A HOST of senior Ulster Unionist figures – including the party’s deputy leader – were in 1982 privately telling the government that Jim Molyneaux’s leadership was disastrous for the party, newly released official records reveal.
Papers released at the Public Record Office in Belfast under the 30-year rule show that NIO officials sometimes struggled to articulate what the UUP’s position was on an issue because they were privately being told so many different things by various party figures.
And, in a devastating assessment of the party’s problems, even the UUP’s press officer told government officials that his party leader was widely viewed to be “inadequate”, party morale was “low” and the public believed that the party was “all over the place”.
While there were also regular meetings between civil servants and figures from across the SDLP, the government does not seem to have had the same level of intelligence about what was going on within the DUP.
One file records a meeting between Stephen Leach from the NIO’s political affairs division and Frank Millar, the then UUP press officer who would go on to become the party’s general secretary and then a distinguished journalist, in January 1982.
A note of their meeting records a pessimistic picture which reads as though it could have been written by many of today’s UUP members who are privately scathing about their party’s direction.
The note said: “Commenting on the general state of the UUP, Millar said that morale was low and that the party’s image in the Protestant community (particularly in Belfast) was disastrous.
“It was widely perceived that Molyneaux was inadequate as a leader (for all his personal qualities) and that the party was ‘all over the place’.
“The feeling that McCusker was the only alternative leader with ‘fire in his belly’ was widespread, but it was also clear that Molyneaux had no intention of withdrawing gracefully and everyone was terrified at the electoral implications of a public struggle to oust him.”
An January 8, 1982, note from senior NIO official David Blatherwick said that Mr Molyneaux was “hanging grimly on to the leadership”.
A February 5,1982, paper from Mr Blatherwick which attempted to sum up the parties’ views on a weighted majority voting mechanism at Stormont contained further searing criticism of the UUP.
The note said: “The UUP is in a sorry state, deeply divided over personalities and policy, with badly shaken morale and mesmerised by Dr Paisley’s publicity successes.”
In a withering assessment of the UUP leader – who would remain for more than another decade – Mr Blatherwick added: “The position of Mr Molyneaux is crucial. While he remains leader, the UUP will continue to prevaricate.
“Though he has little support in the party, there is as yet no concerted attack on his position; and so long as he stays, alternative leaders cannot easily emerge.”
A week earlier, UUP deputy leader Harold McCusker had asked for a meeting with the Secretary of State whose private secretary, Stephen Boys Smith, recorded what was said.
His note of the meeting says that Mr McCusker spoke “very frankly”, telling Mr Prior direct rule was damaging the Ulster Unionist Party and that there “continued to be resentment at the grassroots in Northern Ireland about rule by Englishmen”.
He said that local government in Northern Ireland was “of little or no consequence” and added that he was “ready to challenge the OUP to say what it really wanted [direct rule or devolved government]. Mr Molyneaux [who was sceptical about devolution] was not ready to face this issue.”
Mr McCusker told the NIO that the only reason his party had won more seats than the DUP in the previous May’s local election was because the UUP had put up more candidates: “If Dr Paisley had put up 40 more people most of them would have been elected.”
It added: “He thought that the OUP [UUP] could expect to win four out of 17 seats in the forthcoming Parliamentary election.”
In the event, Mr McCusker’s projection for the 1983 General Election was much too gloomy – despite the DUP’s vote doubling, it did not win any extra seats and the UUP took 11 of the 17 seats.
Three days prior to that meeting with Mr Molyneaux’s deputy, the Secretary of State had met the UUP leader at Westminster.
Mr Boys Smith’s confidential note of the meeting said that Mr Molyneaux had claimed (somewhat improbably) that “he was and long had been a devolutionist” but that he could only give his support to a form of devolution which was acceptable to his party.
The note said that “the Secretary of State did not disguise his considerable disappointment at the recent performance of the OUP, and by implication therefore at Mr Molyneaux’s leadership, but Mr Molyneaux remained unmoved and indeed amiable throughout”.
A confidential memo from civil servant David Wyatt to private secretaries to ministers and senior civil servants on January 28, 1982, said that a note about the Secretary of State’s meeting with Mr Molyneaux “makes very depressing reading”.
He and asked whether Mr Molyneaux’s fear that the DUP would take twice as many seats as the UUP was correct, and, if it was, whether in those circumstances the government should “ought to be having an election if that is going to be the result”.
He said: “I do not think that we can or should try to keep the Official Unionists on a life-support system if they are going to die anyway. Indeed it could be argued that the prospect of disaster at an election is the only thing that will concentrate their minds sufficiently to stave off disaster. But if in the end we have to deal with the DUP as the major unionist party, so be it.”
The UUP were “talking with so many voices that we can hardly be said to be talking to a party at all”.
