Editorial: Parliament’s fitting tribute to a political giant, the late Lord Trimble

​The unveiling of a bust of Lord Trimble in Westminster highlights the huge contribution the former Ulster Unionist leader made not just to Northern Ireland, but to British politics.

For over thirty years, he served in both the House of Commons and then in the Lords – where he became a Conservative peer.

​The Nobel laureate will perhaps be best remembered for securing the 1998 Belfast Agreement, in the face of bitter opposition from within unionism.

However, parliament’s permanent tribute to his memory also shows the respect Lord Trimble has earned within the mother of parliaments.

There are many who hold deep and sincere views about what the Ulster Unionist Party signed up to in 1998. That is acknowledged in today’s News Letter by one of David Trimble’s successors.

However, Lord Empey says Northern Ireland is a much better place for the tenacity shown by Lord Trimble – and says a key achievement is that the future of the Union is now in the hands of the people, not Whitehall officials and the Irish government.

However, before his death in 2022, David Trimble warned that the deal he had secured for unionism had been undermined by the post-Brexit trade arrangements.

He said that the Northern Ireland Protocol “rips the very heart out of the agreement” – which both he and the unionist population “believed safeguarded NI as part of the UK and ensured that democracy not violence, threat of violence or outside interference, would or could ever change that”.

The political class at Westminster need only look at the instability created by the Protocol to see that Lord Trimble’s warning was correct. Action to restore the political balance he created would be a further and final tribute to his legacy.