As secretary of state Brandon Lewis is in the mood for intervention at Stormont, there is a loose end from New Decade, New Approach that he urgently needs to address.
Part of the deal last year to restore devolution is to introduce a lengthy cooling off period for an executive collapse, followed by a prompt election.
Under the new arrangement, if one of the two main parties walks out, they have 24 weeks to patch up their differences instead of the current one to two weeks.
The assembly and executive would continue to operate throughout this period, minus the resigned party.
If the rift cannot be healed, an election must be held within a further 12 weeks. Currently, there is no statutory deadline to call an election, hence the three years of ‘indirect rule’ during the last collapse.
The executive would continue meeting during this 12-week period as well, then for another 24 weeks after the election if the first or deputy first minister posts remained unfilled, up to “a maximum of 48 weeks since there has been a functioning executive in place”.
Then there would presumably be another election.
What all this means is that walking out would hand power to your opponents for between six months and a year, with a trip to the ballot box at least every nine months for as long as the stand-off lasted. The Alliance surge indicates the electorate’s likely verdict.
This would be the most significant change to Stormont’s rules since the 2006 St Andrews agreement, with equally profound consequences for the evolution of power-sharing.
In talks leading up to New Decade, New Approach, the DUP proposed a walk-out should leave empty chairs around the executive table, which remaining parties would fill until the next scheduled election - a kind of ‘voluntary-mandatory’ coalition.
The cooling off period stops short of that, yet it achieves the same goal through more ingenious means. Although one of the big two parties could still quit without leaving everyone else permanently in charge, it would be at real risk of just sitting on the sidelines until it was the third largest party and its presence was no longer required.
When the DUP sought these changes, an issue it termed ‘sustainability’, it imagined Sinn Féin would be the party threatening to quit.
The DUP considered sustainability a key negotiating objective in its own right and a quid pro quo when selling an Irish language act to unionist voters.
The past week has shown the DUP in need of sustainability closer to home.
David Campbell, head of the Loyalist Communities Council, is sticking by his claim he told Arlene Foster she will have to bring down devolution if the Northern Ireland protocol is not changed. She allegedly replied this has to be “within the DUP’s thinking” but only “when all other avenues were explored and exhausted”.
The DUP insists “there was no discussion about us bringing down the Northern Ireland Executive.”
Both sides could have put these different interpretations on the same delicate conversation. It would be easier for Foster to take a firm line with loyalists if a DUP walk-out would simply leave Sinn Féin in charge for the rest of this year.
On Monday, a senior DUP figure briefed Radio Ulster that an Irish language act would be blocked unless the protocol is changed.
To its credit, the DUP denied this swiftly and unambiguously - but would the damaging accusation have been made had the cooling off period applied? Its absence enables troublemakers and encourages a self-fulfilling cycle of pessimism that extends beyond the DUP’s growing internal discipline problem.
In the few hours before the Radio Ulster briefing was debunked, mainstream commentators pronounced Stormont doomed, loyalists and anti-agreement unionists salivated about direct rule and republicans sombrely predicted joint authority.
These are fantasies: Stormont, like the protocol, can only be replaced by something much the same. The Alliance surge has entrenched power-sharing by leaving Sinn Féin and the DUP in no doubt they have to stay in office. Sinn Féin’s southern growth and the DUP’s Brexit disaster have further locked both parties into Stormont, as their statements and actions make clear.
That would be crystal clear if the cooling off period was put into law, as agreed by all five executive parties over a year ago. The necessary amendment to the Good Friday Agreement legislation would be unopposed in Westminster - all Lewis has to do is apply the rubber stamp. So what on earth is keeping him?
