As rumours of a General Election intensify some close to the thinking of the DUP suggest that the party is working to a post-Christmas timetable.
This is highly significant, particularly in light of how far the DUP has come since it began its boycott of the power-sharing Executive in February 2022.
The mainstream media ignored this revelation, despite reporting from the Guardian the previous week that the party was threatening to take this drastic course of action.
In fact, as I intimated, the party had already decided on the strategy, perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, to keep itself united and keep a lid on mounting calls for protest action.
Since walking away from Stormont nearly two years ago, we have seen considerable pressure placed on the party from within and without either to stay the course of opposing the Northern Ireland Protocol or to return to Stormont.
Politically speaking the party seemed to be between a rock and a hard place.
One year after the DUP pulled down the institutions, the British government finally responded by announcing the Windsor Framework Agreement between the UK and EU aimed at easing the trade of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It was a genuine problem-solving attempt by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to agree a better deal with the EU that both respected the Good Friday Agreement while addressing Unionist concerns.
For some critics, the Windsor Framework did not go far enough and came nowhere close to meeting what Sir Jeffery Donaldson encapsulated in his ‘7 Tests’.
Sir Jeffery had a job of work to persuade his party’s support-base that this was good enough to start the process of returning to the Northern Ireland Executive.
As Alex Kane correctly observed earlier this month in the Irish Times, ‘I’ve argued for some time that the DUP would, sooner or later, have to make a choice between imperfect devolution and imperfect direct rule: what poet Louis MacNeice might have described as the choice between authentic mammon and a bogus god. I think that point has been reached.’
Today I have received information from sources close to the DUP that the party is moving quickly to broker a deal with the Conservative Party that will presage a return to Stormont.
This seems to tally well with the exchange in Westminster today between Sir Jeffery and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Chris Heaton-Harris. It is worth quoting at length:
Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson
Further to that excellent question from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), our objective is to ensure that Northern Ireland’s place in our biggest market, the United Kingdom, is restored and protected in law. Will the Secretary of State work with us to ensure that, where goods are moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, they are not subject to EU customs processes that are neither necessary nor fair and right? Save for reasons of animal health and the risk of smuggling, there should not be checks on those goods.Chris Heaton-Harris
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question, and I very much enjoy working with him on a regular basis to try to achieve the aims he has set out. We have so far gone a long way in this space with the Windsor framework, but I look forward to continued engagement with him in the next few days, because we do need to find a resolution to these issues that also means we can re-form Stormont and deal with the other domestic issues in Northern Ireland.
The intervention by Peter Robinson earlier this week was, perhaps, vital to setting the conditions for movement. Robinson is a respected DUP grandee who, in more recent times, has become representative of the pragmatic devolutionist (indirect rule) wing of the party. He is often seen in the same light as his successors as party leader Dame Arlene Foster and Sir Jeffery.
On the other wing of the party are those on the idealist Westminster (direct rule) wing, Ian Paisley Jnr. and Sammy Wilson who cling much more to the DUP’s oppositional protest form of politics.
It is said that when Peter Robinson was First Minister he effectively stacked the Assembly with his supporters who were mostly willing to follow his style of compromise politics, which may have their genesis in his involvement in the secret talks at Duisburg in West Germany held amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union, aimed, ultimately unsuccessfully, at ending the conflict.
While I am agonistic on the issue of the Windsor Framework, I do not agree with the extremist rhetoric that it undermines the Union. The reality is that Northern Ireland’s position in the United Kingdom is subjugated not by Brussels but by the long-held constitutional imperative of King in Parliament.
Even amidst all the extremist sloganeering Sir Jeffery’s pragmatic form of Unionism seems to gathering positive momentum, with the UUP taking the view that the Union can only be secure when Unionists make devolution work not when they remain isolated at Westminster.
We must also look at the return of devolution from the point of view of the mood music emanating from within the Conservative Party that makes a deal with the DUP more likely.
There are voices in the Tory backbenches who say, “We can’t go into a General Election being labelled the party who broke the United Kingdom and squandered 25 years of peace since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.”
If Rory Stewart is correct in his analysis that the Tories are highly factionalised, then it stands to reason that the party’s right wing are poised and ready to seize control of the party post-election with another leadership challenge. That is certainly how Suella Braverman’s damaging protest letter to the Prime Minister was interpreted in the wake of her sacking.
Therefore, Rishi Sunak needs Northern Ireland to work if he is to resist that hard right challenge.
In strategic terms, politics is in the driving seat on constitutional matters.
Therefore, in local Northern Irish terms, it makes violence or the threat of violence increasingly unlikely to materialize in the event of a DUP return to Stormont.
Another reason why violence is, perhaps, unlikely is due to one of the most significant developments in paramilitary politics in recent years.
The UVF Brigade Staff’s decision to stand down its East Belfast leadership effectively removes the last violent bulwark to the DUP doing what is in the best interests of all the people of Northern Ireland.
The East Belfast UVF had been behind some of the worst civil disturbances in Northern Ireland in 2011 and again in 2012-13 and again by throwing considerable muscle behind the anti-Protocol rallies.
Their removal from the paramilitary stage, to outside observers (whether near or afar) at least signals a lifting of the loyalist paramilitary boot from the body politic.
Loyalist paramilitary veterans from Belfast I have spoken to in recent days have put it more bluntly: “Ceasefire soldiers have done little other than replace a whiff of cordite with a sniff of white powder.”
In his The Devil’s Dictionary (1926), American civil war veteran and journalist Ambrose Bierce perhaps put it best when he defined patriotism as ‘Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.’
In British politics doing what is in the national interest is a far superior form of pragmatic politics than what is in the idealistic individual’s self-interest.
Squaring the circle of instability in Northern Ireland’s local politics is a necessary prerequisite to building a much more stable and enduring system of democratic governance across these islands.
The ongoing choreography between the DUP and His Majesty’s Government certainly appears to have that objective in mind.
Only time will tell if it will be successful.