The Robinsons: Paint an Inch Thick

Mulling the possible fall-out of the Peter & Iris Robinson Debacle on Newsnight last week, scholar Paul (Lord) Bew warned viewers to be aware first of all that ‘there is no-one to the left of Peter Robinson in the DUP.’ Now, there’s a thought to make you gulp: Bew is right, of course, and it’s been that way for a while, and yet the plain statement of the truth does chill the blood somewhat. (The excellent David McKittrick summarises the state of things well in today’s Independent.)
The abrupt termination of Iris Robinson’s ludicrous political career is, of course, to be warmly welcomed. One always assumed that she was a contemptible hypocrite, but never that she would end up trumpeting the fact to us all with such fanfare. No further attempt on her part to show off the contortions of her Protestant conscience could afford her the slightest pathos – truly this is the sort of woman (cf. Wilde) whose hair would turn quite gold from grief. But she had a good run, absolutely maximised her limited abilities in life, and was able to carry on in the grandest manner. Now, as Hamlet instructs Yorick’s skull, ‘Get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’
What of ‘Peter’, as McKittrick calls him with, one assumes, some sort of friendly regard? He looks to be on the out, for sure. He appeared red-eyed on television the other day, though his legendarily pinched and sour persona of the 1980s and 1990s makes him another hard fellow to feel sorry for. 'In all of my public life', he insists, 'I have acted in the most professional and ethical way.' That goddamned self-advertising Protestant conscience again. Says who, Peter?

I will always remember him as the would-be DUP autocrat trapped in the mountainous shadow of Ian Paisley: a chap with a decent mind who nonetheless affected a trench coat and tinted glasses, a nerd trying to be a thug, as when, notoriously, in 1986, he led a Loyalist mob to the little Monaghan town of Clontibret, in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. What idea of Ulster those eejits thought they were upholding by breaking windows and daubing graffiti on schools, the Lord only knows, but Robinson watched over the cudgel wielders and pronounced that this was Good. His subsequent attempts to squirm out of the legal consequences of his actions ought to have been the moment he learned to stop acting the tough guy.
The funniest twist in Robinson’s career was his adoption c. 1990s of a spiked, moussed hair-do, this coiffure perched above a pasty face that has always seemed about as cheerful as a kicked-in fridge door. Clearly Iris was urging him to play his proper part in the power couple they had become. And yet in the big stakes game it seemed Peter could never usurp Big Ian. Rather like Prince Charles, you might say, he aged and wearied and grew stale in the long wait to succeed. And yet, materially he prospered, his well-upholstered little empire in Castlereagh expanding indefatigably, with Iris ordering in the fancy curtains.
Moreover, as the mid-90s ‘peace process’ trained a new international spotlight on Northern Ireland Robinson proved himself to possess a decent set of political smarts, to be able to master a brief, exhibit a forensic mastery of detail. In his entirely auto-didactic way he was more impressive than the condescending ex-law lecturer David Trimble.
As Trimble’s UUP fell apart, Robinson’s utterly strange party gained, and Paisley's authority waned - Robinson himself seemed a bit more sensible, a bit more likeable, and distinctly atypical of that party of his. As he said in 2001, ‘Unless we have a structure that can enjoy the support of unionists and nationalists alike, it is not going to last.’ This observation remains true, and Robinson came round to it quicker than some of the other aspirant stormtroopers on his side. But if he’s now about to exit the field, then Paul Bew’s observation is the ominously correct one.

David Trimble's Elvis-like Comeback

If in light of the latest bit of illustrious daftness from Stockholm, you were compiling a list of more or less vacuous awardings of the Nobel Peace Prize then you might well consider the strange case of David Trimble. Trimble's great distinction in life (up to now) has been to lead one of the great historical wastes of space - the Official/Ulster Unionist Party - to a mountain-top where none of its members, including Trimble himself, really wished to be: namely, the long overdue Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
History had earmarked Trimble to be unionism’s chief negotiator that day, even though he was the most inwardly conflicted figure ever to have emerged within the eternally moribund UUP. (Tom Paulin has written well of the party's "demoralised passivity, its sentimental traditionalism, its dearth of ideas, its hangdog lack of creative energy.") Having cut his teeth as a hardliner in the 1970s with an utterly obnoxious shower laughably calling themselves 'Vanguard', Trimble on that Good Friday agreed terms for a reconciliation with the Old Enemy - and such was the insular nature of the man that few within his party had sensed the historic compromise afoot, not least those less willing than their leader to make a leap of faith based on republican bona fides. Yet more damning for the Agreement’s chances of succeeding, Trimble immediately seemed somehow sickened at the prospect of going out to sell the deal he had settled for: during the subsequent referendum campaign he was unwilling to share a platform even with the 'progressive unionist' David Ervine (who died in 2007, and was worth ten of Trimble), much less Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.
Some people I know, clearly desperate, like to say of Trimble that at least he had the genuine smarts, and moreover - if looking for some personal trait - that he's a big Elvis Presley fan, which can't be all bad. Nonetheless Trimble led the UUP to a shattering defeat at the General Election of 2005 and so left the party a withered rump, but he was happy to go his own way and the Tories saved him with a life peerage. That must have gratified his strange and innate sense of apartness and superiority. He has since helped to reconcile the UUP and the Tories to the marriage they enjoyed prior to the Sunningdale fallout of 1974, a sort of cluelessly well-heeled 'Keep Ulster British.' Now the very smart Tory thinker and Times blogger Danny Finkelstein today reports that he recently put to Baron Trimble of Lisnagarvey the question of whether, "now his party was allied with the Conservatives, he would consider serving in a Cameron government. [Trimble's] reply? "I will do whatever David tells me to.""
How lovely. Or - to look at it another way - urgh.