The duke of Wellington was appointed prime minister in January 1828. After his first cabinet meeting he remarked, “An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.”
Doug Beattie’s relations with his party officers may not have been as brusque as that, but he tended to be more military than political in his style of running the UUP. As Alex Kane, the most percipient living expert on the UUP wrote, “He had a military approach to leadership of a party that is no respecter of authority.”
Opinions differ about the final cause of Beattie’s resignation. Some claim it was the refusal of the party to accept his choice of replacement in the assembly for Robin Swann after his election as MP for South Antrim. Beattie wanted Ballymoney councillor Darryl Wilson, perceived to be on the liberal wing of the UUP. The party executive overruled him and appointed Colin Crawford who holds more conventional UUP views. Apparently Beattie was ‘apoplectic’.
Others claim it was Beattie’s failure to make a breakthrough in July’s general election given that the DUP was in disarray and challenged by the TUV in all winnable unionist constituencies except Upper Bann where Carla Lockhart is sufficiently hardline to satisfy the TUV. Those who hold this view also criticise Beattie’s political judgment in nominating a Colonel Blimp character to contest North Down whose statements were widely ridiculed. Beattie admitted his candidate wasn’t familiar with party policy. Many were also unimpressed with Beattie’s lack of subtlety in interviews.
In these various opinions you have the UUP’s problems in a nutshell. First, the party’s inability to move with the times, to adopt a more socially liberal outgoing set of values as Beattie, and before him, Mike Nesbitt, wanted. Yet they had tried going backwards with Robin Swann and that failed.
Secondly, adhering to the fantasy that there is a chance of a breakthrough to turn the tables against the DUP. Like the SDLP, the UUP is never going to ‘bounce back’. Like the SDLP the UUP has to cease pretending to be what it used to be. Like the SDLP it needs to acknowledge that in large parts of the north not only has it no members, it has no organisation. For example, as Doug Beattie explained (with lack of subtlety or inability to mislead, take your pick) there was no UUP candidate in north Belfast in July because there’s no longer a Unionist Association in north Belfast.
Since the eclipse of the UUP and the SDLP by the DUP and Sinn Féin none of the serial leaders of the UUP or the SDLP who has emerged from their revolving doors has been able to find that role or purpose. The reason for that inability is that politics in the north has changed so that neither the UUP nor the SDLP has, or will have a role again
So now it’s pass the parcel – or poisoned chalice – time again which simply makes the party look ridiculous. Nominations for leader close next Friday. There won’t be a rush of aspirants. There hasn’t been a leadership election since 2012. Soon there’ll be more chiefs than Indians among the MLAs. It all adds to demoralisation and despondency. People drift away, decline accelerates. The resemblance to the SDLP is uncanny.
The truth is none of it matters because the UUP, like the SDLP, is irrelevant. Both parties have only a past. Every single observer agrees that the UUP needs to find a role or even a purpose for the party. The fact is that since the eclipse of the UUP and the SDLP by the DUP and Sinn Féin none of the serial leaders of the UUP or the SDLP who has emerged from their revolving doors has been able to find that role or purpose. The reason for that inability is that politics in the north has changed so that neither the UUP nor the SDLP has, or will have a role again.
We’re in the endgame. The reason for the establishment of the north, a unionist tribal reservation run by the UUP, has disappeared along with unionism’s majority. Elections are now contests to select negotiating teams to work out with the Irish government how to live on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island. The voters have selected SF and the DUP.
