Harry West: Harry West, who has died aged 86, was one of many jostling to lead unionism during its most chaotic period of disintegration, in the early 1970s.
A big, bluff farmer, most at ease in his Fermanagh acres, he made less impression on contemporaries inside unionism than his sometime fellow conspirators and later rivals, Brian Faulkner and Bill Craig. In the short-lived umbrella of the United Ulster Unionist Coalition, he was completely overshadowed by Ian Paisley.
West essentially voiced a single message, the attachment of outnumbered Border unionists to a devolved government in Belfast which unionists could control. He conspired against three successive unionist prime ministers as each in turn unwillingly urged reform under pressure from London. But his last contribution inside Brian Faulkner's cabinet was to urge him to give London "everything they want" rather than lose Stormont. His last public involvement was with the ineffectual and single issue "Charter Group" which argued for devolution in the late 1980s.
Harry West was elected to Stormont in 1954 as MP for Enniskillen after many years as a Fermanagh councillor. The owner of a large dairy farm, he became president of the Ulster Farmers' Union in 1956, a post he clearly relished. He was appointed Northern Ireland minister of agriculture in 1960 by his fellow Fermanagh landowner prime minister Basil Brooke, later Lord Brookeborough. Brookeborough's successor, Capt Terence O'Neill, sacked West in 1967 for breaking a code of conduct for ministers which O'Neill had established on his arrival four years earlier.
The Northern attorney general said West had bought farmland which Fermanagh County Council was considering acquiring, with financial support from Stormont, to build the "St Angelo" airfield. The affair caused a flurry of public interest, but damage to West's reputation in unionist eyes was limited by awareness that O'Neill was locked in battle with him and other ministers about reform, and by O'Neill's lack of management skills. The bluff Fermanagh man won sympathy easily over the ex-Etonian.
O'Neill's autobiography noted that West was one of a group which met at Faulkner's house in 1965 to plot how best to force O'Neill's resignation. He recalled the St Angelo business in typical style, feline swipes mixed with compliments: "There was no question of dishonourable conduct . . . nor was I prepared to introduce measures to keep up to British ministerial standards and then have them flouted. Though never a reformer, his most usual utterance 'Fermanagh will never stand for it', Harry West was nevertheless an entertaining member of cabinet and a good mixer. He once went to Russia on an agricultural visitation and the stories he told on his return kept us in fits of laughter. So long as Ulster was cosy and unreformed, Harry was well suited to office."
Harry West opposed the civil rights movement and complaints of discrimination against Catholics from the perspective of Fermanagh, where the crudest of gerrymandering had been necessary to maintain unionist control of a county with a considerable nationalist majority. He told the Twelfth parade in Enniskillen in 1967: "It could be that the type of unionism which is being advocated today would not have been accepted by our forefathers. If this type of diluted unionism had been common in 1920 then it is doubtful if Northern Ireland would have been born at all." Nationalists had been encouraged "in their quiet waiting game".
He denounced the establishment of the Cameron Commission to investigate discrimination as an O'Neill manoeuvre to support further "concessions". The civil rights movement was a "cloak for our traditional enemies".
Brought back as agriculture minister by Faulkner when he became prime minister, West then succeeded Faulkner as leader of a party split by Faulkner's support for the power-sharing executive of 1973-4. In the following years West was perhaps the least influential of several prominent figures - Bill Craig, John Taylor, the Rev Martin Smyth, and later Jim Molyneaux and Enoch Powell, as monolithic unionism first disintegrated then thrashed about, its leaders often quarrelling bitterly and aware of loyalist paramilitarism's increasing profile.
When the UUUC backed the loyalist strike that brought down the power-sharing executive in 1974, West and Paisley were slower to take part than Craig. In 1977, when Paisley tried a rerun, West opted out. In ways he was much less suited to confrontation than many around him, a big man whose size never seemed geared to aggression.
His electoral record put paid to whatever prominence he originally had. He won the Fermanagh-South Tyrone seat in Westminster in February 1974 and lost it in October to the independent republican Frank Maguire. In 1979 he stood in the North's first European election and was eliminated on the fifth count: Ian Paisley won 170,000 first preferences to his 57,000. He promptly resigned as party leader and was succeeded by Jim Molyneaux, with whom he had shared an unconvincing double leadership for some time, Molyneaux leading the Westminster party. West believed Molyneaux was plotting to oust him. With untypical sharpness he described his successor to Molyneaux's biographer Ann Purdy as a very small man, physically and mentally.
But perhaps his most crushing disappointment was his electoral defeat by the hunger-striker Bobby Sands in 1981, when he stood again for the Fermanagh-South Tyrone seat. Republican supporters yelled and cheered when the results were announced, West's election agent Noreen Cooper, his cousin, wept, and West said through gritted teeth he was horrified to learn how many of his fellow-Fermanagh people supported the IRA.
If developments inside unionism over the past decades exercised him, he has said little though he told a BBC interviewer in 1991 : "It was a very foolish exercise and greatly to be regretted that we allowed Ted Heath to take away our democratic institutions." He added: "I readily admit that I was wrong in pressurising Brian Faulkner and his government to introduce internment. We did not know police intelligence was so poor at the time."
Harry West lived through decades of IRA violence to see republicans dominating the political representation of his beloved countryside west of the Bann. Ian Paisley reminded his audience yesterday at the launch of the DUP's proposals for restored devolution that he had been West's deputy in the UUUC and paid tribute to him as "a traditional unionist who served his day and his nation well". West had travelled many miles to oppose the Sunningdale agreement, said Paisley.
He was part of an extended family network in Fermanagh which includes the younger moderates James Cooper and Raymond Ferguson, now among the dwindling band of veterans in the party who support David Trimble.
West is survived by his wife Maureen and seven children: William, Rosalind, John, Diana, Mary-Lou, Ronald and Rupert.
Harry West: born 1917, died February 5th, 2004.