The Democratic Unionist Party is in danger of making itself irrelevant

Editorial: The main unionist party in Northern Ireland elected a new leader on Friday – this is a pivotal moment for the party

Edwin Poots, the new leader of the DUP (AP)

The election of Edwin Poots as the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party was not in itself a bad decision, but it may make it harder for the party to recover from a series of bad decisions.

The most fundamental of those decisions was the DUP’s approach to Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Independent maintains that Brexit was the wrong decision for Northern Ireland as it was for the whole of the United Kingdom, but given that the DUP supported Brexit, it faced a choice about the way in which it was to be achieved.

Some senior members of the party accept privately that they made a mistake in rejecting Theresa May’s compromise, which would have kept the UK in the EU’s customs area. Notionally, this would have been temporary, until the negotiation of the trade treaty, but it could have been temporary for a long time, which was why the Clean-Breakers on the Conservative back benches did not like it.