‘David Trimble resisted Tony Blair’s pressure on SF and guns’

While Mr Blair heaped praise on Lord Trimble yesterday for demonstrating a “masterclass in leadership” over the agreement, the late UUP leader’s communications director David Kerr said the ex-prime minister tried to “bounce” him into an Executive four times in 1999 before a single IRA bullet was decommissioned.

Mr Kerr said Mr Blair “put David under relentless pressure” to enter a power-sharing coalition with Sinn Fein ahead of any IRA disarmament.

As preparations are under way for Lord Trimble’s funeral next Monday at Harmony Hill Presbyterian Church in Lisburn, Mr Kerr recalled that the former UUP leader resisted Mr Blair’s insistence on “government-before-guns” until he threatened to shut down the Assembly at the end of 1999.

He also revealed that Lord Trimble informed Mr Blair at Weston Park all-party negotiations in 2002 that he would resolutely oppose any scheme to give wanted IRA fugitives amnesties or so-called ‘on-the-run-letters’. Mr Kerr said the prime minister never raised the OTR IRA letters again but simply pressed on “behind David’s back” to pursue the scheme.

Lord Trimble’s successor, UUP leader Doug Beattie, laid a bouquet of flowers beneath a portrait of the late first minister in the Great Hall at Stormont yesterday.

An architect of the Belfast Agreement, Lord Trimble died on Monday at the age of 77 after a short illness.

After a brief pause under the painting, Mr Beattie said Lord Trimble had created an agreement that fundamentally changed Northern Ireland.

“We now have a peace, it is an imperfect peace, but it is a peace we can work for our children and for the future,” he said.