The DUP’s refusal to rapidly sign up to a deal on the NI Protocol seems to have astonished Downing Street, but that very fact demonstrates the astonishing ignorance of the party at the top of Rishi Sunak’s government.
n briefings and leaks, it was made clear that the government expected near-immediate acceptance of what it has agreed with Brussels.
After reading that, last week a DUP member told me: “I think the leadership will be buying a lot of Imodium over the weekend — it’s squeaky bum time.”
It is true the DUP leadership faces a mammoth decision, and the time to make that decision is running out. But for now, it is the Prime Minister and his advisers who are in more immediate need of medicine, because their mishandling of what is a small regional party has exposed their own weakness.
In recent weeks there has been no discernible hint that the DUP has been preparing its supporters — or even its own elected members — for a major compromise.
In fact, the opposite has been happening.
The party’s ‘seven tests’ for agreeing to an altered protocol were demonstrably written to allow substantial wriggling and spinning if it wanted to accept a compromise.
But rather than opening the ground for compromise, senior DUP figures have been shrinking the room for manoeuvre.
Even allowing for the DUP’s love of last-minute final concessions from a negotiation, the extent to which the party has closed potential avenues for compromise seems counterproductive if Sir Jeffrey Donaldson plans, as many in his party believe, to ultimately accept a deal short of what the party has demanded.
And rather than follow a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine when the party met the Prime Minister last Friday — which would be consistent with a party negotiating hard to extract final concessions — Sir Jeffrey chose to be accompanied by Emma Little-Pengelly, Gavin Robinson and Gordon Lyons, three fellow moderates.
A source said that this was not simply about excluding more sceptical DUP figures in public, but that they have also been excluded from the detail of what the deal entails.
The tenor of an interview by Lord Dodds in Italian newspaper la Repubblica last week suggested either that the DUP will not support the emerging deal, or if it does then Sir Jeffrey’s position will be perilous.
Lord Dodds has long been at the heart of the party and is not known for destabilising outbursts, but he set out criteria which the deal, as it has been briefed, would not come close to satisfying.
The former DUP deputy leader said that EU law in Northern Ireland would have to go, ongoing divergence from GB law would have to end, “tinkering” with the ECJ’s role would be insufficient, and that the DUP will not operate the Stormont institutions unless it is happy with the deal, ruling out some sort of grudging acquiescence.
A fortnight ago, a “senior British official” quoted in the Financial Times scoffed at the significance of an issue like the ECJ, saying: “Do you hear anybody talking about this in Ballymena? No. We’ve got to focus on the things people actually care about.”
A senior EU diplomat agreed: “This issue really doesn’t matter to ordinary people.”
Those comments suggest baffling ignorance, perhaps driven by confirmation bias. Of all the places in Northern Ireland that might not care about the finer points of Euroscepticism, Ballymena is not one of them.
Not only is it the heart of the constituency of the late Ian Paisley and the constituency of his successor as Northern Ireland’s most fervent Eurosceptic, Jim Allister, but it is also the constituency which had the highest leave vote in Northern Ireland (62pc).
It might have been a throwaway line but, when seen in context with other aspects of this negotiation, it indicates profound ignorance of uncomfortable realities.
The DUP almost imploded as its supporters rebelled at it allowing the protocol to be implemented once.
Regardless of any other consideration, a party which sees everything through the prism of the ballot box is unlikely to rapidly agree to the deal which has thus far been briefed.
