Trimble's defeat at polls puts heat on Dublin and London

Has David Trimble finally run out of luck? That was the question exercising thoughtful Ulster Unionists yesterday as they savoured…

Has David Trimble finally run out of luck? That was the question exercising thoughtful Ulster Unionists yesterday as they savoured the scale of their defeat in South Antrim. And this was defeat of potentially seismic proportions.

Fearing the worst, some commentators in advance had hopefully offered that perhaps the real comparison should be with the UUP/DUP breakdown in South Antrim in the Assembly election in 1998. In that context, victory for the Rev Willie McCrea would appear neither as surprising, nor as instantly threatening to the entire peace process.

Yet however much they may have wanted, few Trimbleists could quite believe it. Until the early hours of yesterday South Antrim ranked as the Ulster Unionist Party's second-safest parliamentary seat. Suddenly it had fallen to a newly resurgent DUP, once again savouring the possibility that it might emerge as the party of the unionist mainstream.

"That's seven lives he's had," confided one dejected Trimble aide: "I've counted."

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From Mr Trimble himself came the defiant assurance of life left yet; the promise that he would stand and fight. "We've had a setback," he declared, "but we're not quitters." The unanswered question in the minds of some of his strongest supporters is: fight whom, and to what end?

In defeat Mr Trimble blamed the Patten Commission and the British government, and by extension the Irish Government and the SDLP.

"The main reason we attribute to the loss of this seat is the Patten report and the treatment of the RUC by her majesty's government," said Mr Trimble. "The Ulster Unionist Party will have to reflect on this result. More importantly, the Prime Minister and the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Mandelson, will have now to address the problems unionists have with Patten."

The defeated candidate, Mr David Burnside, appeared to blame Mr Trimble. The result, he said, betrayed unionists' fear that their British identity was under serious threat; that the peace process had become "a drip-by-drip appeasement process" to republicans; and that his party leadership had "moved too far from the authentic voice of unionism".

Mr Jeffrey Donaldson MP was on hand to hammer home the message. "Time to draw a line," he insisted, as he called on his colleagues to withdraw from the Northern Ireland Executive.

The recent leadership challenger, the Rev Martin Smyth, was more direct. Speaking on BBC Radio 4 barely hours after the declaration, the South Belfast MP said Mr Trimble would have to change tack or resign.

Maintaining he had made no decision yet about a fresh leadership challenge, Mr Smyth said Mr Trimble was not giving unionism the leadership it wanted and would have to consider his position.

As speculation grew about which tactic the anti-agreement forces would choose - another leadership challenge, or an attempt to tie Mr Trimble to a fresh closure date for decommissioning, or the reinstatement of the RUC title? - it was left to Mr Ken Maginnis MP to turn the Trimbleist fire back on Mr Burnside.

Rejecting Mr Donaldson's "nonsense", the Fermanagh MP said the South Antrim result was "a signal from the electorate that they don't want ambivalence. They want to know where their party stands."

The hope in Irish Government and SDLP circles will be that this line can hold. Certainly in the higher echelons of the nationalist leadership there has long been a view, largely unspoken, that Mr Trimble must ultimately find liberation from his party's "rejectionists".

While happy to continue to battle to keep the Glengall Street title deeds, some of Mr Trimble's Assembly supporters, too, suspect a formal split is inevitable. They know that taking the Brian Faulkner/Unionist Party of Northern Ireland route would be hazardous. Their hope would be that the Assembly Party would remain faithful to Mr Trimble should he lose his majority in the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), so keeping alive the prospect of salvation in fresh Assembly elections farther down the road.

Detailed investigation of this option suggests that not more than half the UUP Assembly members would be prepared to so resist any democratic decision by the UUC against the agreement.

There is no indication that Mr Trimble himself is seriously attracted by the idea.

It would seem to wholly ignore the objective evidence - borne out by South Antrim - that Mr Trimble is the minority shareholder within unionism, dependent on Assembly arithmetic which would not be replicated if the Assembly contest was rerun tomorrow.

In a general election year, moreover, it disregards the now serious possibility of a realigned unionism, effectively led by Mr Donaldson and Mr Peter Robinson, mandated to seek renegotiation of the Belfast Agreement.

This is the essential context in which the First Minister and UUP leader ponders his options this weekend. And the worry for Dublin and the SDLP will be the echo in Mr Trimble's words of Martin Smyth's assertion that Patten has "soured" the unionist community.

The message from South Antrim, Mr Trimble maintained, was that unionists had been carrying "the strain" of the agreement. Now nationalists must bear their share of the load by meeting unionism's concerns over policing, and the para militaries by quickly beginning to decommission their weapons.

Even as Mr Trimble spoke, Mr Gerry Adams was turning the heat on him and Mr Mandelson, warning the British government it had but one chance to get the policing issue right. "Nationalists and republicans will not join, support or endorse what is currently proposed," he avowed, placing responsibility for the "crisis" firmly on "the British government's management of this issue."

So, again laid bare, the policing and decommissioning fault-lines which could yet see the Good Friday accord implode. Yet Mr Adams's words also point up a third fault-line. For this is Mr Ahern's crisis, too. And for all the talk of shared commitment and joint ownership of this process, it is remarkable that Dublin and London can think to reconcile the competing claims of unionists, nationalists and republicans without having established and sustained consensus of their own.

The word "crisis" may have been over-employed in much peace process commentary. But Mr Adams has found the right word for this moment. A very real crisis is gathering for the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister. They have little time to act; and it is they who must.