mitchell Principles of democracy and nonviolence, which he recognised would prove difficult for Sinn Fein (such as an end to punishment beatings) and the International Body’s rejection of the notion of equivalence between security force weapons and illegally held stocks. It noted that the Body ‘also recognises that an elective process, if broadly acceptable, could contribute to building confidence despite Sinn Fein and the SDLP’s public opposition to unionist proposals’. And it went on ‘we know that Sinn Fein expect the Body to pose some particularly hard (if not impossible) challenges for them. They also anticipate that the Body will not endorse Washington 3. Reporting indicates that Adams hopes that the British Government, by giving a premature negative reaction to the Body’s failure to endorse Washington 3, will relieve Sinn Fein of all responsibility for giving a positive response to the challenges posed to them by the Body’s report.’
But how would the British Government respond? Mayhew indicated there were three broad options:
‘(a) Reject the Report. This would be highly damaging. HMG would be exposed. There would be stalemate. Sinn Fein – as we know they hope – would be let off the hook: The nationalists and all their sympathisers, including the Americans, would stand together in holding HMG responsible for the continued impasse.’
‘(b) Accept the approach the Report canvasses. I do not believe that would be the right approach, without further consideration and development in consultation with all the parties. As it stands it provides too uncertain a basis for the necessary confidence. We need to test the response of the paramilitaries, and to take view of the parties including of course the UUP.
‘(c) Take a positive line in response to the Report, in no way abandoning Washington 3, but promote a modified way ahead involving an elective process, as identified by the Report albeit rather faintly, requiring broad support within the political track as the next stage.’
Mayhew continued: ‘I consider the third option offers the best way ahead. It enables us to take the initiative both in responding positively to the report and in putting forward a route to negotiations which builds on unionist ideas but will be difficult and damaging for nationalists to reject out of hand.’ As for the proposals for an assembly, Mayhew noted that ‘the attraction of some elective process is that it builds on unionists’ own idea. The DUP, UUP, and Alliance Party have all proposed some form of time-limited elected body. They have all said they would be prepared, without prior decommissioning, to sit down with Sinn Fein after an election for discussions … nationalists are opposed to such a body, but I believe their concerns could be met if:
– elections clearly gave direct access to substantive negotiations (ie without further insistence on prior decommissioning);
– those negotiations remained on the three-stranded basis agreed in 1991;
– there was a proper role, as in 1991, for the Irish Government in appropriate strands and the British Government in all strands;
– the negotiators themselves were drawn from the pool of elected representatives, avoiding unwieldy 90-member negotiations although the full body of elected representatives could be consulted at key points;
– HMG maintained its position that there could be no purely internal settlement.’
The document demonstrates several points. The first is the central importance of the UUP to the then Government’s thinking: no UUP, no process. This was a genuine article of political faith (though it was functional rather than ideological in character) which pre-dated the parliamentary arithmetic. Rather, the Government saw it as the Realpolitik of the Northern Irish political scene. The second is how even at this stage, the Government were seeking formulae which would dilute and even divest the elective route of its content as envisaged by the UUP, to make it bearable to nationalists. That, of course, was to be a hallmark of the peace process: for every advance by one side, there would be a counterbalancing measure in the next round.
Above all, does Mayhew’s paper show that the Tories ‘binned Mitchell’, as nationalists contended – thus showing their bad faith and tilting the balance in the IRA back to the ‘militarists’ as opposed to the exponents of the ‘political route’? For one thing, as was demonstrated during the trial of the Docklands bombers, plans for the resumption of full-scale IRA violence began prior to Mitchell’s appointment to the International Body, let alone before Major responded to his report.14 But on the point of ‘binning’, the record is less clear. It was not binned in the sense of the