Trimble
Henry McDonald
Bloomsbury £16.99, pp342
Buy it at BOL
How to explain David Trimble's current position as the perhaps mortally wounded Unionist leader who negotiated Sinn Fein into a partitionist settlement? And what could Martin Smyth, a politician who gives every impression of not knowing how or when his sentences will finish, offer that Trimble, the cleverest leader Unionism has produced, can not?
Trimble applied to join the Ulster Unionist Party in 1978, after several years oscillating between law lecturing at Queen's University, Belfast and providing ideological input for Vanguard, an extreme right-wing unionist paramilitary force instrumental in destroying the 1973 Sunningdale agreement, the first attempt at power-sharing in a devolved Northern Irish Parliament.
His application to the UUP was approved by 103 votes to 100, too small a majority to allow him automatic entry into Ulster's political establishment. But though the rules were bent for this talented and ambitious intellectual, the painfully slim majority illustrated that, for a large section of the UUP, Trimble was not and never could be 'one of us'.
Trimble became leader of the UUP in 1995, after the 75-year-old James Molyneaux was forced to resign by the UUP's men in grey suits. Molyneaux's departure was precipitated by a stalking-horse candidate who secured a mere 15 per cent of the UUP's ruling council, the same body that gave 68-year-old Smyth 43 per cent of the vote.
Trimble became leader by assiduously cultivating his right-wing, nay-saying pedigree. Here was an articulate, intelligent candidate capable of taking Unionism beyond its traditional enclaves. Trimble's infamous post-Garvaghy Road prance with Paisley reassured traditionalists that his modernity was not too modern.
Now, there are weekly protests outside Trimble's home, his wife receives constant abusive telephone calls, and the man who made Unionism welcome in Washington finds a former friend in his own constituency pleading with the Nobel Prize winner to do the 'honourable thing' - to take a bottle of whiskey and shoot himself because of his treachery. And despite most unionists being against the Belfast Agreement, Trimble apparently remains committed to the kind of power-sharing agreement he helped abort in 1973.
Henry McDonald's valuable and readable biography helps explain the unpleasant, unenviable position Trimble faces today. Throughout his book, McDonald shows how Trimble has always had the respect, even admiration, but never the affection of ordinary UUP members.
Where Molyneaux's integrationism effectively eliminated the possibility of civic, political development within Northern Ireland, while also masking traditional Unionism's reluctance to confront power sharing with Catholics, McDonald presents Trimble as a consistent advocate of devolution.
In part, this is because Trimble has never lacked the intellectual confidence to confront Republicanism. He introduced a cultural component to the UUP's otherwise saccharine Queen and Country patriotism, even if this involved the odd notion that the Republic of Ireland was a 'foreign country'.
McDonald is good on Trimble's Vanguard allegiance and does not flinch from highlighting his selective attitude to dialogue with paramilitaries: 'Trimble helped write what was the first-ever serious political document produced by the loyalist paramilitaries... Trimble was not just flirting with the loyalist terrorists; he was giving them political and constitutional advice.'
Described as a 'red-hot militant' by a Vanguard colleague (well placed to recognise one), McDonald praises Trimble's willingness to incorporate, for Unionism, an eclectic range of intellectual influences - maverick Jesuit priests, the newly-pacific Official IRA, the unclassifiable Ruth Dudley Edwards and concepts of sovereignty and independence borrowed from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Trimble embraced these and more to develop a form of 'self-determination' for Ulster, a brand of independence where, McDonald claims, citizenship would supplant religion and the benefits of the Union would become available to all.
McDonald's account of Trimble's early contact with Tony Blair is an important aspect of this process. Though a devout Presbyterian, Trimble seems genuinely uninterested in confessional politics, even if he is lamentably indifferent to the impact of some of his actions and rhetoric on the nationalist community.
Talking to Billy Wright at Drumcree, for example, is considered excusable, despite the consternation it caused among his own Catholic constituents. But if Trimble does not equate Protestantism with Unionism, some UUP colleagues still do. With depressing regularity, McDonald quotes liberal figures within the UUP constrained by unapologetic sectarianism: Chris McGimpsey, for example, a Trimble supporter, is told bluntly that only Taig-haters prosper within the party. And this is the flank that the opera-loving, academic Trimble, the man committed always to seeing opposing view-points, has failed to dislodge.
If the Orange Order's 120-strong block vote had not automatically swung behind Martin Smyth last week, Trimble's agenda would today be in a far healthier state. The logic of his secular drive, surely, is to terminate the UUP's links with Orange politics.
But as McDonald notes, one of Trimble's failings as a politician is his leniency with dissenters. He seems incapable of dealing with renegades like Jeffrey Donaldson. He may have forged cordial relations with Bertie Ahern and availed himself of advice from former IRA killer Sean O'Callaghan, but for McDonald, it is the 'black-and-white certainties' of traditional unionism that need to be confronted.
How Trimble can do that is not clear when this fascinating, though not impartial, book ends in November 1999. This week, as Trimble compares the 15 per cent who supported the stalking horse that dislodged Molyneaux with the Reverend Martin Smyth's 43 per cent, it is perhaps even more unclear.
