You might have seen on TV on Friday the latest balloon wafted across the Irish Sea bobbing about in front of Hillsborough Castle.
His job, the easiest in a British cabinet, is to sign papers affecting people and places he knows nothing about. Then, after emitting a puff of air he wafts back to England. No consequences affect him. He has no votes here. He couldn’t get elected to anything.
He’s the latest in a line of political nonentities deemed suitable in London to sign stuff off in Belfast. It’s a great job with a big mansion to live in if you want, or another not so big mansion at Stormont if you prefer; free rent, free transport, two days a week. His predecessor was so stupid she actually admitted she didn’t even know this place was divided into nationalists and unionists who strangely enough don’t vote for each other.
The new incumbent used to be chief whip, a job at which he was an abysmal failure. Most of his own party MPs ignored his instructions repeatedly and with impunity. He handed his boss Theresa May the greatest parliamentary defeats in modern British history. So, naturally there’s only one job fit for him – the north.
Here he can sign papers to his heart’s content marvelling at the funny names in them. Like all his shamelessly ignorant predecessors he doesn’t know the difference between Maghera and Maghery and can’t pronounce either. He doesn’t need to. Why would he care?
The best evidence that he doesn’t care is the fact that he didn’t even realise the message he sent standing before the gates of Hillsborough Castle last Friday, the seat of the imperial proconsul, making his announcement after two days ignoring all the representations of the parties here. Appropriate that it wasn’t Stormont, which of course no longer counts, but also because, there he was from the metropolitan capital telling the natives what was best for them at the gates of Hillsborough, where, in centuries gone by tenants solicited favours from the lord.
It takes nerve or a total lack of self-awareness, or just sheer effrontery and arrogance to stand there as a carpet-bagger and spew the opposite of what everyone knows to be the truth. Having heard what ALL political parties here bar one, and business and farming said, he had the cheek to announce: ‘I’m sure in the Brexit deal that’s concluded that the Good Friday Agreement is respected at all levels.’
This pronunciamento despite his government being told the opposite by EU leaders, despite the certainty of crippling customs checks which make cross border travel difficult and serve to damage the Irish identity of northerners, despite having ratted on the December 2017 Joint Report for the simple reason that it did respect the GFA in all its parts which his government has no intention of doing.
The current proconsul then followed up with this stunner. ‘I’m clear I will ensure I continue to treat all the Stormont parties equally.’ He’d just publicly demonstrated that he doesn’t, and won’t and can’t, because his government depends on DUP support. The DUP did meet him, but as everyone knows, he doesn’t amount to a row of beans because the DUP deals only with Johnson and his office. He knows the British proposals are the result of a compromise with the DUP and no one else here.
You ask yourself, despite knowing this, how can this guy say he will treat all parties equally, how can he come out with that when it is manifestly not true? Does he come out with such meretricious piffle just to keep a job in cabinet which carries no power or kudos with it? Does he not realise the contempt people here feel for him as he destroys the much improved world the GFA brought, solely to beat the Brexit party in England? Does self-respect come into it at any point?
