Opinion

Claire Simpson: Queen Elizabeth portrait row a distraction from the real issues

THERE'S a basic sleight of hand trick so old it was used in ancient Greece to scam the unsuspecting.

In the trick, a ball is placed under one of three cups before they are swiftly moved around. The target has to guess where the ball is.

But the scammer uses sleight of hand to take the ball from under the cup so no matter how the target guesses, the answer is never correct.

It feels as though we've also been the victim of a three-cup trick. In less than three months the UK will leave the European Union or, in what is now looking like the most likely scenario, will be catapulted out of the bloc with no fallback plan.

The Bank of England has warned there is a one-in-three chance the north and Britain will fall into a recession by next year (is an economic downturn under the left, middle or right cup?), even if a final Brexit deal is agreed at this late stage.

The bank's governor Mark Carney has warned a no-deal Brexit will result in an instant economic shock. Food and petrol will become more expensive if the UK leaves with no deal.

But why worry about likely price rises and job losses when we can all be distracted by a row over a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in a government office?

Earlier this month, Lord Maginnis, the former Ulster Unionist MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, claimed a senior civil servant was handed £10,000 in compensation because he was offended at having to walk past a portrait of the queen at Stormont House, which is the Belfast headquarters of the Northern Ireland Office (NIO).

In this case it's unlikely that compensation was paid solely on the basis of a portrait.

We will probably never learn of the full background to the claim. And because the NIO has repeatedly said it cannot comment on individual cases, we probably never will.

While it's important that public workplaces are neutral spaces, the scale of the row has been blown out of all proportion.

New prime minister Boris Johnson was reportedly "a bit shocked" when the issue was raised by unionists during a flying visit to Belfast last week. I'm sure he was.

He might have expected a greater focus on more serious issues, especially since, on the day of his visit, a large group of protesters had gathered at Stormont to campaign against the possible closure of Harland and Wolff shipyard in the traditionally unionist heartland of east Belfast.

The protesters' link-up with Irish language group An Dream Dearg for a bi-lingual demonstration - something which would have been unheard of even a decade ago - seemed much more significant than a familiar old row about symbols. A friend said watching the shipyard workers shout in Irish had moved her to tears.

In a doomed attempt to defuse the dispute, secretary of state Julian Smith insisted he had a photo of the queen in his private office at Stormont House.

He tweeted a picture of the photo, saying he was "delighted" to find it in his office - which rather sounds like he wasn't expecting it to be there.

Unfortunately the photo looked as though a lowly staff member had printed it off the internet, stuck it in a random frame from Boots and plonked it on Mr Smith's mantelpiece seconds before he arrived.

It looks not so much a state portrait but a blurry image of a distant relative he's forced to visit at Christmas.

In most other democracies, photos or portraits of the head of state hang in government offices without much comment.

But we don't actually have a democracy, instead we remain in a limbo state more than two-and-a-half years after our devolved government collapsed.

The row smacks of distraction at a time when we all most need to keep our eyes on the ball.

Politics often uses the same principles of misdirection as the three-cup trick, with an added extra of confected outrage (see any Brexit row over the colour of British passports).

And in any trick there is always a dupe - in this case, us.