Trimble ready to test rivals' mettle

Trimble supporters hope his opponents are all talk and no action, writes Frank Millar , London Editor.

Trimble supporters hope his opponents are all talk and no action, writesFrank Millar, London Editor.

Is it time finally for David Trimble to vacate the Ulster Unionist leadership? MP David Burnside and his parliamentary colleague Lord Kilclooney (Mr Trimble's former deputy, the still formidable John Taylor) clearly think so.

Moreover, both men think they may have fashioned the means by which Mr Trimble might make a dignified exit. Mr Burnside has not yet said it as explicitly as Lord Kilclooney. However, the indications are that he and other senior figures on the right are also prepared to back Sir Reg Empey - once Mr Trimble's most loyal lieutenant and champion of the Belfast Agreement - as the man best placed to reunite the Ulster Unionist Party and bind its wounds.

With no formal challenge yet declared, other candidates cannot be ruled out. However, Mr Burnside has emerged as the driving force behind the strategy, first revealed in The Irish Times, to replace Mr Trimble with a "corporate leadership". And its operative assumption is that such a leadership team must be "centre-led". The irony will not be lost on Mr Trimble. Not so very long ago, he would have been only too happy to have Sir Reg succeed him as First Minister at Stormont.

READ MORE

Indeed the widespread expectation for a time was that this was precisely what would happen during the life of the second Assembly. In the context of successful devolution, Sir Reg would in turn have beaten the now departed Jeffrey Donaldson for the party leadership, leaving Mr Trimble free to retire to Westminster, a big job in Europe or a lucrative career on the American lecture circuit, his place in history secured.

Beyond the ranks of the UUP, too, this struck senior figures in Dublin's Department of Foreign Affairs and in Sinn Féin as a most agreeable prospect after years of tiresome dealings with the ever angular and often angry Mr Trimble.

That, of course, was then. Now Mr Trimble finds Sir Reg apparently sponsored by Mr Burnside, always actually a more authentic leader of the UUP's "No" wing than Mr Donaldson. Inevitably, too, Trimble loyalists divine a pattern of behaviour here which they say sits uncomfortably with the notion of Sir Reg as unifier. For did he not lend himself to last year's plot for an Empey/Donaldson "dream ticket" succession?

And anyway, they demand, why put the party through the trauma of ditching Mr Trimble (the superior politician) only to replace him with someone who was at his side through all the major decisions which so divided the UUP and resulted in its election defeat by the DUP last November?

The disloyalty charge will grate with Sir Reg and, in fairness, he would not be alone among pro-agreement unionists in thinking to have stayed loyal beyond the call of duty. Against that perception of Trimble as a superior politician, moreover, it can also be argued that - in distancing himself from the leadership last summer - it was Sir Reg (albeit late in the day) who showed the keener awareness of the shifting forces within the wider unionist community. A number of leading pro-agreement figures also encouraged the pursuit of the "dream ticket" option - not out of any disloyalty to Mr Trimble - but rather through fidelity to the Belfast Agreement; a suspicion that Mr Trimble had carried the project as far as he could; and a conviction that a greater consensus was necessary inside the UUP if it was to be rescued.

Crucially, it was the recognition that Mr Trimble's bare majority was an insufficient basis on which to manage his party which ensured that - on arguably the most fateful decision of the entire Trimble leadership - Sir Reg was emphatically not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him. And many, including Trimble loyalists, are agreed that if this bandwagon carries a successful corporate leadership bid now, it will be powered above all by that disastrous and failed attempt to expel Mr Donaldson, Mr Burnside and the party president, the Rev Martin Smyth MP.

Some reading this may wonder why they should care whether Mr Trimble stays or goes, or who might succeed him. They can be counted among those who have already concluded the game is up for both Mr Trimble and his party; that one unionist party is the inevitable response to Sinn Féin's ascendancy; that it doesn't matter much anyway because the essential terrain of any viable settlement in Northern Ireland is accepted even by the DUP; and that it is really only a question of how long it takes the two power blocs to come to terms.

This judgment is premature, although it may ultimately prove correct. In which case the historians may also conclude that the DUP's ascendancy became irreversible on the day the UUP leadership resumed its disciplinary action against Mr Donaldson, so enabling him finally to follow his instinct, bury his own ambitions and join a Paisley party to be led in time by Peter Robinson or Nigel Dodds.

Neither UUP faction will concede anything of the sort.

Mr Trimble's supporters insist November's election outcome was better than expected; that there is relief at Mr Donaldson's departure; and that the defection of many of his followers finally gives Mr Trimble security in the ruling Ulster Unionist Council. Mr Burnside's allies insist the UUP must continue to speak for the many unionists for whom the DUP is not an acceptable voice, while acknowledging that unionist realignment is the big issue once Dr Paisley and Mr Trimble have departed the stage.

Mr Trimble has no plans for a voluntary departure, although even those loyal to him feel plots against him are also fuelled by his failure since November to explain why he wants to stay, and to what end. Against that, he has previously been blessed by the quality of his opposition and their capacity to talk a good challenge but then fail to deliver. And he is counting on them again.