‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure’.
So said Enoch Powell, and such a fate has befallen Powell’s erstwhile Election Agent: Jeffrey Donaldson.
Once the commanding figure of the Democratic Unionist Party, a familiar presence at Westminster and Stormont alike, Donaldson now stands condemned, having been found guilty of 18 historical sexual offences, including rape. Donaldson’s fall came as a shock and will continue to have ramifications for the DUP.
However, the political significance of his fall lies not only in the disgrace of one man.
It lies in what his case reveals about the habits, assumptions, and weaknesses of party politics more widely. Donaldson’s downfall exposes something deeper about the political culture that elevated him, trusted him, and made him so central to the movement he led. It is the failure of a model of authority: one built on reputation, deference, and the comforting assumption that public rectitude is a reliable guide to private character.
In many ways Donaldson was the model unionist leader.
He served in the Ulster Defence Regiment during the Troubles; he was a practicing Christian who vociferated Ulster Protestant values and morals. He had resigned from the Ulster Unionists and joined the DUP over concerns about implementing the 1998 Agreement. Articulate, he was a long-serving and influential MP. He could speak to unionists at home and ministers in London. He could resist compromise – then explain compromise. He could take the DUP back into Stormont and present it not as surrender, but as statesmanship.
What happens to a party built so heavily on moral certainty when the man who supplied much of its public respectability is exposed as a criminal and abuser of children?
The DUP’s problem is not merely reputational. It is epistemic. How does a party which has so often claimed to see clearly through the moral confusions of the age now persuade voters that it can judge character, truth, risk, and responsibility? How does a movement that placed such emphasis on standards explain its own failure to see the truth about a man so central to its public life?
It compels unionism to confront a hard truth: that movements which speak most confidently in the language of morality are not thereby protected from moral catastrophe. On the contrary, the louder the rhetoric of rectitude, the greater the danger that reputation itself begins to stand in for genuine scrutiny.
There is a difference between moralism and moral seriousness.
Moralism is public, declaratory and often theatrical. It consists of saying the right things, denouncing the right enemies, and associating oneself with virtue in the eyes of supporters. The late Ian Paisley turned the DUP into masters of it. Moral seriousness is more difficult. It requires institutions to be built on an unsentimental view of human nature. It assumes that senior figures can be weak, duplicitous, and corrupt. It therefore insists on habits of challenge, accountability and internal scepticism. A party may have an abundance of the former while lacking much of the latter.
On the back of Donaldson’s conviction, the media are falling over themselves to capture headlines looking at rumours of lurid activities, security service blackmail, and who knew what and when. The most important question is not simply who in government and the DUP hierarchy were aware or had suspicions, yet said nothing. That question is serious, and it will no doubt – and should – continue to be pressed.
Assuming many around Donaldson genuinely knew nothing of his crimes, a deeper issue remains. What sort of political culture becomes so dependent on a familiar figure that his authority itself discourages searching questions? What sort of party comes to rely so heavily on the reassurance provided by seniority, experience, and public reputation? Those are not questions about one man’s guilt. They are questions about institutional character.
The day after Donaldson’s conviction, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, was sentenced to five-and-a-quarter years in prison for embezzling more than £400,000 from his own party. Within the space of 24 hours, two of the United Kingdom’s most significant identity-based parties were confronted with the same uncomfortable truth: movements built around constitutional certainty can become dangerously incurious about the people who wield power in their name. Murrell was not the SNP’s public prophet, but he oversaw their party machine. For two decades he served as chief executive of a party which came to dominate Scottish politics.
In Scotland, nationalism has come to present independence as more than a constitutional option – but as an ethical project: the route to a better, fairer, more enlightened country. Party loyalty can acquire a moral weight which ordinary politics does not possess.
In a very different set of circumstances, Peter Murrell’s conviction in Scotland points to a related weakness in modern party organisation.
It goes without saying that Murrell’s offences are in no way comparable with Donaldson’s horrendous and disgusting crimes. The moral gravity is of a wholly different order. Yet the two scandals expose a common flaw in party culture. In Murrell’s case, the court heard of a significant breach of trust, and of a man whose position allowed him to circumvent checks and balances over an extended period of time. Two whistleblowers have stated they were intimidated when they tried to raise concerns about Murrell within the SNP. This demonstrates a broader truth about political organisations supporting great causes: they are often very good at enforcing discipline outwardly, and dangerously bad at scrutinising inwardly.
Donaldson and Murrell are not alike in the nature or gravity of their offences.
Yet, they are parallel in what they reveal about machine politics. In both cases, a political movement placed exceptional trust in a known man at its centre. In both cases, the prestige of familiarity appears to have weakened the normal instincts of institutional caution. In both cases, the eventual scandal inflicted damage not merely because a crime had been committed, but because it forced the party to ask how someone so central could have operated for so long without more effective challenge. This is not a problem of Left or Right, nationalist or unionist. It is a problem inherent in any movement that conflates challenge and accountability with disloyalty.
The problem for the SNP is not simply that Murrell stole money. It is that the party machine has come to look opaque, self-protective, too convinced of its own virtue. The nationalist movement asks Scotland to trust it with statehood while failing to protect its own members and donors from abuse of trust at the highest level.
For the DUP, the deeper danger is subtler. Donaldson has not only damaged the DUP’s image. He has weakened the authority of the type of leadership on which the party long relied. Once a movement has learned that outward respectability can conceal profound corruption, every future claim to moral seriousness is heard more sceptically. Trust becomes harder to win.
Enoch Powell was right that political lives end in failure. The failure on display here is not only Donaldson’s. It was the judgment of parties which placed too much faith in authority, too little in scrutiny, and discovered too late the cost of doing so.