Daphne Trimble: David knew he had done the right thing in terms of the Good Friday Agreement

“It’s all been so poignant,” she says.

"In a way I’m glad that I’ve had a bit of time between his death and the celebrations because if it had happened in the first few months I just couldn’t have done it.

"Equally, and this sounds awful, I’m glad that it didn’t happen during his last few months when he was so ill because he would have wanted to go to everything and he wouldn’t have been able to.

"He did attend his portrait unveiling at Queen’s. That was a big thing for him. But he was in hospital the next day and he passed away inside a month. I think he had just kept himself going for that.”

Former First Minister, Nobel peace-prize winner and leader of the Ulster Unionist Party from 1995 to 2005, David Trimble died on July 25, 2022, aged 77, following a short illness.

The Trimbles had been married 44 years and Daphne, 70, an affable, diminutive woman with a towering intellect, says she “misses absolutely everything about him”.

​"I just wish he was here to see people actually finally paying tribute to him for what he did. Although, I think he did know people appreciated what he did.

“Any time he went out to Tesco, or wherever, strangers would come up to him and say ‘thank you’. He knew he had done the right thing.

"We have people walking the streets today who would not be if we hadn’t had the Agreement. We have people being able to live their lives and educate their children and go about their day-to-day lives in peace and that’s absolutely huge.”

Daphne Trimble is in the comfortable lounge of her Lisburn home – a room full of items belonging to her late husband – his hundreds of opera records and CDs, his honorary degrees, his books and photographs, including a recently found canvassing leaflet, which is propped up on a cabinet – her favourite picture of her late husband.

The Trimbles have always lived and brought up their four children – Richard, Vicky, Nicolas and Sarah- in this house in a quiet cul-de-sac of detached properties with manicured lawns, however, there were times when their security team suggested they should live elsewhere. Daphne, however, was having none of it.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of moving. They said we were too close to Poleglass and Twinbrook. But as well as loving it here, there was so much going on.

"I didn’t think that I could cope with the stress of finding another house and moving and maybe having to find other schools for the children, because the pressure would have been to move into the constituency and it would have had to be Portadown, Lurgan or Banbridge. It was stressful enough without taking on that as well, so we just said ‘sorry, we’re staying’.”

Born Daphne Orr in 1953, Lady Trimble, is a former politician and solicitor, honorary president of the UUP and an academic who served on the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission.

She met David Trimble when she was a Law student at Queen’s University and he was her tutor and nine years her senior.

“We had quite a small tutorial group and I remember when I was doing my finals I was thinking, who are the lecturers that I will miss seeing again, and he was top of the list. Then we hit it off a bit. There was a post-exam cricket match, so we gelled a bit there and the rest is history.”

The couple were married in 1978 and whilst they tried to maintain a normal family life with their four young children, going on annual driving holidays to camping sites in Europe, there were times when life was far from normal.

"I remember back in the day, even before David was an MP, when he was going to Ulster Unionist meetings up and down the country and the feeling that you would have in the pit of your stomach until he was safely back home again.

"You would worry would something happen or would there be somebody waiting outside the house with a gun. That’s what it was like – not just for us, but for any police families or prison officers or anybody who put their head above the parapet. You just had to be constantly vigilant, you had to look under your car every time you took it out.”

She recounts fairly matter-of-factly the time she held a letter bomb.

​"Three letter bombs were sent to David. He was in London so he was never anywhere near them. Two were sent to party headquarters and one was sent to the constituency office.

"There was myself and David’s secretary Stephanie and we could see that this was not a normal letter- there was black powder pouring out of it. We poked at it and prodded it and looked at each other and said ‘we better call the police’.

“A young police arrived very quickly and inspected it and said ‘I think we better call the bomb squad’, who arrived and cleared the street and said it was a viable device. That’s what life was like.”

During the time of the Good Friday negotiations Daphne recalls evenings at home poring over the minutiae of documents with her husband.

”He ran ideas past me. At the time the talks were going on it was pretty intense and he would come home with the current draft and we would sit and go through it word by word for him to see what I made of it, because I was a fresh pair of eyes. I had training as a solicitor and at that time I was reasonably capable of looking at legal documents.”

With the benefit of hindsight did David ever say if he would have done things differently in the the run up to the Agreement?

“No. He knew that it had to be done. He obviously didn’t know what the exact nature of the Agreement would be, but he knew that it had to be done.

"This goes back years because when he was in the 1971/72 Convention and he was there as a Vanguard Unionist they very nearly came to an agreement and he was quite instrumental in writing the report which was for a form of power sharing, but on the last day of the convention it all fell apart and David ended up almost in the wilderness, politically, for a number of years, because he did join the UUP. His introduction to politics was through Bill Craig and Vanguard and I think that’s probably why people tended to think of him as a hardliner, which he wasn’t.

“He always knew that a deal had to be done and it was a question of what are the circumstances under which you can do the deal. It took until 1998 to get across that line. He always said that he went into politics to do something and he did it.”

Did David have a sense that negotiating a peace deal with nationalists would ultimately cost the UUP its position as the main unionist party?

“I don’t think it mattered. It was most important to get the Agreement done and to get the process moving forward. He might not have ever articulated it, but Mike Nesbitt when he was a leader had a mantra, ‘country first, party second, individual third’. That’s certainly what David’s driving force was.”

*The second part of this interview ('We celebrated the Belfast Agreement with fish and chips') will be published on Monday.