A kitchen cabinet full of knives, most of them aimed at backs or plunged into them; one picture of what’s been happening in Downing Street and what passes for today’s British government.
The comedy of feuds and infighting is everywhere more than matched by dour stories. Craving for power and influence plus sneering at the predecessor’s interior decor is a bad mix, with one aspect foreign to earlier feuds. The Cummings/Boris/Carrie war has the element, to a high degree, against which over recent years countless individuals, families, couples and ex-couples have banged shins. No point insisting ‘I never said THAT!’ when another person can now produce your text saying precisely that.
Not having a real government is one reason why we cannot compete for ridiculous yet shameful feuding with Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Another is that they have a range of media to play off against each other. What will not be remotely funny is if the bad behaviour of Johnson and Crew displaces other recent revelations. One by one, singly, these would constitute scandal enough for media and public to absorb. The Post Office destruction of so many blameless people has won some attention, Private Eye deserving considerable credit as so often before for sticking with the story. Post-prime ministerial David Cameron shouldn’t get away in the smoke while cosiness with big business becomes ever clearer as backdrop to the Downing Street saga.
This side of the sea, if we consider paramilitary disputes as well as political infighting, deathly disagreements far outweigh farce. But everyone knows the gist of the paramilitary story, and the DUP’s internal strife has been bubbling under for years. Otherwise a few distant scenes float up from the memory stew; long-retired SDLP men who championed jaw-jaw over ‘armed struggle’ trying to knock each other out, the time an Irish Times journalist took a punch to the jaw because someone mistook him for a particularly pugnacious SDLP-er.
Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt were colourful by nature and Fitt told his ‘jokes with a jag’ very well, increasingly against the former colleagues. Gerry in his singlet facing down young New Lodge invaders with his legally held gun was much mocked. The Fitt and Devlin departures - from the SDLP and the nationalist/republican mainstream - weren’t one bit funny for their families, or themselves.
The Devlins went through hard years in the west, teenage children facing republican jeers on the street. Teresa Devlin and Anne Fitt were brave women.
In 1983 Gerry Adams took West Belfast from Fitt, and the IRA burned down the Fitts’ home. A long Magill article that year by Nell McCafferty– findable online - catches with brilliance the increasing isolation from his people of the MP who breached London’s determination to ignore Northern Ireland, ‘John Bull’s slum.’ He went on being funny in Annie’s Bar but the story only became more sad. Paddy Devlin was wooed by some unionists, plagued by ill-health but kept writing - and he didn’t end up in the House of Lords.
Of the undermined leaders of unionism, perhaps only Terence O’Neill was as lonely as the later Fitt and Devlin though Brian Faulkner perhaps came close, neither O’Neill or Faulkner with an apt platform to defend themselves. In his last years the Paisley who hounded out those two as well as James Chichester-Clark, performed one final denunciation with his wife in the graphic Mallie documentaries. They had a tableful of targets, the delightfully nicknamed Twelve Apostles.
The idea of Paisley and Martin McGuinness as first and deputy first repelled them but they wanted another crack at Stormont. MPs first, in alphabetical order: Gregory Campbell, Nigel Dodds, the Rev William McCrea, David Simpson. MLAs Tom Buchanan, Diane Dodds, Paul Girvan, Nelson McCausland, Lord Morrow, Stephen Moutray, Mervyn Storey. And deputy assembly speaker of the time Jim Wells. Some things do not change. It was never going to be pretty.
