Could the Democratic Unionist Party’s mistakes pave the way for a united Ireland?

The leading voice of unionism in Northern Ireland seems to have lost its way, writes John Rentoul

Edwin Poots, the new DUP leader, with Paula Bradley, his deputy (PA)

At the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 there was a saying that the republicans were too clever to admit that they had lost and the unionists too stupid to realise that they had won. I was reminded of it last week when the Democratic Unionist Party managed to make its crisis worse with a bout of unscheduled bloodletting.

Is it possible that the DUP’s mistakes might not only destroy the party but help pave the way for a united Ireland? The coup against Arlene Foster, the former DUP leader who will be first minister of Northern Ireland for a few more weeks, was “very brutal” and “just awful”, she told the Financial Times. But it has also been damaging to the party and to the unionist cause.

On Friday, party representatives met for what was supposed to be a formal endorsement of Edwin Poots as the new leader. But the meeting descended into acrimony, with a proposal of a secret ballot on Poots’s leadership narrowly rejected, and his election finally confirmed by a show of hands.

At least two members resigned from the party in protest, but as one of them was Foster this was more significant than it might have been. “I don’t agree with the direction of travel under Edwin’s leadership,” she told the FT. “I think we are regressing and becoming more narrow. It’s quite nasty, frankly. If the union is to succeed, we need to be a bigger tent.”

She must bear some responsibility for the situation in which the DUP now finds itself. It supported Brexit, against the majority opinion in Northern Ireland, and then opposed Theresa May’s compromise that would have kept the whole of the UK in the EU customs area, thus making the borders issue more manageable.

But she did at least try to lead the party away from the traditionalist scriptural positions that limited its appeal to younger and non-aligned voters. The opinion polls suggest that Poots, for all his political skills and easy manner, is hardly the leader to expand the unionist base.

The DUP is paralysed by the immediate question of who should be first minister. Poots has said he won’t take the post himself, but no one can tell if this is old-fashioned false modesty, as he hopes to be dragged to the chair by a grateful people, or simply a vacuum. One possible candidate is said to have refused the post because he does not want to be “Edwin’s mudguard”.

The party’s bigger problem is next year’s assembly elections. If the DUP continues to lose ground, Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill is likely to take over as first minister, leaving the DUP to fill the deputy position – if it is lucky. The latest opinion poll put the DUP on just 16 per cent, level with the cross-community Alliance party and only just ahead of the rival unionist party, the UUP, on 14 per cent.

What an irony it would be if the DUP, which emerged as the leading voice of unionism in the Good Friday settlement, managed to throw it all away – and put the union itself at risk – by its misjudgements over Brexit.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator