Theresa May, Arlene Foster, Michelle O’Neill, Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon are so wildly different in views and personality that no woman commentator should surely any longer face the gormless ‘How would you compare A with B?’ To which the only honest answer is ‘I really wouldn’t.’
Don’t their politics differentiate them as satisfactorily as those of any two men? Though the two under the spotlight at the moment, for all that they come from different worlds, have had strikingly similar recent experiences.
In the March Assembly elections, the DUP leader and her team made it all about Arlene. ‘My party, my manifesto’ and the floor-length stole in red, white and blue. Me, me, me; it did not go well. Neither in private nor in public does an eternal ‘me’ come across as endearing.
Theresa’s closest aides had more lofty titles than special adviser. But closing herself off with them, plus their own apparent lack of people skills, proved just as disastrous as Arlene’s reliance on young Spads with over-developed estimates of their own judgement, and neither interest nor care for how their boss galled all sorts of nationalists. Whether the DUP Spad squad is as resented as the May kitchen cabinet is still not clear. When the election delivered disappointment in place of landslide Theresa’s counsellors were tossed overboard sharpish.
Neither woman is a whiz with words. The May performances that helped make Jeremy Corbyn shine by comparison were hobbled by her inarticulacy, her verbal deficit. It turned out that she had speechwriters who might as well have been saboteurs and that she couldn’t think on her feet. The Foster mis-speaks of past months slow Arlene up now, and London interest no doubt makes her more self-conscious still. Nothing recently has been as jagged as the crocodiles or as repetitious as Theresa’s ‘strong and stable.’
Oddities still get through. At the sign-off to one of Foster’s proud declarations that the DUP is eager to play its part in saving ‘the nation’, to bring stability to ‘the Union’, came a little wounded yelp – clearly about the sudden, unflattering focus on association between the party and loyalist paramilitaries, on Ian Junior being repulsed by homosexuality, Sammy et al’s climate change denial, Mervyn and others’ insistence that the Lord created the Giant's Causeway a blink of historical time ago. Asides like that of some nonentity of a former minister about ‘holding noses’ to secure an arrangement with the DUP must be taking the shine off the party’s long-awaited big moment. What Arlene said was that she had noted ‘a lot of hyperbole about the DUP in recent days.’
The tone makes nationalists bristle too. ‘Patronising and racist, including the BBC, objectionable in the extreme’, says one scandalised media worker. What did London think ‘we’ve been living with all this time? The same DUP has been condoned or encouraged as it suits Westminster.’
In the early hours of last Friday it was not ‘send for valued Arlene, whose guiding star is the Union’. The DUP’s tally of ten seats was everything. Crude buttering-up was injected into the May speech outside Number Ten before she drove off to see the Queen; the frequently unused title of Conservative ‘and Unionist’ party, ‘our friends and allies in the DUP’.
There was also a premature suggestion of a done deal. Cue a more conditional rewrite later, and on with the talks. Those between DUP and Downing Street have a lot more chance of progress than any at Stormont.
May’s carnivorous party may still come after her, or rend itself apart. The May-Foster teaming may not last. Meanwhile, unlike northern nationalism, the DUP are in the game.
When outgoing Taoiseach Enda Kenny eventually got around to telling May ‘nothing should happen to put the Good Friday Agreement at risk’, this after she had begun to talk terms with the DUP, what he got back was ‘that the government's approach and objectives in the forthcoming talks to re-establish the Northern Ireland Executive remained unchanged.’
No recognition there that the Agreement’s dependence on the two governments to stay above the fray, always more pious hope than realism, is no longer wink and nudge but openly trashed. Some thought Kenny would show more indignation than is likely from Leo Varadkar. But barring accidents Enda is out of there tomorrow.
Roll on Leo the Lion, who has as much affinity with northern nationalism as Arlene - though the DUP leader is almost certainly more tender and caring towards people on welfare benefits.
