Trimble
Henry MacDonald
Bloomsbury, £16.99, 288pp
Buy it at BOL
Henry MacDonald must have chewed his fingernails over when to end this interim biography, opting finally for November 1999 and the gamble of setting up Ulster's devolved government in hopes that the IRA would decommission weapons by March.
David Trimble - as is now brutally clear - put himself on the line by offering his Unionist colleagues a postdated letter of resignation if that didn't happen. The result, of course, is that his position has been safeguarded only by the suspension of the executive: "The End" cannot be written yet. But the decommissioning issue was looming inexorably very early on: it was always the ghost at the unlikely love feast of Republicans and Unionists. Or, as opera-freak Trimble might prefer, the Commendatore's statue knocking at the door.
MacDonald's Trimble is not exactly Don Giovanni, but he emerges as an unpredictable and talented man. The author's stance is firmly pro-Trimble throughout; still, many of his judgments carry the impartial conviction of the experienced journalist he is (the IRA's attempts to claim parallels with South Africa are scathingly dismissed in favour of less welcome assonances with the situation in Israel or Serbia).
He is good on Trimble's rise from speccy nerd in Air Force Training Corps photos, encumbered by the class-ridden baggage of a petit-bourgeois Ulster Protestant background, through reactionary Unionist to trailblazing moderate. Personal touches are few, apart from a delectable interview with an ex-brother-in-law from Trimble's first, failed marriage to someone bearing the quintessential Irish-Protestant name of Heather.
The brother-in-law turns out to be "ex" in more than one sense; thanks to a sex-change he is now an ex-sister-in-law called Tina. Tina's description of that first wedding is vintage stuff, suggesting that Northern Ireland badly needs its Alan Bennett. Trimble is now happily married to an equally inevitable "Daphne". It is clear that much of his career has involved learning from early mistakes, and sharply changing direction.
Thus he shifted from civil service apprenticeship into academe, via the impressive feat of achieving a first-class degree by studying part time at Queen's. MacDonald convincingly portrays him as a classic academic in politics. But there are aspects of his past which always threaten to do a Commendatore, one of them being his membership of Vanguard - the extreme Unionist group set up by William Craig in the mid-1970s, which attacked modernising Unionists such as O'Neill and Faulkner as "quislings", and paraded in public with a sinister paramilitary back-up.
Trimble was also a vociferous know-nothing rejectionist of the 1973 Sunningdale agreement, the last attempt to set up a power-sharing devolved government for the province. MacDonald gives every excuse for Trimble, who was old enough, and certainly intelligent enough, to know better. It is one of several hostages to fortune given early in his career - making excuses for anti-constitutional action, describing negotiation with nationalists as "contamination" and, above all, his triumphalist Orange march hand in hand with Ian Paisley at Portadown in 1995.
Of course, if you believe that he was a closet moderniser all along, you will read this as Trimble cleverly manoeuvring himself into a position to wrest the leadership from the antediluvian lizard-figure of Wee Jim Molyneaux - which could only be done from the right of the party, rather than (as John Taylor seemed to promise) the moderate left. Once ensconced, Trimble could set about ridding Unionism of its prehensile tail.
MacDonald reveals that Trimble seized Paisley's hand on that fateful day simply to stop the Big Man invading his political turf and monopolising it. This may be so, but the overall portrait suggests something less calculating: a process of self-education on the hoof rather than a Machiavellian game plan. Trimble is always the autodidact, always the university lecturer: even in his Vanguard days he was still handing out texts (Hueston's essays on constitutional law) to his no doubt incredulous comrades.
The Machiavelli theme is provided, in this treatment, by his tutors: clever journalists and ingenious academics such as Ruth Dudley Edwards, Paul Bew, Eoghan Harris and Sean O'Callaghan - ex-Marxists, southerners, sophisticates from a very different world. Trimble himself learns to "spin", contributing anonymously to Fortnight magazine in its glory days as "Calvin McNee". Seamus Mallon's acid quip that the 1998 Good Friday agreement was "Sunningdale for slow learners" might have been coined specifically for Trimble.
But MacDonald also shows how far back Trimble's links with Blair go, and how early he spotted New Labour's impatience with the sentimental knee-jerk Republican assumptions of their predecessors. He also spotted an even more vital shift in attitudes: the new-look Irish Republic's devout wish to distance itself from anything like a United Ireland, which was subsequently proved by the near-unanimous referendum to change the constitutional articles claiming the territory of the North.
The Armani-suited Sinn Feiners may have been slower on the uptake than the distinctly un-soigné law lecturer. In MacDonald's reading, Sinn Fein went along with the negotiations on the assumption that the Unionists would wreck them - and found themselves finessed into underwriting a solidly Partitionist agreement.
This makes a certain sense, without necessarily implying that the Republicans then fell back on a hard line against decommissioning in order to extricate themselves. The interesting point is that Trimble, unlike many of his allies, is a realist who spotted both the illogic of integrationism Molyneaux-style and the irrelevance of United Irelandism to Dublin's Celtic Tiger cubs.
Moreover he is, by Ulster standards, a secularist: one of MacDonald's most unintentionally hilarious interviews is with a local clergyman determined to claim a deeply religious motivation for Trimble, against all the evidence. His Nobel speech, after all, not only admitted that Unionism had built "a cold house for Catholics" but also invoked Amos Oz, Edmund Burke and George Kennan rather than any of Unionism's traditional household gods.
He is still the academic with the shambolic desk, still handing out reading assignments - although nowadays that means giving the US President Malachi O'Doherty's The Trouble With Guns, a highly intelligent critique by a disaffected Republican. And he retains an academic propensity to see the other person's side of the question, both a strength and - when dealing with ambitious dissidents such as Jeffrey Donaldson - a weakness. Towards his conclusion, MacDonald quotes (rather too often) the dictum of another Italian prince, the hero of di Lampedusa's The Leopard: things must change in order to remain the same. This book is published at a time when it is not yet clear if both sides in Northern Ireland realise that it is also desirable for things to change in order to become different.
• Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish history at the university of Oxford and the author of Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Penguin).
