Fintan O’Toole: David Trimble was the only unionist leader to break Paisley’s noxious spell

At the annual conference of the Democratic Unionist Party in 1998, its founder and leader Ian Paisley ranted about a “traitor” so contemptible that he was not worthy even to be named: “I will leave it to the people of Ulster to detect for themselves the traitor and then pass their own verdict.”

This faux anonymity was a rhetorical trick. Everyone knew the traitor’s name: David Trimble. Paisley, in full apocalyptic mode, presented Ulster Unionist Party leader Trimble as in fact the living bearer of another, even more infamous name: Judas Iscariot.

In a twist on the same rhetorical device, Paisley told his congregation that there were “no words in any language . . . adequate to describe” so vile a creature as this reincarnation of the arch-betrayer.

But he thought of a few words anyway: “He is a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, a knave, a thief, a loathsome reptile which needs to be scotched.”

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This was not mere impotent rage. Trimble would indeed be “scotched” by Paisley. In 2005, he suffered the humiliation of losing his own parliamentary seat of Upper Bann to the DUP. His party was shattered and his own political career was effectively over.

Paisley’s revenge was completed two years later, when he became first minister of Northern Ireland in coalition with Sinn Féin, effectively reaping for himself the political crop that he had denounced Trimble for sowing.

It is ironic that the image of Trimble most likely to come to mind for Catholics and nationalists is that of him and Paisley in 1995 walking down the mostly Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown, at the head of an Orange march. After a bitter standoff with the local Catholic population, the sight of the two men joining hands and doing a little jig of glee seemed to embody a shared sense of sectarian triumphalism.

But the image is deceptive. For Trimble’s career cannot be understood without reckoning with the reality that no one despised him more than Paisley did. And that this hatred was well directed because Trimble was, ultimately, the one unionist leader who managed, for a few crucial years, to break Paisley’s noxious spell.

Without Trimble’s decision to negotiate and sign it, there would have been no Belfast Agreement. And without his courage in standing by it for long enough to make it a reality that even Paisley had to accept it, the agreement would not have held.

The paradox is that even though Paisley ultimately won the political battle, he did so on Trimble’s terms. It was the “loathsome reptile” that, in a reversal of the biblical plot, made it possible for Paisley to enter the Eden of government.

The epic sweep of history cannot be reduced to the doings of “great men”. But individuals matter. And on April 10th, 1998, the individual who had to make the ultimate call was Trimble.

In Making Peace, his memoir of the process, the chair of the talks, George Mitchell, chose to open the story with the deep uncertainty, right up to the last moment, about whether Trimble would sign.

The Ulster Unionists, he recalled, were meeting in closed session and contradictory rumours about which way they were going to jump were flying: “They were against it; they were for it. David Trimble . . . was in control; Trimble had lost control.”

The uncertainty was rooted, not just in the obvious divisions with unionism, but in the enigma of Trimble himself. Who, at this moment of truth, was he – the apparently unreconstructed tribalist of the Garvaghy Road or a much more complex and courageous figure?

Trimble, in reality, was never a natural firebrand. He came from a reasonably comfortable middle-class background in a town, Bangor in Co Down, that had very few Catholics and was certainly not at the front line of sectarian division.

His first political campaigns were in support of a moderate unionist MP, Basil McIvor. Without the eruption of the Troubles, there is little reason to doubt that Trimble, a church-going Presbyterian and loyal Orangeman, would have been quite comfortable as an academic lawyer and pillar of a slowly liberalising unionist establishment.

Like so many others, he was radicalised by the Troubles. In his case that meant being drawn into the orbit of William Craig, the hardline home affairs minister who sought to crush the civil rights movement by force.

Trimble became one of Craig’s acolytes in Vanguard, a reactionary movement that, with its militaristic rallies, raised-arm salute, cult of personality and quasi-military Vanguard Service Corps had more than a flavour of fascism.

In May 1975, however, Craig suddenly proposed, in an interview with The Irish Times, a radical scheme for compromise in Northern Ireland: a coalition between the Unionists and the SDLP, and a pact between Belfast and Dublin along the lines of the agreement between the Benelux countries on common economic and political interests.

In their superb biography of Paisley, Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak write that “Craig had a reputation for stubbornness, but erstwhile colleagues were astonished that unionism’s toughest right-winger had suddenly decided to stake his whole future on this one abortive experiment in moderation.”

It is striking how closely this description could have been applied to Trimble himself 20 years later: an erstwhile right-winger who staked his whole future on an experiment in moderation.

Two things about this moment in 1975 help to illuminate Trimble’s subsequent career. One is that he strongly supported Craig’s attempt at a rapprochement. The other is that he got a very quick lesson in what Paisley could do to unionist compromisers.

Paisley was not initially hostile to Craig’s plan. But, as he would do so often, he saw a political opportunity in violent abuse of traitors.

In a preview of what he would do to Trimble in 1998, Paisley denounced Craig and his allies as “a race of collaborators and quislings” and the compromise plan as a “holding operation for the final victory of the terrorists”. Craig was effectively finished as a political force.

‘Angular and difficult’

Trimble was very close to the centre of this episode. It gave him every reason to be wary of being outflanked in militancy by Paisley. But it also made his ultimate decision to make a historic deal all the more courageous and clear-eyed: he knew from experience that Paisley would try to do to him what he had done to Craig.

Trimble may be a rare example of a man who rose to the top in politics by being seen as personally rather unpleasant. His rebarbative personality operated as a kind of camouflage – a spiky exterior hiding a coolly intelligent pragmatist.

Trimble was not a gracious man. For him, the word “bonhomie” would also be qualified by “false”. A distrust of Irish plámás was, in him, more than a caricature of Ulster Presbyterian attitudes – it was a political personality.

Gerry Adams, who complained that Trimble “treats everybody like sh**e” may not be the most convincing of witnesses. But the much gentler Maurice Hayes attested, to Trimble’s biographer Dean Godson, to “a gracelessness, leading to a rudeness that is even more embarrassing to witness than to experience”.

Even his friends and admirers admitted that he could be, in the words of the former London editor of The Irish Times Frank Millar, “angular and difficult”. By his own account, in Millar’s excellent book, David Trimble: The Price of Peace, he “regularly got irritated” and “snappy over small things”.

His colouring perhaps did not help. His complexion was such that a rush of blood to the head was all too literally visible – as he acknowledged to Millar “people see me getting red-faced and they assume I’m about to explode”.

Trimble recalled for Millar a time when he was five years old and got into such a temper with another boy that he just put his head down and ran at him: “The other lad of course did the smart thing and stepped to one side, and I ran straight into the wall.”

Yet Trimble’s great achievement was actually to stop unionism (for a while at least) from running into brick walls. And his lack of charm helped to make this possible.

Trimble’s personal irascibility was usefully deceptive. It gave him a reputation as a unionist hard man that was at odds with his record of relative moderation.

If he had needed to be liked, he would have achieved nothing. If he had not had a certain indifference to what people thought of him, he would have lacked the thick skin that seemed impervious to Paisley’s vitriol. If he had not been a natural loner, more comfortable in intimate company than in crowds, he would not have been able to withstand the assault of charismatic demagoguery.

While Trimble could say, quite nonchalantly, that “It’s not my job to be accommodating to people”, most politicians would reply that that is precisely what the job entails. In that narrow sense, Trimble was a terrible politician – and that is what made him, in a much broader historical sense, an indispensable man.

He accommodated himself, not to people, but to political reality. From his support for Craig’s 1975 plan to his consistent support for devolution over integration, he understood that unionism had to negotiate with Catholics its own survival. Even at Drumcree, Trimble was constantly exploring the possibility of compromise – including with the Catholic cardinal, Cahal Daly.

His basic perception after the mid-1980s was that unionists had allowed themselves to become marginalised by the Anglo-Irish Agreement. A sterile policy of surly refusal to engage in political negotiations meant, as he later put it, that “there as a hand to be played that wasn’t being played”.

He understood that that hand was not going to get any stronger over time. It had to be played while it still contained some aces.

Trimble was also astute enough to realise in 1996 that the long era of Conservative rule in Britain was coming to an end and that Tony Blair was going to be the next prime minister. He began, thorough intermediaries, to pass outline proposals for a deal to the then opposition leader.

Moment of opportunity

He may not have realised just how far Blair would go in bringing Sinn Féin (and implicitly the IRA) into this process, but he fully understood that there was a moment of opportunity in which he could do a deal in which the IRA accepted the reality of partition and Irish nationalism bought in to the principle of majority consent within Northern Ireland.

It might be said with justice that some of this acuteness was well hidden from outsiders. In her memoir, Mo Mowlam, who was Blair’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, wrote of Trimble that “My early concern was that I didn’t think he had the courage and determination to lead the Ulster Unionists in difficult times ahead.”

But as negotiations progressed, her opinion altered: “David showed an iron will to keep going with, at times, very little support. He was very impressive.”

George Mitchell, too, came to admire the way Trimble kept his balance during the complex and tedious talks, even while he “threaded his way through a minefield of problems, guided by his intelligence, his sure grasp of the political situation, and his determination to reach agreement”.

There are times in history when “stubbornness” becomes “iron will”, when self-righteousness becomes determination to do the right thing, when it doesn’t matter that you walk without grace so long as you can pick your way through a minefield.

Trimble was the man for those times. He understood what he had to do and was prepared for the insults he would get for doing it. His death is a sad reminder that unionism lacks such a figure now.

It might be said of Trimble and the unionist community what Jonathan Swift said about himself and the Irish: “That nation he has left his debtor. I wish it soon may have a better.”