As she backtracked on her backtracking, the Foster Defence did her in. Amber Rudd had to go.
Capable of crisp performance in public debate and possibly liberal for a Conservative, she turned out under major pressure to be incapable of responsibility.
The civil servants let me down, she pleaded. I never saw the memo, nobody copied me into the email, I was not told. Perhaps trying to stand by her boss, she showed no loyalty to those beneath her. She trashed her officials, and one leak after another trashed her.
Conventional wisdom rabbited that Rudd had to stay, as the shield of a dogged but desperate prime minister. Theresa May would look even worse if she fell.
That hostile environment for elderly dinner ladies born in the Caribbean, now so universally reviled, was a May recipe if not a May invention. The Tories couldn’t afford another resignation and May couldn’t afford to lose another ally, particularly another Remainer.
So Remainers and even a Brexiteer or two formed up around Amber, Michael Gove earnestly nodding in the skinny doughnut around her on her second-last Commons appearance.
Who’s left, the lobby correspondents asked? There is no cabinet pool of talent. Having seen a couple of ministers up close in recent weeks it is clear that this is not an exaggeration. We got David Lidington after David Davis, in Davis’s case lacing smiles among empty sentences delivered into thin air or perhaps into the receptive ear of Peter Sheridan, Co-operation Ireland’s Chief Executive, his sole companion. Lidington supposedly listened to businesspeople, then recited the schedule of negotiation to come. So, yes, the team surely looks thin.
But the leaks kept coming, and Rudd went. In most political systems the wages of one particular sin is political death. It is a simple commandment. Thou shalt not rat on the permanent staff, the people who keep the wheels turning as power changes hands, the people who know where the files are. These people are the servants of the state, the honorific ‘civil’ in their name key to their pledge to hold those files securely, in loyalty to an institution that transcends the politics of the moment.
Over the past few weeks here, in the RHI inquiry, prolonged abdication of responsibility and confession of woeful amnesia has been accompanied by repeated assertion that others did not do their jobs. Over two days the House of Commons listened to Rudd and heard her come up short on believability. She might have survived if nothing emerged to contradict her. But the damage was done. You could see it, almost smell it.
Might there be a parallel exit here? The betting has been against it, with arguments somewhat similar to those confident assertions that Rudd would stay. Factor in some empathy and a smidgen of imagination, though, and the situation looks more open to question.
Suppose you were watching your telly in Fermanagh as the Amber news came on. How strained Amber has looked, how sleepless her eyes, how the pressure built and the stories ran and the contradictions mounted.
Is Arlene ready to go? Is she not stubborn beyond belief, dug in, sure of her own righteousness? But Amber is out of the frying pan now, whatever about the fire of Brexit battles in the British parliament.
For someone who repeatedly complains of her own experience over the past year and a half as an ordeal, unparalleled pressure, outrageous speculation, the Rudd exit might look worth imitating.
The party, though, what of the party; the argument against an Arlene resignation echoes some of the Westminster talk. The DUP has no alternative leader. Nigel Dodds will not serve. If you were Arlene, the point might already have come where you stopped caring that the pool of talent is so small, the likeliest contenders so unlikely to back each other in the top post.
Is there a possibility instead of grey suits trooping in to urge the leader to step aside? See above, though perhaps Lord Morrow might step up to defend old values. All fanciful stuff, perhaps.
Though there was a scene last Thursday at Stormont as the parties showed up to be talked to (by Karen Bradley) about possible new talks.
But it was ‘crazy talk’ for republicans to claim that the Tory-DUP deal was the main block to restoring devolution, the DUP leader said forcefully. She was flanked by an anxious-looking Simon Hamilton and a detached-looking Nigel Dodds, neither looking at her.
The threesome did not radiate mutual confidence.
