That politics here are tacked into the Westminster balance, if only for a short time, has focused some minds and fuzzed up others.
But in a London where an attacker crashed into people observing Ramadan yesterday, small wonder the British focus has been mainly on the surface, the dislikeableness, to put it as mildly as possible, of the DUP. (How that revulsion echoed here is a subject for a more relaxed day.)
Decent Londoners are still rocked by the Grenfell Tower disaster, and how it has spotlit a political culture shaped to privilege and perpetuate wealth. Coming on top of the June 8 election results, there is a sense of politics having to change. Predictions and assumptions are upside-down, like the judgment of Theresa May and those around her. A government at odds with itself has plainly floundered in dealing with disaster only a few miles from the mother of parliaments. When that tower full of people blazed up the routine that follows each attack deemed ‘terrorist’, the cant meant to convey capability and calm of ‘the prime minister is attending a Cobra meeting’ disappeared.
The spectacle of closed council offices, donations of clothing and other supplies directed to a car park was almost laughable. But it would have been despairing laughter. In his new guise as credible next prime minister Jeremy Corbyn probably hit the most appropriate note, not for the first time, when he urged the more political approach, less emphasis on May’s inability to be spontaneous and empathetic on television. Her refusal to take responsibility is more important.
But her inadequacy needed exposure. This hopeless prime minister has been pushed by interviewers in a way neither leading party will tolerate from the media here. Temper, instant sniping responses, and threat or actual boycott follow; pathetic, immature, and a measure of both the DUP and Sinn Féin.
The DUP’s chief figures have been up close to May in recent days, no doubt an uncomfortable sight. Arlene Foster though perhaps more readily Nigel Dodds must have recognised the hapless May as an extreme case of what happened to Foster during the Assembly election campaign. But the DUP, with presumably little resistance from a shaken Foster herself, took their woman back from the brink.
The chants of ‘my party’ and ‘my manifesto’ were not to be aired in another Northern Ireland campaign. All that had achieved back in March, after all, was the end of the unionist majority at Stormont.
Election director Simon Hamilton rationed Foster appearances. She behaved herself. Then came that remarkable British result, while the DUP and Sinn Féin swallowed one time rivals, now sad also-rans the Ulster Unionists and SDLP. A big fat vote swept to one side whatever reservations the upper reaches of the DUP may harbour about Foster’s self-discipline.
Within days she was playing deal-maker in London, with Dodds as close escort. Last Friday she was in Dublin, all smiles beside the brand new Taoiseach. But in a radio interview directly afterwards the smiles became audibly strained, and suddenly we were back to a Foster at odds with the record.
She had scoffed, though fairly amiably, at the party’s depiction in British media as benighted, laughably reactionary. She was at pains to assure the BBC’s Mark Devenport that DUP positions on social morality were not part of the discussions with May. These were devolved matters, for decision at Stormont.
But had she herself not lobbied the Scottish government on same sex marriage? A former Scottish minister has said that she wrote as a Stormont minister to him to ask that gay, civilly-partnered couples from here should not be allowed marry in Scotland, as Scottish law permits.
‘That’s certainly not the case,’ said Foster. ‘There certainly wasn’t a letter from me.’ She was equally certain that she had written no such letter in a personal capacity. How strange. The Edinburgh administration, as this paper reported last Thursday, has confirmed they received a Foster letter. What did she write?
Although when the pace is hectic news-worthy assertions can vanish, at least temporarily. Whatever becomes of May and her government’s deal with the DUP, what the party tells its people is worth noting. MLA William Irwin told the Armagh Show at the weekend that priorities would include ensuring the continuation of direct payments for farmers, and ‘the maintenance of a seamless border on the island of Ireland’. He did add ‘from a trading point of view’. But a ‘seamless border on the island of Ireland’ as a DUP wish. There’s a thing.
