"Put not your faith in princes," Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, said as he was beheaded in May 1641. He was quoting from Psalm 146 in the Book of Common Prayer.
Wentworth was King Charles I's lord lieutenant in Ireland, the front man for the English king's dirty work here in the 1630s. Surely the king would not let him down? In fact he came to a sticky end.
It so often happens to the tool of policy. Who now remembers Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the patsy for British policy in Rhodesia in 1979? Mr Nice Guy, he was the first, and last, black prime minister of Rhodesia, heading a government formed after a constitution ratified by a 'referendum' from which blacks, 96 per cent of the population, were excluded. He lasted 11 months before being swept aside by Robert Mugabe who renamed the country Zimbabwe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had the wit to keep de Klerk's white administration at arm's length when they tried the same ploy with him.
You could multiply examples from all over the world. The most obvious current one is the doomed American-appointed Iraqi governing council, one of whom has already been murdered. None of them has any future in Iraqi politics.
The general rule seems to be, the more you are associated with the policy of outsiders the more certain you are to come a cropper. No, you don't even have to be associated with their policy. All you have to do is be their favourite politician or party. It's the kiss of death.
Does David Trimble feel that, now that Tony Blair has decided an election is on the cards, an event Trimble has been desperate to avoid since last year, deal or no deal? For five and a half years now Trimble has been the acceptable face of unionism for the British government. They've indulged his every whim, supported his veto on every issue, tolerated his tantrums, even acted as his spokesmen. Now he's on his own.
Trimble is such a terrible liability in election campaigns that he would even have blown the referendum in 1998 if TB, as his acolytes call him, hadn't zoomed over and rescued the 'yes' campaign with a flick of his electoral muscle. Who was to know then that TB's style was fatally flawed with half-truths which have all come home to roost? Unionists will never forgive him for his white-board list of promises written in his own fair hand.
So an action replay by TB is out of the question. No one trusts him. His appearance would copper-fasten Trimble's image among unionists as the British government's local patsy. The last thing any party leader here needs is to be shored up by the NIO, to have his success bound up with the hopes of a British government.
Trimble now finds himself in the position of all UUP leaders since the collapse of the old Stormont. In his book Home Rule Professor Alvin Jackson has expressed their dilemma best. He points out that after 1972 unionist leaders were not expected to govern, but rather to mediate between unionist public opinion and Westminster policy, and that so far they have been unable to accommodate themselves to this diminished and dangerous role.
Trimble's method has been to claim an inside track in Downing Street. That still means, however, that he presents himself as the British government's man, always a fatal position for a unionist since unionists have never trusted a British government. It is equally clear to unionist public opinion that Trimble has been unable to halt or change British policy but merely to delay it, frustrating though that may have been to nationalists.
Any election poses this question for Trimble: how many unionists can he recruit to support British government policy as mediated by him? At the moment the answer is, not enough. Not because the DUP will overwhelm the UUP but because Trimble has lost control of his own party, a big chunk of which doesn't trust him. He has fallen into the impossible position of opposing British policy and its ramifications verbally within his party while at the same time trying to persuade the British government and the unionist public here that he wants to execute it. No wonder it's so easy for Nigel Dodds and Peter Robinson to show the gap between what he says and what he does.The simple truth is this. There is not a sentence in the Good Friday Agreement that is or was unionist policy. The language is all nationalist: the three strands approach is a nationalist analysis. We have the bizarre picture of a unionist leader carrying out a nationalist project for a British government, the north's very own Bishop Muzorewa.
