Former Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble has revealed that in the week of the Belfast Agreement British prime minister Tony Blair made two personal commitments to him but failed to carry out the second - extending the operations of the British Labour Party to Northern Ireland.
Lord Trimble, who last week joined David Cameron's Conservative Party, disclosed in Coleraine last night how he won pledges from Mr Blair in 1998 that if the agreement was achieved current Ulster Unionist leader Reg Empey and former UUP Assembly member John Gorman would be knighted.
Lord Trimble also sought a commitment that the British Labour Party would organise in Northern Ireland, he disclosed at a lecture at the University of Ulster commemorating the late Prof Antony Alcock who died last year, and who was one of Lord Trimble's senior advisers during the Belfast Agreement talks.
The Nobel Laureate said to Mr Blair on the Tuesday before the Good Friday deal: "If we pull this off there are two things I want you to do for me. First I want a K [knighthood] for Empey and Gorman, and then, after the Assembly is settled, I want you to extend Labour Party organisation to Northern Ireland."
Both Mr Empey and Mr Gorman were knighted but Labour still doesn't organise in the North while the Conservative Party, which contested the recent Assembly elections, does. Lord Trimble indicated that he expected that Labour eventually would formally operate in the North. "I reminded Blair of the matter from time to time and he never looked very comfortable about the matter, but in fairness, it is only now as the future for the Assembly appears stable, that this bit of unfinished business looks like becoming practical politics," he said.
Implicitly referring to his own decision to shift allegiance to the Tory Party, he added: "As you can gather from recent events I hope to return to this issue in the future."
Lord Trimble said he has long been of the opinion that Labour's "boycott of Northern Ireland was wrong in principle and an obstacle for the development of normal politics".
Lord Trimble, in his speech, Reflections on the Belfast Agreement, said that the UUP was right to endorse the Belfast Agreement nine years ago, notwithstanding the political damage Ulster Unionism sustained thereafter.
"My argument was that the constitutional and institutional aspects of the agreement, which would endure, were, on balance, favourable," he said. There were negatives that were shortlived, he added.
But referring to the DUP/Sinn Féin powersharing agreement and the scheduled restoration of devolution on May 8th, he said his endorsement of the agreement was "completely vindicated by recent political developments".
