In this space last week the obvious local angle to take was the DUP fretting about the state of their leverage on Boris Johnson’s government.
It has been some week, leaving Westminster onlookers half-laughing, half-disgusted. At times the pompous ‘Mother of Parliaments’ looked more like teenagers on their last day in school.
Amidst the yelling plus glimpses of dignified dismay, the DUP’s time in the sun ended without even a whimper. By its own doing, the Johnson government is now so far short of a majority that the DUP’s ten votes are irrelevant. Their moment has gone.
Denial kicked in, as was always likely. Jeffrey Donaldson kept popping up in broadcasts, some in Dublin, to mention and re-mention possible deals that only need Dublin to roll over. The nominal party leader’s response to her party’s loss of purpose has been more intriguing.
Waiting for the RHI report, relegated and totally upstaged by her self-important MPs, how Arlene Foster has occupied her mind for the past two years is a mystery. Did she work out what to say when this moment came? Is she winging it? She might, you would imagine, have registered Johnson’s performance over the past week as an unanswerable argument against improvisation. The evidence so far instead suggests a state of headless chicken-ness.
On Friday night there she was at Stormont in that big and sombre crowd, the rearguard action against provision of safe and legal abortion here, among placards reading ‘Not in my name’. On Saturday morning she gave us her ‘Vision for Unionism; Beyond 2021’ or that at least was the title for the party’s ‘Autumn Policy Forum’. The Foster speech surely cannot be the sum total of the vision. Could it be? She wants as broad a coalition as possible. Unionism must engage ‘Northern Ireland’s minority ethnic and new communities’. How can it do more to ‘integrate and celebrate’ these citizens? This project will be interesting to watch, and certainly easier than engaging with the longer established and now equal-sized local community.
Foster did show some self-awareness. Celebrating nationalist citizens would ‘require the longest-term commitment’ and this ‘strand of work’ would also ‘be treated with the greatest scepticism.’ Unionism was not planting seeds ‘in the hope of a quick harvest. We are planting oaks to grow deep roots.’ But as before, she could not stop there and leave the seed to be nurtured.
There had to be, as is her custom, an un-nurturing dig. Nationalism abided by historical determinism, she said, which hadn’t worked for a hundred years. Nationalism was waiting for history to end the UK but ‘the ballot box has seen off all challenges.’
This may not be a good moment to put confidence in unionism’s interpretation of history. But turning up at rallies to emphasise the DUP’s lack of responsibility for abortion provision may be the high point of current Foster thinking. Wooing the votes of nationalists whose Catholicism governs their politics?
Well, the Conservative party looks torn beyond repair, so that project is no longer viable. But in terms of sometimes grim entertainment the crisis just keeps giving. A leader chosen for his supposed eloquence made a mess of his first big Commons speech and gave Jeremy Corbyn the chance to sound dignified and even definite in comparison. The cameras (advance apology to any gentle readers who may have missed this) caught Iain Duncan Smith excavating his nose. The cameras also loved Jacob Rees-Mogg draped across the front-bench, personifying entitlement and contempt, said several, for parliament.
Rambling is worse than bumbling, Johnson painful to watch in Wakefield on the day his brother defected. The coming election, whenever it comes, may nonetheless reward the rambling and bumbling prime minister with his own majority. Which will leave the DUP to contemplate their present leader without Westminster distraction. Every cloud has a silver lining. No successor, surely, could be worse.
