You’re a government minister charged with bringing investment into Northern Ireland. Do you:
a) get into a heated argument with your special adviser in front of senior civil servants and tell him he can’t come to a meeting?
b) bore investors in China with your “repeated personal anecdotes”?
c) go on a business trip to New York, get so drunk you fall asleep at a bar and get kicked out, then sing 1990s one hit wonder Breakfast at Tiffanys at full volume?
If you’re former DUP enterprise minister Jonathan Bell then the answer is d) all three.
It says a great deal about revelations coming from the Renewable Heat Incentive inquiry that last week’s claim a “clearly intoxicated” Mr Bell was asked to leave a New York bar after downing a bottle of wine and two pints of Guinness wasn’t even the most startling news to come from the ongoing hearings.
Since the inquiry returned from the summer break, we’ve heard the even more bizarre news that Mr Bell thought it was a good idea to bring his friend Ken Cleland to a key meeting at the height of the RHI crisis with senior civil servant Andrew McCormick. And that before the meeting began Mr Cleland confidently said he’d had a spiritual prophecy Mr Bell would be vindicated over the renewable heat scandal.
This is the same Jonathan Bell who was a senior member of a party which is now essentially in government at Westminster. Why revelations coming out of the inquiry haven’t been headline news in Britain is unclear. Although, perhaps given our Secretary of State Karen Bradley has admitted to a less than zero knowledge of the north before she took office, Mr Bell’s eye-catching behaviour may be being passed off in Britain as just something people do over here, like block equal marriage and listen to Nathan Carter.
Over the last two weeks, the inquiry has heard just how toxic the DUP has become, with unelected chief executive Timothy Johnston more powerful than MP Nigel Dodds; unelected special advisers (Spads) dictating to ministers and a destructive culture in which Spads seemed to treat civil servants as the enemy.
Given the mess a DUP-run department made of the RHI scheme, it’s debatable whether any other party should rush to join them again in government. Rather than highlight the need for an urgent return to power-sharing, the inquiry has left me wondering if some senior DUP members could be trusted to man the bran tub at a school fair.
The lack of a paper trail may protect some DUP members who’ve given evidence but at times their assertions have been met by incredulity by the inquiry panel.
A tearful Mr Bell insisted that he had no discussions about the RHI crisis for several months and wasn’t informed of key developments, and former Spad Andrew Crawford claimed he had no discussions with close family members, who had 11 RHI boilers between them, about the scheme, even though he was a special adviser in the enterprise department while RHI was being developed.
With ex-DUP special advisers Dr Crawford and Timothy Cairns at odds with each other over what actually went on, it’s the difficult task of the RHI panel to decide whose evidence is most credible. Good luck, as they say, with that.
Perhaps the bigger question is why Mr Bell, who was clearly unsuited to a senior government role, was given not one, but two, ministerial roles. Or, to put it another way, why did ex-DUP leader Peter Robinson give him those roles? Why too did Mr Bell continue to seek advice from Mr Robinson long after Arlene Foster became party leader?
During his evidence to the inquiry, a bewildered-looking Mr Bell, who claimed ignorance of everything to do with RHI that hadn’t been written down, come across like a man who knew he had lost the war and was determined to take everyone else down with him. Why else, apropos of nothing, would he make reference to the “sexual misbehaviour” of two unnamed DUP ministers? With former colleagues like these I don’t blame Mrs Foster for nipping over to Gibraltar last week for a welcome respite.
The DUP may claim that Sinn Féin brought down power-sharing and is preventing a return to government. But the RHI scandal is increasingly showing that the north’s biggest unionist party is perfectly capable of making itself unfit to govern.
