That night, Trimble and the Prime Minister again found themselves under the same roof- this time at the Mandela state banquet in Buckingham Palace. The Queen was ‘most solicitous’ he recalls, but the Duke of Edinburgh pointed at Trimble and teased the UUP leader with the words ‘oh, ho, ho – so they managed to drag you away from the barricades?’; afterwards, Trimble told fellow Loyalists privately that the Sovereign’s consort had a good grasp of the situation at Drumcree.33 Jeffrey Donaldson claims that when Trimble returned the next day, the UUP leader told him, ‘Major will give me a victory’, so long as they went through the motions of conciliation. Trimble says that the state banquet was very conveniently timed, but he denies that Major promised him that the march would go down the road; and Major agrees with Trimble’s recollection that no such pledge was given.34 Whatever really occurred between the Prime Minister and the UUP leader that night, the visit to London did Trimble little good amongst the brethren in the fields outside Portadown. Many of them felt that he had gone to sup with a terrorist, in the person of Mandela; others saw the pictures of Trimble in white tie and tails and felt that he had let down his own people by abandoning his post to enjoy the high life.
The scene when Trimble returned on Wednesday 10 July was about as far removed from the niceties of Buckingham Palace as it was possible to imagine. The Reverend John Pickering, the Rector of Drumcree parish, had been unable to sleep all night and at around 1:45 p.m. was packed off to bed by his wife. According to his private diary, he was still lying down in the late afternoon when he received a telephone call. A huge mechanical digger was moving round at the top of the hill – and metal was being welded on. Pickering informed Trimble, who said there was no such device. ‘You’d better take another look,’ said Pickering. When he saw the digger, Trimble became very concerned.35 Trimble recalls that senior RUC officers were also very worried about the digger – it had been nicknamed ‘police buster’ – and contacted Trimble to see if the UUP leader could do anything about it (there were also rumours that slurry tankers filled with petrol were being readied to spray the RUC). Key players such as Harold Gracey did not know where the digger came from, though Denis Watson believes it must have originated in a local construction firm. Trimble went up to the digger and clambered on to the vehicle, which according to Denis Watson was manned by loyalists in boiler suits. Billy Wright sat there, calmly sunning himself on a deck-chair, whilst the men welded on more armour plating. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ Trimble asked them. They gave him short shrift and one of them denounced him as an MI5 agent. He was rescued by some Orangemen: Denis Watson says that ‘David Trimble is a very lucky man he wasn’t murdered at that stage.’36 Harold Gracey recalled telling Trimble ‘“David, go you out of the way” – and he did.’ Gracey then spoke to the men, whom he said that he had never seen before or since, and they switched off the engine. ‘Okay, we’ll do it for you, but not for him’ (that is, Trimble).37
But the danger of them driving the digger at police lines during the night remained. Trimble then knew that there was only one option open to him. He had to find the one man reputed to enjoy influence upon these militants: Billy Wright, who had acquired an almost folkloric status amongst hardline loyalists in the region as ‘King Rat’. Trimble had never met Wright before – the UUP leader states that Wright was not visible to him at Drumcree I – though the Portadown loyalist was certainly known to him as an aggrieved constituent. Wright had once turned up in his Lurgan office to complain about alleged harassment by soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment/Royal Irish Regiment: Trimble’s secretary, Stephanie Roderick, recalls that Wright was very polite but that he had the coldest, most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen.38 According to Trimble – who had the matter verified by his security spokesman, ex-UDR Major Ken Maginnis – some UDR/RIR soldiers had put a bounty on Wright’s head: those soldiers on patrol who observed Wright obtained a £50 bonus, whilst there was a £25 bonus for sightings of Wright’s side-kick, Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton. Indeed, in a Commons debate on media coverage of terrorism that he himself had introduced in 1992, Trimble had condemned a Channel 4 Dispatches programme, entitled The Committee, which alleged that there was a secret body consisting of senior RUC officers, businessmen and politicians to plan the assassination of republicans. Wright appeared on the programme, leaving Trimble with the impression he engaged in paramilitary activities with the approval of the police.39 ‘I hold no brief for Mr Wright,’ declared the MP for Upper Bann. ‘I am told that he is a gangster who tries to cloak his crimes with political motivation, occasionally gets involved in sectarian crimes about which he then boasts to journalists, giving interviews to them regularly. Whether he has committed all the offences of which he boasts I do not know, but I can hazard a fair guess as to why he collaborated with Dispatches and gave credence to the accusation that some RUC officers collude with paramilitaries … He had a clear interest in harming the police force.’40
The full truth about Wright will probably never be known. What can be ascertained is that Wright was 35 years old in 1996. He apparently joined the Young Citizen Volunteers – the YCV, or the youth wing of the UVF – aged fifteen after the massacre of ten Protestant workmen at Kingsmills in his home patch of south Armagh in 1976.41 Like so many who had felt the sharp end of republican terrorism, he moved to the northern part of the county where he determined to make a last stand. At that stage, he had never been sentenced for any offence, though in the early 1980s he had been remanded for one year on charges of murder and attempted murder; these were dropped.42 He originally supported the loyalist ceasefires of September 1994, but soon became disillusioned. Wright reserved particular disdain for the ‘doveish’ Belfast leadership of the PUP-UVF. Much of the PUP-UVF ideology was based upon the notion that they had hypocritically been pushed into ‘fighting the war’. The PUP-UVF asserted that the Protestant working class had suffered as much from Stormont’s neglectful policies as their Catholic counterparts. Since their men had been dying and going to jail to maintain the privileges of the Unionist elite, they were now entitled to an independent political perspective. At times, the PUP spoke of how much they had in common with the Provisionals in terms of shared experiences of deprivation. Such talk was anathema to Wright. Leave politics to the politicians, he asserted, and let us provide the muscle. Wright believed that the PUP-UVF were putting their socialism ahead of their Unionism and that the UVF should be a broad church in terms of its ideology. He regarded men like David Ervine as traitors and saw the PUP as the pawns of British intelligence, seeking to create further splits in the Unionist bloc. They, in turn, believed that Wright was a drugs dealer who used the cause of Ulster to further his criminal ends.
Trimble met with Wright twice, once in a room in the church hall, once in the vicinity of the digger. On one level, Trimble found it disgusting. Wright told Trimble ‘quite mendaciously’ that he had not been involved in the killing of McGoldrick. On the other hand, recalls Trimble, ‘he was rational. He wasn’t stupid by any means. It was easier to talk to him than the men on the digger.’ Trimble