Book review: The arc of change — from firebrand unionist to unlikely peacemaker

Stephen Walker’s fine biography will ensure David Trimble will be long remembered as a flawed man who made an enduring impact on the lives of many in bringing peace to Northern Ireland

Former Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble was the inaugural first minister of Northern Ireland, 1998 to 2002.

• David Trimble: Peacemaker 
• Stephen Walker 
• Gill, £26.99

On becoming first minister of Northern Ireland in 1998, David Trimble appointed a man named Graham Gudgin to be his economics adviser. 

In an interview with Stephen Walker, the author of this cradle to grave biography of Trimble, Gudgin recalls joking that the only problem with being an economic adviser to David Trimble was that, firstly, he had no interest in economics. 

And secondly, he didn’t take advice from anyone on anything. It is a telling anecdote about a man, whom Walker claims, changed the political landscape of Northern Ireland.

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Walker points out that Trimble did take advice from Gudgin, and indeed many others, on all sorts of political and policy decisions, both large and small, but it is clear that, over anyone else, Trimble trusted himself most of all.

With considerable brio, Walker traces Trimble’s journey from the firebrand of the William Craig-led Vanguard movement who opposed the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 to the angst-ridden leader of Ulster unionism, whose support of the Good Friday Agreement a quarter of a century later was so crucial to peace in Northern Ireland.

Based mainly on extensive interviews with Trimble’s family, friends, political allies, and enemies, Walker’s Trimble is a man of principle and contradiction, a man of peace and division, a man of ambition and doubt, who inspired deep loyalty and even deeper loathing.

Former prime minister Tony Blair and former taoiseach Bertie Ahern signing the Good Friday Agreement, which was supported by David Trimble. File picture: RollingNews.ie

Throughout the sweep of Trimble’s life, Walker captures his brittleness and power, his cunning and naivety, his highs and lows, his glory and tribulations, his domineering arrogance and his crippling doubt as he moves slowly from the margins to the centre stage of Northern Irish politics, where he makes one of the most crucial decisions in all of Irish history; the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, or the Belfast Agreement as he always called it.

Some will quibble with the title of the book: Peacemaker, given Trimble’s early support of Vanguard and his antics on the Garvaghy Rd in the summer of 1995, when one senior Northern Ireland Office official described his behaviour as “disgraceful”, while another noted “the dreadful Trimble did his best to obstruct and spoil” an agreement in Portadown during the height of the marching season. 

But, as Walker persuasively points out, there can be little doubt that Trimble was central to peace in Northern Ireland. 

Amidst the accusations of traitor, sellout, and Lundy, it was the Orange Order’s hero of Drumcree in 1995 who ultimately led the Ulster Unionist party into the Northern Ireland Executive with Sinn Féin just three years later.

These terms of abuse hurt Trimble deeply, as he was a unionist to the core, and there were times when he could have taken the easier road of the Dr No of Ulster unionism, Ian Paisley, but Trimble had something of the man of destiny about him. 

The 1998 Nobel Peace Prize laureates David Trimble and John Hume, displaying the diplomas and medals they received during the awarding ceremony in Oslo.

And that destiny was to deliver the enormous prize of peace to a Northern Ireland blighted by sectarianism, to which he contributed, since its foundation, and by violence for the three decades up to when Trimble made that fateful decision to do a deal with Sinn Féin, whom he loathed with every fibre of his being. 

As his daughter Vicky, says of him: “Without my dad, we might not have peace in Northern Ireland.” And she is right.

To get to that place, Trimble had to perform some pretty sinewy moral gymnastics and while his place in history as one of the architects of peace in Northern Ireland is secure, this book shows what an odd character he was. 

He couldn’t abide the Labour Northern Ireland secretary of state, Mo Mowlam, feeling Tony Blair, not her, was his equal. 

Four years after the Good Friday Agreement, he told an Ulster Unionist Party conference, without a trace of irony, that the Republic of Ireland was a “pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, monocultural state”.

It was as if having done the peace-making deed, he could barely bring himself to make it work.

Walker had the support of the Trimble family in writing his book and one of its strengths is he shows how Trimble, the family man, influenced Trimble the politician. 

He particularly highlights the influence of Trimble’s wife, Daphne, in his extraordinary political journey. 

As Mary McAleese said of Trimble: “The arc of change for someone like him was really quite remarkable, and so there must have been someone quite remarkable in his life … And I credit Daphne with a lot of that.”

Walker’s Trimble is of the great man school of history but he is keenly attuned to how the structures of Northern Irish society produced men such as Trimble, John Hume, Gerry Adams, and Ian Paisely, three of whom played crucial roles in the Good Friday Agreement and one who although he loathed it, ultimately made it work when the Democratic Unionist Party entered power sharing with Sinn Féin close to a decade later.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume was the pinnacle of Trimble’s career, although it is amusing to read that Trimble’s greatest nightmare in the lead up to the announcement when it was clear that he was on the shortlist was that he would have to share it with Gerry Adams. If that was the case, he was ready to withdraw.

But life after the Good Friday Agreement and the Nobel Peace Prize was difficult for Trimble. He always felt that both republicans and the Labour government in Britain alike did not do enough to implement the agreement fully and had not enough consideration for the internal difficulties he faced within unionism. 

Less than seven years after the jubilation of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he lost his Westminster seat to the DUP.

Embittered with unionist politics rather than unionism, he joined the Conservative party in the vain hope of having an influence on the wider politics of the United Kingdom but although he was ennobled into the House of Lords his time had passed.

Trimble disappeared into the political loneliness of those who cannot understand why they have been forgotten, but Walker’s fine biography will ensure that he will be long remembered as a flawed man who made an enduring impact on the lives of many through his immense contribution in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.