Henry McDonald: My memories of David Trimble, the man who charted a path through the fog

Both of us were stuck in a van-with-wings light aircraft circling over the famous Lancashire seaside resort.

Fog had descended over the town on September 30 1996 and our pilot patiently flew above it several times.

As we waited for the fog to clear I got into conversation about one of the future first minister’s passions – the operas of Robert Wagner.

Fellow journalist Hugh Jordan and myself quizzed him over why he adored Wagner given the composer’s notorious anti-Semitism and his widow’s later fixation on Adolf Hitler.

Lord Trimble managed with conviction to ‘divide’ the man from his music and even pointed out that a performance of Wagner’s work had only recently been performed in Israel.

His carefully constructed argument smacked of the legal expert he was before becoming a politician and his surprising rise to become Ulster Unionist leader.

Eventually we were diverted to land at Liverpool Airport where Lord Trimble didn’t forget about his two Wagnerian interrogators. We were all on our way to the Labour conference in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens where Tony Blair would enjoy a premature coronation as the prime minister in waiting the following year.

PR expert Richard Gordon hired a car at Liverpool and Lord Trimble kindly reminded him that “our two journo friends” should travel with them in the vehicle.

On that late foggy September day Lord Trimble was extremely anxious to reach Blackpool because he was making history – he would be the first unionist leader ever to attend a British Labour Party annual conference.

He had correctly concluded that Tony Blair was the coming man with whom he would have to do business once the New Labour leader entered 10 Downing Street. Lord Trimble knew that the Conservative and Unionist Party would be out of power for quite some time.

On that fog-engulfed plane he was realistic enough to dismiss a report in the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph that morning which claimed, without any evidence, that the Conservatives would soon enjoy an “autumn fight back” in the polls. He waved his hands dismissively, I recall, and said the Tories were in reality doomed to defeat.

Displaying pragmatism, he courted Blair and his entourage, and through some grit and steely negotiation managed to persuade the new prime minister in 1998 to water down much of the proposed North-South architecture of the Belfast Agreement, which would have been a bridge too far for the UUP and thus the breaking point of the peace deal.

Some of his critics in left-liberal circles have claimed he never ‘sold’ the agreement, ignoring the fact that he and his family suffered horrendous abuse and intimidation from extreme loyalists after the agreement was signed.

Although he could be tetchy with interviewers and journalists at times, he also never lost his humanity as I can attest to. In September 2011 when my mother was dying in Belfast City Hospital he was having cancer surgery. My mum was in a ward in one of the top storeys of the hospital and my sister was having a panic attack getting into the lift. Inside it was Lord Trimble in a dressing gown, not long out of theatre. He stayed with us and held my sister’s hand reassuring her she would be alright. He stayed with the two of us until we reached the upper floor to the ward our mother later died in.