Is this trolling out in the open, at least partly where we can see it, by people with masks under their noses? Is this what Sammy and Edwin and possibly Sir Jeffrey are doing to nominal leader Arlene Foster? Sir Jeff slides so fast from one position to another it is hard to tell.
Perhaps this is not just recreational trolling. Unlovely utterances in different voices inside a collapsing party structure; maybe auditions? Carla Lockhart has things to say too but we’ll leave her out of it, as the party almost certainly will. The lads may be pitching to an audience, or different bits of an audience. On a circuit of emails and phone calls and who knows, even meetings without social distancing behind closed doors, desperate buyers out there may be hollering. What would they holler? Show us your gospel roots, Edwin, give us more anti-science?
Rudeboy Sammy used to have them rolling in the aisles. He isn’t funny now. Or the jokes don’t work as well when the world hears them. (Whatever happened to Curry My Yoghurt Gregory? But then what’s become of the Irish Language Act...)
The traditional curse on families entrenched in their clan’s pieties is a plague on the lot of you. The goodbye many have loosed over a shoulder as they slam the door is yes, I’m off with someone from the ‘other’ lot and bedamned to your lamentation. There is a plague on both our houses now, if not the terrible black death of medieval times. The deniers alone refuse to see it.
But it infects the world we live in. Our political system is flummoxed, primarily here by the party that most people who look beyond their own tent can see is incompetent, soaked in siege-mentality, utterly self-centred. The DUP does indeed look to be falling in on itself.
The matching observation is that self-centred Sinn Féin appears to lack even the memory of its collective brain. Anyone disposed to ignore republican feebleness while gloating about Arlene and her trolls should get a grip on their reason. DUP bad behaviour does nothing to make Stormont SF, ministers and advisers alike, look any more impressive. Ruthless Mary Lou McDonald, perhaps entranced by scoring off the coalition, hasn’t moved on her northern comrades as yet. But then, it took the PSNI until last week to agree a time with Michelle O’Neill’s legal advisers to question her about Bobby Storey’s three-part funeral, away back in June. McDonald, complete with black stilettoes and furled black umbrella, was there as well.
And now we have Edwin Poots whistling into the wind. No surprise that the coronavirus may well discriminate on the basis of class, age, weight, that the poorest may suffer most deaths. Postcode statistics are fickle, though. Anyone keen to quantify the Irish nationalism of Shankill-Woodvale? Anyone who wants to play the Poots game had better be ready, in short order, to look and sound stupid.
But who knows the market for stupidity. The game Mr Poots is playing will bear watching, if only through fingers over eyes. And the party’s economy minister Diane Dodds, married to the party’s deputy leader, ex-MP Nigel? The first minister’s chief adviser Emma Little Pengelly, married to the civil servant who heads the health department? Do Diane and Emma show sisterliness to the encircled Arlene?
Diane has a little go at Sammy but otherwise keeps her head down. The elected representatives who play so fast and loose with what are initially presented as party decisions or party positions; Edwin, Slipped-Mask Sammy, those other chaps who helped hold up a pro-Trump banner just before Joe Biden narrowly but surely defeated him, and Chief Whip Sir Jeff. A half-baked coup or just plain badness?
Or a serial audition for a post said not to be in contention? Come on DUP, pull yourselves together – there’s a thought - and get it over with. You owe people.
