David Trimble: Tributes to late peer ignore his opposition to NI Protocol, says Jim Allister

Mr Allister said: “It is interesting that many of those effusive in praise of Lord Trimble over the Belfast Agreement, studiously ignore his telling rejection and intellectual dissection of the protocol, which he saw as conflicting with the supposed consent principle of the agreement.”

He continued: “The selective appraisal of Lord Trimble by the great and the good does a disservice to the man. Though politically we fundamentally disagreed over the Belfast Agreement, latterly as joint applicants in the judicial review challenge to the protocol, we shared a common determination to rid Northern Ireland of this iniquitous assault on our constitutional position.

“David had a very clear and correct view of the dangers and unacceptability of the protocol but many who push another agenda are keen to avoid this fact.”

Even in the months leading up to his death, Lord Trimble railed against the NI Protocol stressing over and over again that it violated the principle of consent at the core of the Belfast Agreement.

In May the former first minister wrote that the current protocol regime “cannot continue” and that Brussels seemed oblivious to the concerns the UK government were now raising about social, economic and political instability it was causing in the Province.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Nobel Peace prize winner claimed that the government and unionists had been met with “a brick wall of intransigence” from the EU.

He challenged Downing Street to “act on its responsibility to safeguard the future of Northern Ireland and replace this damaging and community-splitting protocol”.

Lord Trimble continued: “It grieves me that the arrangements which I and others gave so much to achieve are in danger of collapsing, as a result of the Northern Ireland Protocol.”

He added: “The protocol also removed any votes on the laws which will be made in Brussels, now imposed on Northern Ireland and enforced by the European Court of Justice.

“Consent and democratic legitimacy have been torn from the Province by the protocol. That is why I and other unionist leaders intend taking our legal challenge to the Supreme Court.”

The protocol, he contended, had damaged “the pillars of consent and cross-community agreement” at the centre of the 1998 peace deal.

He was also sharply critical of some American politicians whom he said “say they support the Good Friday Agreement, yet this denial of democratic control and dilution of British sovereignty over part of the UK has the opposite effect”.

Lord Trimble said: “If they did care about the Good Friday Agreement, they would realise that this protocol doesn’t command support from any unionist representative in Northern Ireland. How does anyone expect the Assembly, which is based on decisions being made by consent, to function?”

The former Upper Bann MP’s last major work before his death was for the London-based think tank Policy Exchange, which was founded by his official biographer Dean Godson.

In one of two forewords written in May and published in June for a paper questioning the existence of an all-island, all-Ireland economy Lord Trimble wrote that as a result of the protocol “the Good Friday Agreement was trashed”.

Accusing the EU of failing to understand both the detail and spirit of the Belfast Agreement, his foreword continued: “The UK and unionist role in terms of their Good Friday Agreement rights was stripped out of in favour of ‘full implementation’ of the protocol. This was clearly incompatible with the model for east/west relations outlined in Strand 3 of the agreement.”

He described the current stand-off between London and Brussels as “a test of wills” which he hoped the government would not “flunk”.

His foreword also had a message for the DUP: “The present unionist leadership has a part to play. It has to show that it fully commits itself to bring back power-sharing not only because it is right but also because it will impose a duty on others to act responsibly.”