Opinion

Newton Emerson: The mystery is why the flawed Jonathan Bell kept getting promoted

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Former DUP minister Jonathan Bell appeared before the RHI Inquiry last week
Former DUP minister Jonathan Bell appeared before the RHI Inquiry last week Former DUP minister Jonathan Bell appeared before the RHI Inquiry last week

In Westminster parlance, ‘the men in grey suits’ are party officers who tap a leader on the shoulder and tell them it is time to go.

The DUP’s problem at the RHI inquiry is that its men in grey suits are as much in the frame as its leader.

DUP chief executive Timothy Johnston, a former special adviser to Arlene Foster and Peter Robinson, has been alleged to run the party from top to bottom, via a network of special advisers appointed by preferment rather than the open competition civil service rules require.

Resentments and rumours have festered inside this ad hoc patronage system, giving everyone cause to be wary of everyone else.

So who will tap whose shoulder if the inquiry’s findings warrant it? The DUP looks structurally incapable of showing anyone the door without blowing the door off its hinges.

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The more flawed a figure Jonathan Bell appears to be in testimony to the RHI inquiry, the stranger it seems that Peter Robinson kept promoting him. Bell was a junior minister at the office of the first ministers for four years - a long time under Robinson’s hokey-cokey management strategy. When complaints about Bell reached fever pitch, he was simply promoted again, to enterprise minister. This cannot all be explained by Machiavellian moves to keep enemies or trouble-makers close - Bell would have been a nobody without Robinson’s favour.

The more apparent this mystery becomes, the more doubt it raises about Robinson’s judgment on his other long-term favourite, Arlene Foster.

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Sinn Féin has gone through the motions of objecting to the secretary of state’s plans to defer Stormont elections and clarify the decision-making powers of civil servants.

The party is correct to denounce this as outrageous tinkering with the Good Friday Agreement, rushed through before a judicial review would have ordered a return to the polls.

But it is a token protest, as nobody wants an election and everyone wants civil servants to take certain decisions.

Former Alliance leader Lord Alderdice called for an election last month to clarify “what the people want” but apart from that unofficial kite flying there has been silence on the issue since June last year, when the DUP bounced back in the Westminster election, causing Sinn Féin to drop its ‘one last push’ call for another Stormont contest.

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The Hooded Men have had their final appeal for a finding of torture rejected by the European Court of Human Rights, demonstrated the limits of legal activism in addressing the Troubles. Although the ‘five techniques’ of inhuman and degrading treatment they were subjected to would count as torture today, they did not in the 1970s and a court cannot apply present standards to the past - that is a human right itself. The men’s case was based on the discovery of documents suggesting cabinet ministers thought the techniques were torture. However, this was irrelevant, as by the standards of the time they were mistaken.

A separate case is now being brought by lobby group the Committee for the Administration of Justice, in support of a bereaved relative, seeking a criminal investigation of “authorisation by government ministers.” This also looks futile. The last minister from the time, Lord Carrington, died two months ago.

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Belfast Health Trust has concocted the most Kafkaesque excuse yet to turn down a freedom of information request.

The Trust will not release a report it commissioned into the neurology scandal, which led to thousands of patients being recalled, or even reveal the report’s terms of reference, because the identity of the neurologist involved - Dr Michael Watt - is “public knowledge”.

The Trust says this makes the entire report “sensitive personal information”, for which it is claiming absolute exemption from public interest disclosure, an unheard of position that lawyers for affected patients describe as “indefensible”.

The implication of the trust’s thinking is that the public should never know both what has happened and who is responsible. No better proof is required that the NHS is unfit to investigate itself.

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In further Freedom of Information creativity, Belfast City Council and the Department for Infrastructure have been criticised by Alliance for refusing to reveal the cost of July’s east Belfast bonfire removal operation, on the grounds it is “commercially sensitive”.

This exemption only applies if there is a competitive market in bonfire removal, which clearly there is not, as the council had to scour the UK to find anyone willing to do it.

My information is that the initial quote was £100,000 but this will have increased when a second bonfire was added. Could the final cost have doubled?

Of more immediate concern is that I learned this from a whistleblower, so it will presumably be regarded as “theft” by the PSNI and 100 officers with fake Durham accents will turn up at dawn to arrest me.

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After all the fuss over the Boundary Commission’s initial proposal to divide Dungiven in three, there is surprisingly little fuss over its final report merging Dungiven but splitting Holywood in two and spreading the bizarre new constituency of Mid Down across no fewer than four councils. Is this because Protestants are less bothered by partition?

newton@irishnews.com