ANALYSIS: Danger with DUP flirtation
IT was as though on Tuesday night the Ulster Unionists had a sudden, and belated, insight into how ruthless Westminster politics can be.
After what had seemed like a clamour within the party for closer links with the DUP, any prospect of a merger with Peter Robinson's party was slammed shut by the UUP executive.
The UUP hierarchy had surely picked up on the danger that a DUP flirtation posed to the prospect of them still staying close to Britain's likely next Prime Minister, David Cameron.
In recent weeks the Conservative high command has calmly stuck to its stated position that the UCUNF pact is as healthy as ever. But there were indications of underlying concern at what must have seemed to the Tories like growing UUP indiscipline towards the ground rules of what a pact between the two must entail.
In a key but subtle shift in Tory emphasis, Owen Paterson said on Monday on Newsnight that he did not anticipate that the UUP would do a pact with the DUP, but if they did the Tory-UUP agreement would be over.
One Tory source in Northern Ireland told the News Letter that the Tories had always committed to run 18 Tory candidates across the Province, and that "if we can do that with the Ulster Unionists, that is our preference".
Both these statements were clear: there is no unequivocal Tory commitment to the UCUNF project.
But common sense should have told anyone in the UUP as much: like New Labour in the mid 1990s, the Tories have spent so long in opposition that they have been willing to abandon policies that are dear to their own party faithful, if it plays well with the British public.
So it is inconceivable that they would not ditch the UUP link-up if they felt it was becoming a serious embarrassment.
And ill-advised though the recent reservations of some NI Tories may have been, it would be deeply embarrassing for a modernising Cameron if the Tory-UUP coalition lost non-tribal Ulster Catholic supporters, and gained instead fundamentalists and hardline Orangemen as part of a three-way grouping that included the DUP.
The Tories would lose no face in GB if they said: "We tried to encourage a new, non sectarian unionist alignment in Northern Ireland but it failed." Indeed, both the original effort, and the willingness to walk away if it failed, would likely further endear David Cameron to many moderate Britons.
The Ulster Unionists may have got used to the Northern Ireland political system, where – ultimately – almost everyone has to be included in the process, and where indiscipline is rarely met with sanction.
It isn't like that in London.
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Sunday 27 May 2012
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