The Northern Ireland Protocol has helped bring Tories locally to a sorry state

The Conservative Party in Northern Ireland was in the early decades of this country, post 1921, affiliated with the Ulster Unionist Party.

MPs at Westminster were elected as unionists but they took the Tory whip.

The relationship was, in hindsight, an often complacent one. Unionists had their first major scare when Edward Heath suspended the Stormont parliament in 1972, but a far worse experience 13 years later, with Margaret Thatcher signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement. Many problems that unionism faces today have their origins in that disastrous deal, which gave a formal role in the running of Northern Ireland to a state that is unshakably partisan on behalf of northern nationalists. Worse, a state that harboured terrorists not only before the Anglo Irish Agreement, but after it too. Mrs Thatcher then began to see the scale of her mistake.

For all this history, there was a time in the early 1990s when the Tories began to organise in NI and poll well. It seemed that such a new option for voters might energise people who are pro Union, but disinclined to vote unionist.

Support for the NI Tories fizzled out. Then, in 2010, a pact between the UUP and the Conservatives raised the prospect of national politics being established here. But that too failed.

Since then the NI Tories have polled risible amounts in elections here. Yet, curiously, it retains a membership that is relatively large (in a time of declining political party memberships)— and certainly large proportion to its small vote.

Today we report (see link below) that that membership has plunged from 650 to around 500 in little more than a year. The NI Conservatives have declined to confirm this statistic but the News Letter has taken soundings which suggest the figures are largely accurate.

It is easy to point to Boris Johnson’s betrayal of NI in the protocol, and this paper has done that — and will again — as a reason for the departures. But setting aside such criticism for now, can London not again reflect on the disastrous decisions that have brought NI — and the Tories — to this sorry state?

Please, put aside gimmicks such as triggering Article 16 after the election to look tough. Heed Lord Frost, and take meaningful unilateral action against a protocol that was agreed when Westminster was in an impossible deadlock.

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