Ah come on now. The Great Betrayal of Arlene Foster. Edwin Poots ‘eviscerated’ by big beasts.
It’s past time and well past time to get a grip and some perspective.
African countries are pleading for more vaccines, China has screwed down the clamps on Hong Kong, the timid trustees of the British Museum have chosen as their new chairman George Osborne, who cut funds for the arts including museums in his ‘austerity’ drive that left the NHS strapped going into Covid.
Only a glance, this, at news across the world. And a small-minded party fighting itself to a standstill over clashes between small personalities is supposed to be intriguing?
North of the border on the island of Ireland, the problem in professing to analyse political developments is how quickly you’re into exaggeration or big fat fibs. Nobody likes a know-all. Hanging on to a hard-earned sense of proportion takes nerve.
All the same, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson a big beast? Sammy Wilson? Did Nigel Dodds and Maurice Morrow grow large and scary when they were turned into Lords? Given to snarling, true, but that’s as close as these gents get to pawing the ground and flaring the nostrils. Sammy is the only one with a roar.
Yet this was Edwin the Ejected’s take on what happened to him. Large creatures, he said, ‘eviscerated’ him. (When Edwin does big words they’re good words.) It’s just that what happened and is possibly still happening inside the DUP is the opposite of big. To judge by the squeaks of the ejected ones, falling in on themselves has made them even less able to hear how they sound. As in the heartstring-tugging (in London Tory magazine the Spectator) of Arlene Foster, the second-last leader.
The ‘Great Betrayal’, she wrote, ‘as I am now calling my removal from office.’ Though of course by Pootsian measurement she too was eviscerated, maybe this was tongue in cheek. But Foster re-framing herself as a moderate pushed out for tending Lundy-wards has been some sight. She advises Poots he should enact the promised legislation on Irish, though no time ago she brushed it aside as so far down the agenda it would probably fall off. All this, as Mary Lou McDonald came to Belfast to say last weekend, 15 years after being promised. But then Sinn Féin let the timetable slide, apparently without complaint.
Although we should also remember that all five executive parties signed up to the ‘cultural package’. Including the non-existent Ulster Scots language, invented because unionist politicians lacked the courage to tell their voters a British/Irish Northern Ireland needs formal respect for Irish. Levelling up.
Underlying DUP personal clashes is unease about an under-class that for decades has deferred to the supposedly ‘educated’ who represent them. Who feed out fiction about Irish, Ulster Scots, Brexit, the protocol, scarcity, sausages. At least, there should be unease. Above all about what Chris Patten the other day termed the Downing Street ‘porkies’ that leave loyalists, always insecure, now also bewildered that shearing away from the European Union leaves them less connected to Britain. Who knew? Some knew but denied what they knew. Some refuse to know.
Sinn Féin have the nerve to lecture unionists about levelling with their people, but then SF nerve required application, and has paid off. Shifting from opposing the EU to opposing Brexit took brass neck, and time. Moving away from justifying violence was eked out over years while dissenters and doubters aged and faded, whereas unionists, counter-productively, self-destructively, will probably keep on hyping up loyalist outrage.
But the turnout of no more than a few hundred for Jim Allister and Kate Hoey in Newtownards, scene of past Paisleyite rallies, holed the hype. Allister’s inability to see a UVF banner punctured his pomposity, showed him up. Imagining Sir Jeffrey as first minister is not heartening. There is, however, a big world out there. Perspective is the thing.
