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

on the Arms for Iraq affair was scheduled for debate on 26 February 1996. If the Government was defeated in the House, it would trigger a vote of no confidence. Not all Conservative MPs were solidly behind the Government and attention again focused on the Unionists’ intentions. From the Conservative Government’s viewpoint, the initial signs were not hopeful. In an interview with Roy Hattersley, Trimble had told the former Labour deputy leader that he was appalled by the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates (the gagging orders produced by the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, which were said to have prevented ministers from revealing information on national security grounds that would have shown that the defendants in the Matrix Churchill case had acted with the state’s approval).¹⁹ He was thus less worried by the Government’s Iraq policy than by the fact that innocent men might have gone to jail for raison d’état. No less important, the former law lecturer believed that Lyell gave poor legal advice – and had stated as much as early as the original debate on the Arms for Iraq affair in November 1992.²⁰

      But Trimble could not now afford the indulgence of thinking like some independent-minded backbencher. The UUP’s stance would have also to be based upon the Realpolitik of Unionist interests. It was a close call. On the one hand, Trimble was dubious about how much he could extract from a weak Government. ‘Major can’t deliver much on his own,’ he told Hattersley. ‘[I would prefer] a strong Government with the confidence to take difficult decisions.’ Hattersley stated that Trimble did not believe that such a Government existed then. ‘Ireland [sic] cannot go right for Major in any big way before the election,’ predicted the UUP leader. ‘It can only go wrong. That means that we are likely to have another year of stalemate.’²¹ On the other hand, although Trimble may then have felt that the prospect of New Labour was more congenial, there was still much short-term business to be transacted with the Conservatives (whom Labour would broadly back as part of the bi-partisan approach towards Northern Ireland). The most immediate item on the agenda was the method of election to the new body proposed by Trimble: he feared that the Government was at this stage leaning to a variant of the DUP’s preferred system (which, for a variety of complex reasons, also benefited the SDLP and thus mitigated nationalist hostility). The Paisleyites wanted a Province-wide poll based on a party list system, as in the European Parliamentary elections, which was well suited to maximising the large personal vote of their chief who would then barn-storm the Province. The Ulster Unionists, by contrast, wanted a single transferable vote in the constituencies, which would maximise their greater strength in depth further down the ticket. If a Paisley-friendly system emerged, it could conceivably destroy Trimble and inflict a serious blow to his conception of New Unionism. His fears of a deal were confirmed when one colleague heard from Paisley himself that the three DUP MPs would not enter either lobby for the Scott vote; indeed, Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, recalls that the Government communicated via NIO civil servants that an electoral system more in line with DUP needs would be introduced – though, as he points out, the linkage was hinted at rather than being ‘crudely made’.²² Trimble believes that the NIO has quietly favoured the DUP over the years as a means of weakening the solidarity of the Unionist bloc and specifically of its largest component, the UUP. But perhaps of greatest significance to the Government was the fact that the DUP might potentially participate in such a representative institution with Sinn Fein at some point in the future – assuming there was a ceasefire and that republicans would then take up their seats in such a body. Quentin Thomas had been impressed from the early to mid-1990s by the point made to him by senior DUP politicians that they could not voluntarily agree to share power with nationalists; but, they added, if such an outcome was forced upon them and sanctioned by a particular kind of electoral process (as on District Councils, where committee chairmanships were shared out proportionately according to party strengths) then the DUP would not decline to fulfil their democratic mandate and take up their allocated slots.²³

      But Trimble still had to treat with the Tories, and examine what, if anything, they had to offer. If they offered something very tempting (approximating to the UUP’s preferred system of election) Trimble could not possibly say no. But if the Government made no such offer, Trimble might as well stick to his principles and obtain a bit of credit with an increasingly powerful Opposition. What happened next remains a matter of dispute between the Tories and the Ulster Unionists. To this day, Conservatives assert that Trimble appproached the Government to make a deal; Trimble says that on each occasion, he was approached by the Government. Trimble met twice with Major on the night of the vote, in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s chair. On the first occasion, between 6 and 7 p.m., Major urged Trimble to support the Government. Trimble explained to Major that he was in some difficulty because he had reason to believe that the Prime Minister had done a deal with the DUP: irrespective of the merits of the Scott case, he would look ‘bloody stupid’ if he supported the Government that week and then a week or so later an election system emerged that ruined his party’s chances. ‘I’m not in the business of damaging the UUP,’ replied Major.²⁴ But Trimble noted that the Prime Minister did not contradict his assertion that there was some understanding with the DUP. Major added that he could not say what kind of electoral system he would deliver since he had not told anyone else and could not have it said that he had preferred one party over all others. On the second occasion that night, Trimble says he was approached in the tea room by the Conservative Party chairman, Brian Mawhinney. ‘The boss wants to see you,’ Trimble recalls Mawhinney saying.²⁵ Mawhinney, by contrast, says that he asked Trimble in the course of a more general conversation if he wanted to see the Prime Minister. In other words, states Mawhinney, he gave Trimble the option of speaking to Major and the UUP leader chose to make the effort to avail himself of it.²⁶ When Trimble arrived, Major was in the room with Michael Heseltine; the chief whip, Alistair Goodlad; and Mawhinney. Trimble expected Major to say something, but he did nothing of the kind. Instead, the two just sat there and looked at each other. One witness to the scene recalls Major stating that ‘I will not do a deal with you’ and Trimble replying that ‘I will not ask you to do a deal’: it was as if both men were waiting for the other to make the first move.²⁷

      Trimble says he did not believe the Government’s assertion that there could be no deal. He thinks they were, indeed, in the market for trading policy concessions in exchange for UUP support. Rather, it was simply not their first choice to rely on the UUP, especially after the furore in nationalist Ireland over the British response to the Mitchell report. They needed to show that they could not be bought specifically by the UUP. A DUP abstention was, by contrast, somehow a less explicit assertion of the Unionist family’s ‘hold’ over the Government than a UUP vote for the Government. The support of the DUP was arithmetically less valuable and ideologically less predictable than a link-up with the UUP (and they were less close to the Tory backbenches than the UUP). Thus, in a peculiar way, the DUP was in these circumstances less threatening to nationalists. Specifically, a deal with the DUP afforded certain advantages to the SDLP: if enough votes haemorrhaged from the UUP to the DUP, the SDLP might receive the huge boost of becoming the largest party in Northern Ireland. The DUP and SDLP also had strong personalities at the top of the ticket, namely Paisley and Hume. But ministers still entertained doubts over the reliability and deliverability of the DUP. Because the Government was not sure until the last minute what the DUP might leak, it kept its options open. The likeliest explanation of what happened is that once it thought it had the DUP in the bag, Major et al. sought to make a virtue out of not doing a deal with the UUP.

      Trimble next remembers coming out into the division lobby after the vote – in which the Government scraped by with 320 votes to 319 – to be met by a torrent of abuse from the Tories.²⁸ This, he suspected, emanated from Mayhew who had alleged that the UUP leader sought to blackmail the Government. Mayhew never felt comfortable with political horse-trading (he himself