A former chairman of the NI Conservatives who helped bankroll Robin Swann’s successful Westminster election campaign has quit the party for the second time and urged his erstwhile colleagues to “fold your tent and disappear”.
Alan Dunlop said last month’s general election performance, which saw the five candidates who stood for the Tory’s regional arm secure a total of 553 votes, was an “embarrassment” and the “final straw”.
The retired millionaire shipping firm boss’s letter to the NI Conservatives announcing his resignation from the party came as it emerged that he donated £5,000 to former Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann.
The donation was registered on the MP’s declaration of financial interests on July 18, less than fortnight after the former health minister unseated the DUP’s Paul Girvan in South Antrim.
Mr Dunlop was reinstated as a member of the NI Conservatives in 2022, having quit the previous year, citing “wholesale negativity, back-biting and personal attacks”.
His bid to rejoin the party was initially rejected, prompting him to characterise the procedure as a “kangaroo court”, but after taking his case to the Conservatives’ UK-wide membership committee, he was permitted to rejoin.
But less than two years later he has blasted the party he helped fund, describing its Westminster election performance as a “political meltdown of Chernobyl proportions”.
He said seven weeks on from the election that saw all five candidates lose their deposits “there has been no attempt to conduct an objective post-mortem of what went so badly wrong”.
“I think it’s time for the party in Northern Ireland to fold its tent and disappear - it is in terminal decline, caught in a political whirlpool with no ability to break free,” he said.
“The concept of creating a political entity that had the union at its heart was the right course to adopt.
“We needed to move from the traditional big beasts of unionism to create a new middle ground that was genuinely pluralist, accommodating and supportive of the union.”
Mr Dunlop said the NI Conservatives were “irrelevant” and that members were “disillusioned”.
“I gave years of commitment and support to the party locally and it is with a heavy heart that I now say it’s time to move on,” he said.
The NI Conservatives, which until recently was led by Nolan Show regular Matthew Robinson, said they would not be commenting “on membership current or former”.
