Next Monday the Taoiseach and Tony Blair will unveil the fruits of five months of the sort of 'inch by inch' negotiations Blair said he wanted no more of. Well, some of the fruits, because there are always elements of such negotiations not revealed to mere voters.
This much you can be sure of – already the republican agenda has been well publicised, they will have prolonged the talks to the last moment, squeezed the last ounce out of them and you will see most of what they got and what they gave. They will sign up. Unionists on the other hand won't even admit what they've been talking about – retaining the old 'single item agenda' lie again – and have prepared none of their people for the outcome and will spend the rest of the year trying to unpick what has been agreed.
Why do unionists perform this charade? First, Trimble does not want to admit the truth of the DUP jibe, 'He turns purple, then he turns turtle'. Securing an honourable deal with republicans is seen as treachery, any accommodation a departure from the traditional blind 'not an inch' unionist shibboleth that has served so badly for a century and cost so many lives. At the bottom of it all is competition for the unionist vote, the fear of getting too far ahead of the DUP and the shimmering Shangri-La of 'unionist unity', a chimera irrevocably shattered by Paisley in the sixties yet pursued in vain by every UUP leader and aspirant for that position ever since.
Listen to this gobbledygook from poor Jeffrey Donaldson last week as his latest lead balloon, the Stormont Principles clumped to the floor. "There is a fair degree of common ground. Unionism needs to unite. Whether or not that will be as one party remains to be seen". Ho hum. A couple of days later the charismatic Bob McCartney managed to attract a vast audience of about 30 in ethnically cleansed loyalist Carrickfergus to tell them, yes, you've guessed it, that there needs to be unionist unity or, 'the union will perish'. As Hamlet said, "tis a consummation devoutly to be wished". But don't hold your breath.
The fact is there are two mainstreams in unionism and always have been – even before Paisley formally separated them. The UUP represents the secular wing with a diminishing number of working-class voters, while the DUP represents the Protestant and fundamentalist wing that also embraces a spectrum running from bigots and loony-tunes like drug-dealing UDA white supremacists to sincere church-going ladies in Sunday hats and gloves. Truth to tell, the DUP is an object of ridicule and embarrassment to many in the UUP. Yet Trimble still hankers after the control the UUP exercised over the yahoos before 1968 – that sectarian solidarity that made their north 'a great wee place'.
Therefore Trimble will not sell the deal he will subscribe to next Monday. Instead he will portray the deal as a conspiracy by the British, Dublin, Sinn Féin, the Americans. Publicly he has avoided negotiations, privately he has resisted every inch of the way – but he is involved. Out he will come facing both ways at once, saying one thing doing another. As sure as night follows day his own dissidents will take him at his word. Since he's whingeing about the deal, then why not repudiate it? Donaldson has warned, "as soon as the proposals are made public there will be a special UUC convention". Now there's a surprise.No wonder the unionist electorate is confused. The latest opinion poll shows only a third of them now in favour of the Good Friday Agreement but two-thirds wanting it to work.
When you think about it, that's exactly what Trimble says. He claims to support the agreement but says it isn't working. He never admits that he's the main reason why it isn't.
The poll also showed 49% of UUP voters support the agreement. Is there any danger of Trimble working on UUP voters to encourage them a bit above the 50% mark? None whatsoever and why? Simple. Being an electoral genius who has lowered his party's share of the vote at every election since he became leader, Trimble fantasises that, just like in pre-1968 days the UUP can tuck some DUP voters under their wing if he sounds a bit like a DUP spokesman.
It remains eternally beyond his grasp that since DUP voters do not trust him as far as they could throw him, all he has managed to do is convince some of his own supporters that the DUP is right and to drive others to despair so that they don't bother to vote at all. Stand by for an encore next Monday.
