Reading the room is a fairly new-fangled term for something ages old. Knowing how you come across is a talent only some have naturally.
Then there are the wide bands of people who do not get it. They don’t know they can’t read the room or they don’t care.
Smugness could still scramble Sinn Féin’s ability to see what’s happening and get ahead of it but they read the room.
Watching them rise has scrambled other political brains. The polls showing them topping the Republic’s league in a way that relegates the old order have badly shaken Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and when unionism lifts it head from its own disorder they see republicans making headway its leaders still cannot acknowledge without anger. Because official, ceremonious Britain decided a while back that ‘the war’ was over and it was time to welcome republicans as led by Martin McGuinness into ‘the system’? No, because their vote began to rise and continued to rise, blips on one side of the border fading out, underlying trend upwards. Similar to the picture north of the border.
It isn’t a new dawn. It has been gradual. It has taken SF work throughout the island and still does, ability to profit from the economic storm also owing much to the absence of a credible left-wing alternative. Plus smugness on the part of the old order in the Dáil, a desperate shortage of housing and steady, terrifying rise in the cost of living.
On both sides of the border people fretting from day to day about bills and jobs turn away from politics in dismay. The past week’s overload of British ceremony, television pictures of uniforms and grand interiors could only keep reality at the door for a short time. Or not at all for many more than those who queued, long as those queues were. The official mourning that lasted until yesterday meant that a new royal figurehead could trek around the UK making northern waves at least in Royal Hillsborough (had you remembered the village got its name changed a while back?). Bread and circuses; both paid for by the people, not the palace.
Britain’s replacement for Boris Johnson won more time to stand campaign promises up, or stand them on their heads. Keir Starmer had a little time off-air to get ready for this weekend’s Labour conference.
He has to hope that he read enough of the room when he refused to criticise police action against the tiny number who said ‘not in my name’ about the new king, the river of mourning. The week did not even include a coronation; that’s next year, apparently. What happened and re-happened in one grand room after another involving ‘stinking’ leaky pens was an ‘acclamation’. Now we know.
Irksome voices broke in. North of the border unionism as represented by the DUP continues to do its best to irritate and enrage nationalism into serious thinking about a united Ireland. Although it must annoy some still senior in the party that a former leader grabbed attention, to that very end. Dame Arlene of the Crocodiles is now out of northern politics and therefore not deserving of notice. Like the couple in Dungiven who barged into that small, poor town’s hard-won calm. None of them read the room, but they probably think that a bad habit.
Did Alex Maskey and Michelle O’Neill annoy more people than they pleased by shaking one of those red royal hands? Here’s a bet they did it right. Fawning? O’Neill shook hands instead of the awful contortion that is curtseying. Maskey the veteran apparatchik has form; like his time in the spotlight in Stormont’s great hall, alongside messy Boris Johnson.
The messy one was Britain’s prime minister. The neat one was the ex-internee. He earned the right to make his dry joke to Charles about not telling Jeffrey that Sinn Féin is the largest Stormont party.
