Amid talk of civil war, John Lloyd hears Ulster's First Minister discuss imminent resignation, Sinn Fein's fraudulent election, and a possible change of party

When I talked to David Trimble last Tuesday, his resignation as First Minister of Northern Ireland was - in his own mind, at least - certain. "I don't imagine that the Sinners" (as he calls Sinn Fein, perhaps relishing the pun) "will do anything before 1 July" - the date on which he had said he would resign if there was no substantive progress on the decommissioning of its arms dumps. "They have been hoping that the Unionist Party would resolve the problem for them by removing me from leadership last weekend; or they were hoping for a fudge. But I am still leader: and there is no fudge."

In this, he seems almost serene. When he held post-election talks at Downing Street with Tony Blair and the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, he brusquely dismissed their efforts to find a compromise. What, it was put to him, if we get the "Sinners" to give some absolutely firm timetable for future decommissioning? Look, said Trimble, they promised that last May - when the government, with the agreement of all the parties, extended the deadline for decommissioning to June 2001. In talking of "firm timetables", you would simply be asking them to give a promise that they would do something they had already promised to do - without effect. No.

The remaining faint hope of movement from the IRA Army Council - on which the leaders of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, both sit - rests with the "contacts" between General John de Chastelaine, the Canadian officer whose commission is charged with verifying the handing over of weapons from all paramilitaries. "If there had been anything - the slightest sign of movement - de Chastelaine would have issued a report. There may be a report between now and the weekend. But I do not expect it will show substantive movement."

With this resignation, the Northern Ireland "peace process" will move into its most unpredictable and dangerous period in the three-plus years since the Belfast, or "Good Friday", Agreement was signed in April 1998. One of Trimble's closest advisers told me that he feared civil war. If, as is constitutionally laid down, the resignation, followed by an unsuccessful search for a substitute first minister, ushers in an early autumn election in the province, the hard-line parties, Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein, will again increase their votes. Trimble expects that is what will happen: and the British government "appears to have no clue what to do".

In this bleak landscape, however, Trimble walks with the conviction of a politician who sees himself as a large player in British as well as Northern Irish politics.

He has clearly been holding quite serious talks with leading Conservative figures about a future relationship which may involve joining their shadow cabinet. A story to that effect appeared in Monday's Irish Times, under the byline of the paper's London editor, Frank Millar, a former Unionist Party official who rarely errs. When I put it to Trimble, he smiled, and said: "Well, I have a formula for this, that I have no intention of relinquishing the leadership and there is much to do in Northern Ireland." When I noted that was not a denial, he said: "Well, well."

I asked Lord Cranborne, the former leader of the Tories in the Lords, a close friend of Trimble's and the man named in Millar's story as the conduit for these talks, if the contacts were true. He said he had not seen Trimble since before the election. Not a denial, either.

The best version, constructed from those close to him speaking on terms of anonymity, would seem that he has been talking to senior Tories; but the idea of taking a shadow cabinet post is, as one put it, "a bit previous".

On this, he does give some details. "Would it not be a good thing if a bright lad from the Falls Road" - the heart of Catholic working-class Belfast - "could rise to the British cabinet, as one from Scotland or Wales could?" He continues: "The way in which the Agreement was constructed kept Northern Ireland politics in its sectarian state. Nationalists had never had a share in government because they were always a minority: so this was a complicated way of getting them in. That was fine as far as it went. But it meant that the politics remains fixed on the basic constitutional question of the nature of the state: it remains fixed on the border.

"What I would like is a way of getting out of that; of involving the province much more in British political life; in also allowing the people there to shape their own society politically, as in Scotland and in Wales." In pursuit of that, he says, he would wish that British parties organised in Northern Ireland: "The Labour Party should organise itself in Northern Ireland. Indeed, it can be seen as a breach of human rights that it does not offer such membership to people there who wish to join."

Though his contempt for the Democratic Unionists - who carved deeply into his vote - is large, he concedes one fact about their present stance which he sees as significant for the future. "They have been edging into an acceptance of the Agreement. The campaign on which they fought the seven principles they enunciated for Northern Ireland government was implicitly an acceptance of the Agreement they hated. Their tactics and their own instincts take them away from that - and I blame them most for fostering an atmosphere of violence in the election.

"But if we get through this issue of decommissioning, then I believe the Agreement in its essence can survive. People support a devolved assembly."

In this new freedom born of the heady prospect of a new course, Trimble feels he can criticise those on whom he has, perforce, relied over the past three years. I asked him how disappointed he was in Tony Blair. He voices no personal criticism, but says: "The great mistake of the first period was the release of prisoners for no gain. Their release should have been linked to decommissioning - for both republican and loyalist prisoners. Releasing prisoners who had committed serious crimes, as many had, was a judicial abomination: but if you are going to do it for reason of political gain, then at least make sure you get the gain! But it wasn't done."

If, after six weeks, a new First Minister cannot be agreed by a majority in both the Unionist and the nationalist blocs in the assembly, new elections must be held. Or Dr John Reid, the Northern Ireland Secretary, must suspend it - as he has said he does not wish to do. Or there can be, in the fears of the Trimble adviser, a civil war.

The preconditions would seem to be strengthening on that. The police, says Trimble, are heartily demoralised: the Chris Patten report on their reform, not yet implemented, has "humiliated them, taking away the badge, the flag, the emblems, treating them as if they were worthless". Fifty-seven officers are suing their senior commanders for injuries they sustained some weeks ago during riots in Belfast - because, says Trimble, "of all that Patten crap", they were not permitted to use plastic bullets, and thus were helpless before the mob.

The extremes are winning. The past election was more shocking for the SDLP than for the Unionists - the former lost pride of place as a Catholic/nationalist party to Sinn Fein - and must, says Trimble, "completely rethink its tactics. I said to my colleagues throughout these years that it is no good for us to out-Paisley Paisley: people will vote for the real thing in that case. But the SDLP didn't do that: they attempted to out-Sinn Fein Sinn Fein. They would not, for example, accept their responsibility to persuade Catholics to join the police force. And yet, even here, they are losing the people who should be their supporters. I am told that 35 per cent of the applications to join the RUC come from Catholics. The Catholics are leaving their parties in Northern Ireland."

Sinn Fein is now the largest element on the scene. Trimble has called on his party to emulate its organisational and PR skills. But it is, he says - again with the frankness born of freedom - a party of fraud and coercion. Of the three extra seats it won, he says, two were won by fraud. He gives an instance of an alleged fraud in the village of Garrison, in the nationalist area of Fermanagh and South Tyrone. There, he says, Sinn Fein forced the returning officer to reopen the polling station to allow about a hundred Sinn Fein supporters to vote - and the Sinn Fein candidate won by 53 votes. The Unionists are calling for the case to be referred to prosecution - though, says Trimble, the witnesses will be afraid to testify. "Sinn Fein works with coercion and violence and the fear of it.

"I have come," he says, "to the limit of the politically possible. We have done everything we can. Now it is up to others." It is clear, however, that he also sees the future shape of the politics of the province as being up to him: to produce a stronger bond between the mainland and that part of the UK that remains Irish. It is not a direction that Sinn Fein can be expected to endorse: it carries, itself, the risk of renewed terror. But it is the route Trimble now maps, and on which he now seems likely to begin to march.

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