Tag: Brian Faulkner

His father, Norman, the Ulster Unionist MP for St Anne’s, Belfast, died in April that year and John won the seat in the consequent byelection. Son of Norman, a GP, and Margaret, he was born in Belfast into a unionist family. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and then went into banking rather than to university, owing to his dyslexia. In 1972, after the UK government suspended the Stormont government, Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, triggered Laird’s political involvement with the Ulster Scots heritage of those who were descended, as he was, from the Protestants settled in Ireland after King William of Orange defeated the Catholic James II in 1690. He set up a successful PR agency, John Laird Public Relations, and remained its chair until 2001. He opposed the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement, voting in defiance of his party whip, and developed links with the Vanguard Unionist party, which had been founded in 1972 by the former UUP cabinet minister, William Craig, and which organised rallies against Sunningdale. In 1976, when a further political experiment, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, was suspended, Laird left politics publicly but maintained links particularly with David Trimble, Craig’s deputy in Vanguard. In 1999 one went to Laird. During the Good Friday negotiations, Trimble sought parity for Protestant culture with Catholic Irish culture. • John Dunn Laird, Lord Laird, politician, born 23 April 1944; died 10 July 2018