You want a unionist pushing a hard line who keeps his temper? He’s your man.
As fluent live on air as any unionist of the same stripe can be, apart from nails on a blackboard Jim Allister? That’s himself.
But you want a leading unionist who tells the Irish government, anyone listening in Britain and the rest of us, believably, that he’s going to pull Stormont down? This is not Jeffrey Donaldson. Sir Jeff is a Westminster man from neat hair to shiny shoes. If, if, if he really did it - though the ‘ifs’ leapt out of a speech meant to sound scary - he would sicken more DUP activists than he reassured.
From him, their latest leader facing the gloomiest of prospects, they want a racing chance at holding seats, salaries and patronage. If they hear, as is sometimes audible in the Donaldson elocution, a bottom note of disdain for Stormont as an over-blown provincial palace, it’s scarier for Jeffrey’s leadership.
The latest conventional wisdom believes a chunk of unionism – specialist on DUP Foster Era Sam McBride says ‘a swathe’ - wants Stormont gone. Because it has meant only ‘more loss’, all that shtick and, unvoiced, because it is no longer theirs to command. But the next crack it gets at the ballot-box unionism beyond the DUP may or may not line out for nice Doug Beattie and his thin team. Some will mooch back to 1960/1690 with the TUV, others to Alliance. A bigger number may simply stay home, or linger in garden centres that have re-tooled enough supply lines.
Jeffrey on camera is ordinarily a deft reader. As he delivered, badly, what sounded like a cut and pasted speech, it was as if political instinct had dimmed those earnest Daniel eyes. (Few of us can read aloud convincingly and fret about the text at the same time.) The little crisis that wasn’t folded in on itself inside 24 hours.
Does Donaldson’s DUP really want to mothball the white elephant on the hill? Can he trust the smarts of what is said to be today’s top team, brain-storming how to revive a flailing party? Does he gel with Peter Robinson, in from retirement as political consultant who as leader himself alternated swooshes at radical ideas with hokey-cokey pretences, flat noes, ‘conventions’ and ‘commissions’ of unionism that rarely made more than initial appearances?
Donaldson made his first mark in Ulster Unionism as besotted fan of Enoch Powell, re-purposed as a UUP MP.
Eager to make media contacts the 20-year-old Jeffrey talked of Powell, still only 62 but with a crowded past, as though oblivious to how his ‘rivers of blood’ ended his ‘mainland’ career. The apocalyptic Powell could have been someone else entirely. Enoch was self-evidently a great and scholarly man, Jeffrey so wide-eyed it was endearing.
Kilkeel High had done well by the bright and energetic Donaldson, his command of English well above that of many unionist representatives, grammar school products with woeful grammar though most if not all of them fans of selective education. Jeffrey listened and learned. The then widespread UUP snobbery may have sharpened his innate discipline. A UUP insider of the time (when it was possible to find people in unionist politics willing to talk off the record) confided that ‘Jeffrey’s mobile home’ for establishing himself in Lagan Valley brought sneers. But he served an effective Westminster apprenticeship first as Powell’s aide-de-camp, then as Jim Molyneaux’s personal assistant.
He took to Westminster. Sir Jeffrey swallowed Molyneaux’s integrationism as the safest way to secure NI’s place in the Union, and it has always been assumed he would rather lead from London. He is only denying it strongly now, when leadership of a demoralised and shrunken party comes with the imperative to be Stormont first minister, precisely when that becomes a role unionism may struggle to retain.
You could feel for him. If he didn’t sound so smug.
