I first got to know David Trimble when treading the Northern Ireland beat for the Sunday Telegraph during the mid-1990s. He was suspicious of the integrationist position of the paper, inherited by Charles Moore, then its Editor, from T.E.Utley, his mentor on the Daily Telegraph.
Trimble was at that point a devolutionist, but had been closer to integrationism himself earlier in his career, and indeed to extra-Parliamentary activity – having been a candidate for William Craig’s Vanguard party during the mid-1970s, and a legal adviser to the Ulster Workers’ Council, whose strikes brought down the power-sharing Executive of the time.
So there is irony in Trimble – the hero of Orangeism at Drumcree in 1995, where he linked arms with Ian Paisley – himself taking up power-sharing a few years later. It was one of the three main pillars of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, which he co-championed to his personal gain and loss.
In the wake of the Agreement he became First Minister, going on to co-win the Nobel Peace Prize; but the Agreement, or rather the logic of the British and Irish governments who helped to create it, destroyed him and his Ulster Unionist Party – toppling it from its post-partition position as unionism’s dominant political party.
Maybe I should write “the logic of the peace process itself” – since this was preoccupied with pacifying the violent extremes of Northern Ireland: republican and loyalist terror. The former had a viable political vehicle: Sinn Fein. The latter did not. And by building from the more extreme outsides in rather than the more moderate inside out, the process found another beneficiary.
This was Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. Paisley was a practiced outsmarter of mainstream Unionists, having helped to finish off Brian Faulkner during the 1970s, and his DUP gradually ate up the UUP during the years that followed the Agreement, just as Sinn Fein marginalised the party of Trimble’s nationalist deputy, Seamus Mallon – the SDLP.
Trimble was a highly intelligent man. He was also, though relatively young in the 1990s, an experienced operator, both at the time of the Agreement itself and, a few years earlier, when elected his party’s leader as the more hardline of the two final candidates. (Or so many Ulster Unionist Party members believed; the other candidate was John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney.)
Didn’t he forsee the marginalisation of his party that would follow the Agreement? And anticipate his own fall from office and power as well as his rise to both? The answers are veiled in mystery because so are his motivations. Integral to Trimble was that he was Himself Alone.
This was the title of Dean Godson’s biography of Trimble, a kind of play with the meaning of “Sinn Fein” – ourselves alone. Godson was putting his finger on a sense of isolation, self-sufficiency and inscrutability that his subject somehow projected. Even more than many politicians, Trimble was a hard man to read.
I found that a key to him was his background as an academic lawyer. He had a way of seizing on a point that he had spotted, declaiming its significance – often with a grin and a flush (he reddened readily). And displaying a certain impatience with those he thought too slow to grasp it.
But politics is shaped as much if not more by those who can tell a story to an audience as those who can score points in courtrooms, and it is an aspect of both Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism that they have compelling stories to tell, especially in the eyes of America’s Irish disapora.
At any rate, Trimble went to the Lords after his political fall in Ulster, where he transformed himself yet again – becoming a Conservative peer with an eye to uniting the pro-Union politics of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I found him relaxed, twinkly-eyed, and convivial during this period.
Indeed, I was sympathetic, during my first year as a Conservative MP in 2001, to the exotic suggestion that Trimble should become Tory leader. Tony Blair was then at the apex of his power – and matching him with a Nobel Peace Prize winner had an ingenious plausibility about it.
But it was not to be, and I was sad to see Trimble’s work, achievements and memory marginalised by the DUP ascendancy. This has had baleful consequences for the Northern Ireland. For the DUP had rejected the Belfast Agreement (see Lee Reynolds’ ConservativeHome piece here for a fine exposition of its position).
Which meant that the party was poorly placed to argue that the Agreement was endangered by the Northern Ireland Protocol. Trimble and his former adviser, Lord Bew, ploughed a furrow arguing this case. But time had passed since his period as First Minister, and his political footprint was smaller. This did the cause of the Union no good at all.
Trimble’s Nobel Peace Prize co-winner was John Hume. The name of the former SDLP leader has a deep resonance still in nationalist Ireland. My sense is that Trimble’s has less than you might expect in Northern Ireland, and little here. This article is a very small stab at trying to redress the balance. I write thinking of his widow, Daphne, a peer herself, and their four children.