Columns appearing at the beginning of a new year normally anticipate change for the better and look forward to the resolution of problems which have bedevilled the previous year.
The same goes for politicians. Not always though. In 1967 Enver Hoxha, the Albanian Stalinist dictator, said in his new year message: “This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.” Inspirational, or what?
No prediction or even anticipation, good or bad, applies here because unionists refuse to take control of their own destiny. They prefer to remain shackled to the decaying corpse of post-imperial Britain with real wages falling, public services, especially health, falling apart, and those on state benefits receiving the smallest amount in Europe. The only hope is that an election this year will come as soon as possible and remove this corrupt, venal, lying government.
Again, no-one here will be able to do the slightest thing about that. Whether you admit it or not, the election is taking place in a different country. The parties contesting it don’t fight seats here because painful experience has shown people don’t vote for them. Strangely that doesn’t stop people, especially unionists who fondly imagine they’re part of Britain, from talking about ‘getting the Tories out’. It’s nothing to do with you.
In the meantime there’s little hope of any progress in the local impasse until an election removes the proconsul and his volatile sidekick. They’ve been here now since September 2022 when Liz Truss appointed them, most likely because of their reputations as arch-Brexiteers. The proconsul described himself as a “fierce Eurosceptic”.
The proconsul never had a plan for getting the DUP back into Stormont so he indulged them, led them to believe falsely that he had the power to deliver what is not his to give. The worst part of the charade he conducted for the last year was that it gave the DUP cover and credibility with their own voters that they were making progress when they weren’t and they couldn’t. In the end, inevitably he had to say what he should have said last June: take it or leave it
His sidekick, Baker, is an altogether more complicated case. Self-confessedly manic about stopping Theresa May’s backstop plan, he preferred no deal. In his account of serving in this rotten government, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart says Baker seemed to see Brexit offering the promise of creating a more godly society inspired by the Book of Kings and Romans 13:1-5 which underpinned his Brexit policy.
Make of that what you will. You might think DUP bible-thumpers would see an ally there, but they regard him as a traitor if not an apostate for his apology to the Irish government for his behaviour during the Brexit turmoil.
That’s all over now. Instead of pushing through Truss’s illegal Northern Ireland Protocol bill, our two amigos did a screeching u-turn and pushed through Sunak’s Windsor Framework. What are these guys like? They both voted for the charlatan Johnson’s disastrous deal with the protocol, which they thought was the bee’s knees, to ‘get Brexit done’. Then they supported Truss’s bill to eliminate the protocol, then they voted for Sunak’s streamlining of the protocol and have spent the past 10 months administering it.
Which of the 14 moves in Olympic floor exercises do you think they performed? Backward somersault with tucked knees and a backward flip along the floor maybe? Or maybe they deserve the Groucho Marx award for political principles: These are my principles and if you don’t like them, I have others.
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In any case they have been a complete failure. The proconsul never had a plan for getting the DUP back into Stormont so he indulged them, led them to believe falsely that he had the power to deliver what is not his to give. The worst part of the charade he conducted for the last year was that it gave the DUP cover and credibility with their own voters that they were making progress when they weren’t and they couldn’t. In the end, inevitably he had to say what he should have said last June: take it or leave it.
The proconsul’s cardinal error was excluding all other parties here and the Irish government from the process. The argument was it’s about Strand 1 and the Irish government has no role in resurrecting Stormont. So what were they doing at the talks in 2020 to, guess what, restore Stormont after being shut down in 2017? Why is the protocol a matter solely for the DUP when its operation involves all parties? This December Stormont is supposed to vote on the operation of the protocol. What about representatives of business here? The historical and political fact is that all successful negotiations here have involved all parties and the Irish government.
The proconsul has been an abject failure. He has no plan B. Copying the all-in talks Julian Smith engaged in in 2020 would be a humiliation too far for him.
He has demonstrated so little political nous that he might be tempted to allow the DUP to extend the exercise in a few weeks’ time. We all know what repeating the same thing and hoping for a different result means.
The proconsul has been hopping the ball now since March. He doesn’t know what to do. He should admit failure and resign, but he won’t. The only hope is a fresh start after a general election.