The fate of the Stormont Assembly, and a Brexit resolution of a kind, now rests on the uncharismatic shoulders of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and his judgment call on the Windsor Framework.
If Donaldson declares the abstruse new EU trading arrangements on the enhanced flow of chilled meats to Ulster a victory, then Stormont will re-start and the usual divisive politics of Northern Ireland begin again.
If he goes for the treachery button, then the long campaign in the wilderness against the perfidious and varied enemies of Ulster will go on – much to the consternation of Downing Street.
As closed as the Kremlin, it is never easy to forecast the DUP’s future intentions. But acute observers believe Donaldson’s private inclination – and most of the DUP Stormont Assembly MLA members – is to return if only to resume close political combat with Sinn Fein over the various jobs, glories, titles and funding streams Stormont provides.
Donaldson’s henchmen could indeed argue that a return to Stormont is a unionist necessity to protect the province from further EU and Irish Republican inroads via the vaunted, but still untried, ‘Stormont brake’ mechanism.
As closed as the Kremlin, it is never easy to forecast the DUP’s future intentions
Nor realistically is there likely ever to be a better deal on offer than the current Windsor Framework, however long a future boycott. In Westminster, even the Brexit stalwarts of the waning ERG seem weary of all further negotiation.
Why not bank the gains of the February 2022 Stormont boycott as a victory for his muscular DUP leadership along with the concessions wrung from both the EU and the Irish and UK governments? Unlike their Stormont cohorts, Sinn Fein, the Alliance Party and the SDLP, the DUP have reshaped the agenda in both London and Brussels on the Northern Ireland Protocol. An incontestable win. Primus inter pares.
But nothing is so straightforward in the schismatic Presbyterian DNA of the DUP. Inward, parochial, tight-lipped and ever prone to internal coups grounded in cries of treachery, Donaldson’s judgment call has real political risks. The cry of ‘Lundy’, the protestant traitor who tried to surrender Londonderry to the papists in 1690, is never far from DUP lips. Edwin Potts, his creationist DUP predecessor, lasted just 21 days before being ousted on the usual grounds of betrayal.
Donaldson has so far side-swerved a direct confrontation with his would-be critics by appointing an eight-person committee to sift through the innards of the Windsor trade deal and come to a resolution at the end of March. But only, his enemies whisper, after carefully choosing those who are likely to agree with him. No wreckers need apply.
Unlike another Unionist leadership predecessor, David Trimble, who Donaldson tormented as a softie on the IRA, Donaldson is determined not to become the personal face of compromise but remain above the fray. Solomon not Judas.
As of yet, no open hostilities have been declared, but no-one doubts a showdown is coming. Leading the would-be sell-out camp against Donaldson or on any purported compromise are an assortment of one-time allies, now suspected enemies. This number includes some of Donaldson’s own MPs and the ‘even more hardline than the DUP’ Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister.
Other would-be oppositional voices include Jamie Bryson, a social media figure and loyalist activist, and a range of Brexit-ERG fellow travellers, from David Frost to former Labour MP now Baroness Kate Hoey.
In the incestuous realm of the DUP/Unionist camp, Donaldson was of course just a few months ago sharing platforms and marching hand in hand with those whose Twitter accounts are now flashing red with warnings that nothing has changed and the EU subjugation of Ulster goes on.
The danger in Donaldson’s strategy is that every day of delay and his seeming silence allows the Windsor Framework detractors to unpick the deal and cry foul in the Unionist media.
Donaldson could still opt for the ‘No’ camp if the selling of the Windsor Framework becomes politically impossible. But the odds, at the moment, are weighed on a ‘Yes’. It is hard to fashion a good case of Lundyism on the hieroglyphics of EU-GB customs paperwork documentation. ‘Jeffrey likes being a member of the Establishment, being a Privy Councillor, the statesman thing. It’s his natural inclination to do a deal,’ said a close observer.
If pragmatism triumphs over purity, then the entire Unionist establishment will, in public at least, unwaveringly endorse their leader’s decision as a triumph and our Irish Troubles move on to the next episode.
But a new schism of some kind in Ulster is inevitable. Donaldson presumably must hope it will be confined to the outer fringes of Unionism as represented by TUV leader Jim Allister, a toxic one man no-hoper crusade. And that his divided enemies will splinter amongst themselves into ever smaller keepers of a withered but impossible loyalist faith.
Kevin Toolis is the author of the Troubles classic Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul
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