Opinion

Mary Kelly: DUP still saying 'no' as Edwin Poots plans for Good Friday Agreement's funeral

Steve Baker, long-time ERG ultra and now an NIO minister, has incurred the wrath of the DUP for apologising about how the government has handled Brexit negotiations with Dublin and the EU.
Steve Baker, long-time ERG ultra and now an NIO minister, has incurred the wrath of the DUP for apologising about how the government has handled Brexit negotiations with Dublin and the EU. Steve Baker, long-time ERG ultra and now an NIO minister, has incurred the wrath of the DUP for apologising about how the government has handled Brexit negotiations with Dublin and the EU.

ONLY IN Northern Ireland could a senior politician apologising cause a meltdown among the abominable no-men in the DUP.

They'd barely finished raising their glasses of orange to toast the arrival of 'hard men' from the European Research Group, Steve Baker and Chris Heaton-Harris to the NIO, when the pair started going soft.

Heaton-Harris makes reassuring noises about improving cross-border relations and then Baker did a complete Oprah-style confession, admitting that he and others had not always behaved in a way that encouraged Ireland and the EU to trust them and he was sorry about that.

Then PM Truss said there was no reason an Assembly and Executive should not be re-established at Stormont immediately.

It was all too much for the DUP, whose mission in life is to put out the light at the end of the tunnel, so enter stage-left, Edwin Poots, wearing his undertaker face, warning that the DUP were still saying no, and the impasse could lead to the "funeral" of the Good Friday Agreement.

You'll remember that the party has been insisting that the Protocol was damaging said Agreement. But just in case you were confused, Pootsy helpfully tweeted to a critic: "The DUP campaigned against the GFA, it consistently opposed and never signed it or signed up to it. Have you been out of NI for 20 years?"

Is there a strategy here? Back Brexit, back Boris, back Truss... er, it's all gone Pete Tong. On the one hand they whinge about nationalists talking up a united Ireland instead of making Norn Iron work, but then they wreck government that makes it work.

If there's no Stormont what then? Direct rule? Joint authority? Or is it all just huffing and puffing until they don't so much blow the house down as dig an escape tunnel once the UK and EU come up with a form of words that waters down, though doesn't scrap, the protocol?

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IN the tributes to Queen Elizabeth it was noted that she had seen 15 Prime Ministers during her 70 year reign. One reader responded: "My son has seen four PMs and he's only six." It looks like the lad might soon see a fifth, if La Truss and her similarly deranged Chancellor continue on their current trajectory.

"Gone by Christmas," according to more than one Tory voice at a party conference which fast turned into a wake.

Kwarteng, who's been described as both "ferociously intelligent" and "extremely arrogant" by his friends, is clearly lacking in political nous.

Imagine thinking it would be so easy to sell a policy which handed tax cuts to the richest in society, while curbing spending on the poorest.

Cue sudden reverse ferret on the 45p tax cut and a rueful admission of "a little turbulence" when he addressed depressed Tories in the auditorium, while outside a mob of demonstrators put local police under pressure.

Some Conservative politicians were almost as aghast at the plans as the financial markets, but lest you think Kwarteng and Truss are alone in their ability to alienate voters, the party chairman, Jake Berry, also has form.

He said people struggling to pay their bills should either cut their consumption or get a higher salary. "Just go out there and get that new job," he said, adjusting his Marie Antoinette wig.

This is the man who joined Kwarteng at a champagne reception where hedge fund bosses were said to have "egged on" the Chancellor to press ahead with the tax cutting plans in the mini-budget or the 'fiscal statement', as he preferred to call it, in much the same way that Putin prefers 'special operation' instead of war.

And there are plenty of other nasties, like Home Secretary, Sue-Ellen (real name) Braverman, who expressed "disappointment" at the government's tax reversal and accused colleagues of staging a "coup" against the Prime Minister. She also dreams of seeing a plane fly off to Rwanda with refugees on board. "It's my obsession."

Her parents, immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius, must be so proud.

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I LIKED Jimmy Nesbitt's performance at the Ireland's Future event in Dublin last Saturday a lot better than his turn in Bloodlands, which seems to rely largely on his mobile eyebrows and a script so wooden it could give you skelfs just listening to it.

Any worries that the next event, planned for Belfast in November, might not attract enough punters have been allayed by an unlikely saviour. Jamie Bryson has told the News Letter it could elicit protests from unionists. Crocodiles anyone?