Stories
There are decisive moments that catch us unaware. We all experience them.
When, for instance, inexplicably, love dies. When you open the curtains and the cherry blossom tree is bare. That sense of aloneness when you leave a school for a final time. The worker who hands back an identity badge and walks away.
For Arlene Foster her political world changed that Tuesday afternoon in Nigel Dodds’ office on Belfast’s Shore Road when she assessed the reports coming to her and knew a majority of her Assembly party colleagues wanted her gone. She felt hurt and angry. She cried for a time. And then she recognised it was over.
In Edwin Poots’s case the tide went out during a one-hour period on Thursday morning. On a crackly telephone line, probably from his home, during not one but two disastrous BBC NI radio interviews, he wrote his own P45.
He came across not as a leader but as a loser. In those car-crash, sometimes almost inaudible, politically illogical contributions, Edwin Poots lost the DUP dressing room and sealed his fate.
When unexpected trouble happens and the troops become giddy and nervous, they look to their leader for assurance. Some case for hope is urgently required. Worried followers need to believe that there is a cunning plan to convert what appears like a setback into a golden opportunity.
In those awkward radio moments Edwin Poots came across not as The Man with The Plan but as a beaten docket.
Throughout his few short weeks as the new power in the DUP the demands of process had been relentless. In the small hours of Thursday morning, the most unlikely partnership of Sinn Féin and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis had created one more curve ball.
Edwin Poots knew that the Stormont Assembly Running Order had him set to nominate his choice, Paul Givan, as Northern Ireland’s First Minister at noon on Thursday and that the party’s deadly rivals cum power-sharing partners, were set to facilitate that appointment.
But like the flawed rookie reporter, sent to attend a local flower show who comes upon a dramatic bank robbery on the way to the assignment, Edwin Poots stuck rigidly to the proposed timetable.
He didn’t see the obvious. He failed the leadership test. And those close to him were similarly blind and culpable.
In his three meetings with Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin president, Mr Poots had presented himself as a pragmatist, a person who was firm but fair, someone who had negotiated with Sinn Féin in the past and a leader, who unlike Arlene Foster, had the capacity to deliver.
There may be an opening to portray Sinn Fein as ‘The Untouchables’, North and South.
Mary Lou listened and talked. She went away, consulted with her own organisation and assessed. Her conclusion was the new DUP leader was offering no cast-iron guarantee that delayed Irish language provisions would be delivered during the term of the Stormont administration, due to expire next May.
The best offer on the table from the new DUP leadership was the pragmatic man of his word, would, at some future time, deliver on the long-promised Irish language provisions, all things being equal.
Mary Lou took stock of her support base. She recognised the growing tendency in Sinn Féin to, like most other parties, live in “the now” – the issue getting traction on social media as well as in news bulletins and newspaper headlines.
She factored in the heft of the Irish language lobby and the reality that while a majority of her Assembly members can’t speak it, they want their children, grandchildren and neighbours to have that possibility.
And she decided that rather than having a row with DUP over their ‘no can do, for the moment at least’ stance, she would find a way around their ‘almost’ guarantees.
This is the Sinn Féin that refuses to take its seats in the Westminster parliament now asking Boris and Brandon to give it a dig out.
Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary and Conservative Party MP for Great Yarmouth, is the most unlikely new Sinn Féin ‘bestie.’ Since his appointment to the Belfast-based role in February 2020 he has been conspicuous by his absence. He harbours the ambition to get back to Westminster in a promotion or at the very least an equivalent cabinet position in the next Boris reshuffle.
In a recent engagement with Mary Lou during one of her increasingly frequent trips North, Brandon discussed the possibility of the British government introducing Irish language and other cultural measures through Westminster, if the DUP continued to stonewall.
Mary Lou took note and filed away the proposition. In new meetings with Brandon on Wednesday and into Thursday morning she revisited his suggested initiative and she worked him into the space to commit to it.
Brandon could envisage the plaudits. His boss, Boris, is feeling the heat over the latest Cummings leaks about ‘hopeless Hancock’ and from backbencher disquiet about Covid-related restrictions. Here was Brandon’s chance to get some Boris brownie points by getting power-sharing up and running, ahead of schedule. Brandon saw the upsides for Brandon.
Mary Lou had also done the sums. True, this is the Sinn Féin that refuses to take its seats in the Westminster parliament now asking Boris and Brandon to give it a dig out. But Mary Lou concluded the irony would be overshadowed by the achievement.
The ones who did not think through the angles and the implications of the unlikely proposition were the make-weights in the equation – Edwin Poots and his very small group of DUP confidantes.
In those two Thursday morning interviews Poots came across as a victim of sleight of hand. Someone who had been caught off guard by a Sinn Féin and British government manoeuvre.
For his Assembly members and the Westminster contingent in the Commons and the Lords, the DUP support base, their political rivals and the wider audience, Poots seemed weak.
In the first Thursday morning radio interview he had a cut at the Belfast Telegraph political correspondent, Suzanne Breen.
At no stage did he articulate in detail how the DUP might turn the Lewis-Mary Lou arrangement to its advantage. How the party with eight active members in the House of Commons, close relations with Tory Brexiteers and impeccable unionist credentials would now be demanding that Boris, Brandon and British government show solidarity on the Northern Ireland protocol.
There was no feisty warning from Edwin to the British government. There was no sign of him saying: now that you have given to Sinn Fein, the loyal unionist community expects delivery on a much more significant scale.
The Poots misjudgement in those decisive Thursday morning hours then continued in a mode that bordered on tragic. Jim Allister, the TUV leader took to the airwaves, calling him Rollover Edwin. Jim even had intelligence from within the DUP camp that a heave was afoot.
A statement expressing concern from 14 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords was put in train. One significant absent name was that of Ian Paisley junior.
But it had the signatures of the party chairman, Lord Maurice Morrow and ominously from Poots backers in the Foster heave as well as his opponents, the likes of Nigel Dodds, Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson.
Within the Assembly party, the cohort that had abandoned and sacked Arlene Foster, the sands were shifting. The North Antrim MP, Mervyn Storey was one crucial swinger. The likes of Christopher Stalford and Johnny Buckley were also reading the tea leaves. True to form, MP Sammy Wilson, wasn’t holding back as the party representatives gathered.
In that space between 9am and mid-day on Thursday morning Edwin Poots had neither the instinct nor the strategy to try persuading his nervous troops that he had a formula to save them from humiliation.
Impressive as Arlene was, the show-stopper was the surprised belly-laugh of British minister, Michael Gove
The rage was in flood when he walked out of the party gathering to keep his mid-day appointment around the nomination of Paul Givan as first minister. That abrupt closure of engagement with his elected representatives effectively sealed his fate.
What of Arlene Foster’s tweet about her lunch arrangements as the Poots demise played out? It seemed to stray towards schadenfreude. The truth is she was in a different time zone and has been demob happy for several days.
Mrs Foster enjoys singing and missed the involvement in her local church choir during Covid lockdown.
She got her chance to sing at the British Irish gathering in the Lough Erne Resort hotel beyond Enniskillen a week ago. On the prompting of BBC Northern Ireland’s Gareth Gordon, at the closing news conference, Arlene gave a few bars of “That’s Life.”
Impressive as Arlene was, the show-stopper was the surprised belly-laugh of British minister, Michael Gove. It resembled the sounds of Sid James or Kenneth Williams in that run of smutty “Carry On” movies.
She then had her official bow-out from the Assembly on Monday when Edwin Poots was forced to sit quietly and listen to the range of tributes to the woman he and his colleagues had ousted.
As Arlene retreated to Co. Fermanagh to deal with her growing mailbag of ‘best wishes’ cards, the new DUP regime came face to face with the relentless nature of political centre stage.
Edwin Poots trip to that British-Irish gathering in Enniskillen was a good example. He found himself having coffee with the DUP’s occasional devil incarnate, Leo Varadkar. He was filmed chatting with Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy. And while Arlene was winning new friends for her singing abilities, in Belfast, Edwin’s friend and strategist, Ian Paisley junior, gained new notoriety for his ‘Robin Swann is dangerous’ duet with Van Morrisson.
The ‘Hello Turbulence’ experience continued on other fronts. During the heave against Arlene Foster the moves played out with briefings from ‘senior DUP sources’ to BBC Radio Ulster’s Stephen Nolan Show.
In recent days the Nolan programme was dominated by accounts of over two hundred distraught primary school students who were not offered places in grammar or secondary schools. The person identified during broadcasts to come up with solutions was the new Poots-appointed Education Minister, Michelle McIlveen. Before she managed to get her feet under her desk, she was in the firing line.
One more example of how team Poots discovered to their cost that regime change was the easy part.
What comes next? The DUP will never acknowledge that Brexit was their forbidden fruit.
There is one obvious rule about power-sharing. To do it successfully, you need a partner. And unionism in disarray, or angry or both, doesn’t sound like a viable partner.
But the fall-out of challenge and complexities for local, national and international relationships continues.
In the 20 years since the DUP showed an interest in participating in power-sharing government, it has never experienced such turmoil.
In uncertain times, one certainty is there will be an Assembly election in May of next year or before.
A section of Sinn Féin’s support base is gleefully celebrating the bypassing of DUP stalling, thanks to the assistance of the British government. (The TUV’s Jim Allister took pleasure in referring to Sinn Féin’s West Brits).
But there is one obvious rule about power-sharing. To do it successfully, you need a partner. And unionism in disarray, or angry or both, doesn’t sound like a viable partner.
Mary Lou McDonald clocked up the miles, the face-to-face meetings and the responsibility for making decisions in recent times.
In Northern Ireland she, not the Sinn Féin leader in the Assembly, Michelle O’Neill, was the key party figure and fronted the main media interviews north and south in recent days.
She will be familiar with the opinion poll trends, including support for parties and leadership ratings south of the border. There will be a Northern Ireland Assembly election, followed by a Dáil contest.
There may be an opening to portray Sinn Fein as ‘The Untouchables’, North and South.
These are momentous times and as the fall and demise of Edwin Poots suggests, there is no preordained script.
