Opinion

Brian Feeney: The truth is our current proconsul is simply not up to the job

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Secretary of State Karen Bradley
Secretary of State Karen Bradley Secretary of State Karen Bradley

It was dispiriting to see the colonial forelock tugging from unionists at the weekend as they tried to find something praiseworthy to say about our proconsul after the breathtaking admission she made exposing her ignorance about this place.

There was even an editorial in a unionist newspaper excusing her.

It’s par for the course. BBC newsreaders here announce in respectful tones the latest statement the NIO has written for her, respectful because she is the colonial governor.

As a result of how unionists regard that exalted position she got off lightly. Generally the view was, 'Ah well, how would she be expected to know anything about this place?' Not so in the British media where it was pointed out in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t just guilty of culpable ignorance. The inimitable Marina Hyde in the Guardian knew what it was; imbecility. Hyde wrote, it wasn’t just the initial imbecility of not having a clue about the north’s central facts, but ‘the second imbecility of thinking you should mention that ignorance in public’. Hyde concluded that, ‘it was previously thought that any challenge to Andrea Leadsom’s position as the stupidest cabinet minster would have to hail from at least the vegetable kingdom’, but this challenge ‘is quite sensational’.

You might say, well it’s the Guardian; hardly favourable to a Conservative minister. However, Hyde wasn’t alone. Michael Deacon in, of all papers, the Daily Torygraph, wrote a satirical piece – or at least you’d hope it is – giving a five-point guide to the north by our proconsul. It included the philanthropists called orange men who hand out free fruit to the poor and hungry every July 12, the cold weather in the north which explains why many men wear balaclavas, and the community groups called the Undergraduate Volleyball Fraternity and the Irish Rollerskating Association, UVF and IRA for short.

Look, the truth is the current manifestation of proconsul isn’t up to the job of cabinet minister. That was clear on day one and it’s clear beyond peradventure eight months later. Then again neither is Gavin Williamson, the Alan Partridge of the cabinet, sent to the Killyhevlin on Friday to suck up to the DUP whose help Theresa May needs more desperately by the day. May doesn’t appoint these dimwits because of their charm, wit or intellect but because they are her creatures guaranteed to do her bidding, and because they are part of her calculation of balancing numbers of Remainers and Brexiteers round the cabinet table.

Our present proconsul’s predecessor was a classic example, a man who owed his whole ministerial career to May, having spent years as her faithful gofer in the Home Office helping create her ‘hostile environment’ policy for immigrants. At least, unlike our present incumbent, he knew that it’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re stupid than open it and prove them right.

As you’ve read here before, this proconsul is the DUP’s takeaway delivery driver. On Monday she met all the other parties about plans the NIO has to give civil servants power to take decisions like building the incinerator up near Glengormley. Today she’s meeting the DUP in Westminster so that they can tell her what she must do and when. They’ve already told her what she must not do to move matters forward; that’s to propose any procedures for bringing the north into line with the rest of the UK and the Republic on marriage equality, abortion reform and language legislation, the easiest ways to remove Sinn Féin’s objections to forming an executive.

Then again the DUP leadership – that’s the ancient troglodytes in Westminster by the way, not Arlene and her squabbling spads – don’t want a Stormont executive. They never have because they object to the fundamental basis of the Good Friday Agreement which is sharing power with the nationalist community’s representatives. The majority of those DUP MPs strenuously opposed Paisley’s deal in 2006 and resisted Robinson’s deal on policing and justice in 2010. Now they’re in an ideal, unimagined position to block all of that since without an executive none of it can operate.

Plus they have a proconsul who, as she admitted, has no idea where they’re coming from.