It’s fair to say that mention of the British Conservative Party still evokes a particularly visceral reaction from northern nationalists.
From Margaret Thatcher to Brexit, and in their historic opposition to Home Rule and perhaps a subconscious memory of the unflattering Irish origin of the word ‘Tory’, it isn’t surprising.
The relationship with Labour, however, has never been quite as straightforward as often presented.
It hasn’t necessarily followed that the generally unionist sympathies of Conservative governments have seen an opposite, or equivalent, warmth from Labour towards nationalists.
For many of a certain vintage in places like Derry or my own home turf of south Armagh, the memory of Roy Mason’s tenure as Northern Ireland Secretary in the latter half of the 1970s still sends a shiver down the spine.
In more recent times it was successive Labour Secretaries of State in the 2000s who suspended the institutions at Stormont and the Good Friday Agreement at the behest of unionists.
Hilary Benn will be grateful that he doesn’t have to contend with such acute problems or dramatic circumstances.
But he is discovering, like many of my good friends and erstwhile colleagues now in government, that the promises and expectations of opposition have collided with the stark reality of limitations and perceptions of office.
It’s wearily cynical and slightly flippant, but it’s always been my view that the Secretary of State can be judged to be doing a good and probably fair job if everyone in Northern Ireland is annoyed with them at some point or another during a monthly news and political cycle.
By that metric, Hilary Benn can be relatively content after his first six months or so in post. And I think politicians in Stormont can rest assured that this is who he is, and this is how it will be.
I have seen at first hand that Keir Starmer is committed to Northern Ireland and to restoring good relations and rebuilding trust not just in the north but across the island of Ireland.
It is a priority for him, and that’s why he appointed someone of the calibre of Hilary Benn.
It is clear too, however, that his Labour government’s approach to Northern Ireland will be process-led, risk-averse and, ironically, conservative with a small ‘c’: “steady as she goes”. In that, he may find he has more in common with some politicians in Dublin than northern nationalists would like.
But unlike the stated commitment of the new Taoiseach Micheál Martin and the Irish government to building a shared island, no move towards constitutional change or even conversations about changes will be led, supported or encouraged by this or any other British government.
As Lyndon B Johnson said, the first rule of politics is to learn how to count.
The future of the union is an election issue in Britain in a way that it wasn’t when the last Labour government was in power, and election strategists in the party know that it needs MPs in Scotland to be in government in London, and that puts it in direct opposition to Scottish nationalists and firmly on the side of the union. Northern Ireland just isn’t an electoral consideration, regardless of any intellectual or emotional connection many in Labour have to a united Ireland.
But if politics is indeed about numbers, then the polls as they are suggest Labour might not always be in the position where it can rely on a comfortable Parliamentary majority.
A new Ireland will, of course, only be built on the island of Ireland, and that’s where the work of persuasion, creation and implementation needs to be done, ahead of any decision to hold a border poll.
But both Sinn Féin and the SDLP should be thinking and talking with each other now about how leverage and pressure might be applied at Westminster in the future, because, like it or not, that’s where any decision to hold a border poll will be made, and may even need to be forced.
:: Conor McGinn is a former Labour Shadow Cabinet Minister