Last week, in the Red, White, and Blue column, I set out the acutely difficult political challenge facing Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.
As is often the case with really intractable problems, both sides are right.
Those unionists vehemently opposed to the Sea Border are right that it breaks the promise of the Belfast Agreement to safeguard Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, that it was the United Kingdom on the ballot at the EU referendum not Great Britain, and that barriers are being raised for the Province’s vital east-west trade in order to protect its much less valuable north-south trade.
Donaldson is right that nobody in London, Dublin, or Brussels cares enough about that to do anything about it. The Government, in particular, has proven totally unwilling to fulfil its duty to provide its citizens in Northern Ireland with good government; Chris Heaton-Harris has simply set deadline after meaningless deadline whilst muttering darkly that any direct rule would need to involve the Republic of Ireland (another strike against Ulster’s British status.)
Stormont has collapsed several times before. The usual process is that eventually, the Secretary of State du jour goes over, holds some meetings, hands out some bribes, and gets a statesmanlike photograph. Yet in this case the DUP, unusually, picked a battle on a matter of substance rather than cash, and Westminster won’t budge.
That brings us to today. Yesterday’s papers reported that the DUP has struck a deal that will revive power-sharing at Stormont. Donaldson won out at a crunch meeting of his party’s leadership on Monday night.
Hopeful news. But in reality, the medium-term political picture looks perhaps even bleaker than it did on Thursday.
The most obvious bad sign is that nobody seems to want to spell out what exactly is in the deal. Donaldson claims that it “will end Northern Ireland automatically following future EU laws”, which could potentially be a real breakthrough.
But how? He wouldn’t tell the DUP leadership yesterday evening. Heaton-Harris wouldn’t tell the press today. It isn’t obvious anybody has squared it with the EU, who will presumably have a view.
There do seem set to be some legal changes to the operation of the border, and that is not nothing. Yet the fundamental fact of the sea border remains, and so thus do all the problematic constitutional assumptions used to justify it. It is a far cry from the Seven Tests the DUP set itself in 2021.
Add to that farcical bits like renaming the green lane “the UK Internal Market Lane”, and it will not be difficult for Donaldson’s opponents to present this as a sell-out. Especially with Doug Beattie saying it’s vital that Stormont is back up and running before anyone looks too closely.
That’s true even if the deal holds; it will be infinitely worse for all involved if the whole thing blows up over the next few days or weeks. As Rishi Sunak ought to have learned from his over-selling of the Windsor Framework, no amount of boosterish language can obscure the substance forever.
Donaldson will be acutely aware of the danger he’s in. The DUP secured its place as the leading party of unionism by eviscerating the Ulster Unionists for compromising too far on the Belfast Agreement. (Donaldson was actually on the UUP delegation at the negotiations, and walked out on the final day.)
History could repeat itself. Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice, and grassroots activists such as Jamie Bryson, are well-positioned to savage the DUP if the mood of the unionist electorate turns against them.
The latter is especially dangerous because until recently Donaldson was openly allied to him. He wrote the foreword to Bryson’s book. Yet last night, in what Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph rightly describes as a total humiliation for the DUP leader, Bryson live-tweeted the secret meeting where he sold his deal (or a general description of it) to his party leadership. (See the picture above.)
I mean… Being laughed at is always supremely dangerous for a politician. But substantively, this leak also means that there were people in the room with Donaldson prepared to do this to him, and arguably, or at least potentially, to the DUP itself.
Donaldson has one shield that David Trimble did not. Thanks to Peter Hain’s abysmal St Andrews Agreement, the nominal position of First Minister at Stormont now goes to the largest party, rather than the largest bloc. This makes switching between parties by unionists or nationalists riskier, and has proved a very effective tactic by which the DUP and Sinn Fein pulled the ladder up behind them after supplanting the UUP and SDLP.
The DUP’s walkout was not, as Michelle O’Neill claims, about blocking a Sinn Fein first minister. But it has historically been a prospect leveraged by the DUP to hold their coalition together. It appeals precisely to the sort of tribal unionist voter who might be most appalled by a perceived sell-out on the Sea Border.
In the event that Sinn Fein do take the (again, entirely nominal) top job, that dam may burst, and the DUP will face the same doom they inflicted on the UUP. It would be poetic, at least.