If
the devil is in the detail then Dean Godson’s
magisterial tome on David Trimble is a devil of
a work to get through. Not because it is tedious
– far from it – but even the best of anything,
if served up in outsized quantities, can bloat the
recipient. More knowledge is invariably better than
less – where to retain it all is the challenge.
The brain’s storage vault is like the receptacle
used by a hobbyist to store a collection of model
cars. Then this juggernaut of a thing lands in search
of parking space. The immediate dilemma is, ‘there
is no room for it, but it absolutely has to go in.’
We know the rest.
Arguably,
it is the second truly great book of the millennium
that saw its fecundity nourished in the Northern
conflict. It delves into the political life of David
Trimble in a fashion similar to the work of Ed Moloney
on Gerry Adams; the one crucial difference being
Trimble’s raw courage in cooperating with a
cross examiner whose thrusts would be anything but
tepid. In their respective genres, republican and
unionist historiographies, both books have set the
standard. Any qualitative epistemological advance
must first pass both, or forever sport the tag of
‘also ran’.
When
Trimble first assumed the leadership of the UUP
I recall someone bemoaning his lack of experience
– he had been an MP only five years. To which
the response was ‘but he has been an orange
bigot for fifty.’ While a view genuinely held,
shaped to a great extent by the visceral resentment
stirred by the ‘Dancing Davy of Drumcree’
imagery, Godson leaves little room for doubt that
it was patently untrue. In both his social life
and academic career, sectarianism was not the prism
though which others were viewed. The ‘not a
Catholic about the place’ jibe seemed one of
the few traditional refrains republicans held on
to, having discursively administered hari-kari to
almost everything else, before it too saw its currency
devalued.
There
are many reasons that David Trimble would have for
being uncomfortable with this biography. It positions
him, in the early 1970s, as being too close to the
UDA. A similar relationship on the nationalist side
between a ‘constitutional’ political activist
and the IRA may have led to the arrest of the former
and possible internment. Michael Farrell was gripped
for much less.
Godson,
while not sympathetic to the arrangements that Trimble
eventually settled for, provides his readers with
enough material to conclude that Trimble was the
first strategic unionist leader to emerge. Paralleling
the 1970s Adams position of ‘active abstentionism’,
Trimble aggressively pursued active consent. It
meant a readiness to ‘go anywhere and speak
to anyone.’ It was here that his formidable
intellectual prowess was able to come through. Difficult
to measure in the UUP where finding like to compare
with like was almost as difficult as finding a nationalist
in the party, when Trimble came to the negotiating
plate he took considerably more from it than his
republican adversaries managed.
A
crucial sub-narrative weaved throughout Himself
Alone, is the enormous impact of Tony Blair
on Trimble. The relationship forged between the
two men offers a fascinating window into the crucible
where structural and ideological unionisms converge
more often than they clash.
Setting
aside the concentration on Trimble, Dean Godson
has handed us an unrivalled account of the minutiae
of the peace process. In mastering its brain-death
inducing tedium, he has performed an intellectual
miracle and, in literary terms, brought the dead
back to life.
