Ben Lowry: As DUP meets today, the full scale of Boris Johnson’s betrayal of unionism is still only sinking in

The Libyan leader had been brought out of the wilderness by Britain, he noted, even courted by Tony Blair, yet a few years later it was flying planes over Tripoli trying to kill the dictator.

Mr Johnson is often mocked by those who despise his politics or character, but his brilliance shone through in that column, as it often does in his writing.

He said of Gaddafi:

“Wherever he is I wager there is one thing that causes the old dyed ringlets to shake with rage, one thought that brings the foam to the corner of his champing jaws — and that is the treachery of all those he thought of as friends.

“And of those who have ratted on him in the last six months, there is one particular group of traitors that he would like to cast — I bet — to the nethermost fire-bubbling pit of hell. Never mind the rebels, and all those snaky ex-ministers who chose to defect as soon as the going got tough ... For sheer duplicity there is no one to beat – the British!”

Over the last week, news reports have played an replayed Mr Johnson’s comments to the DUP conference last year, on what he would never accept.

The u-turn is so stark that it is worth reprinting those words:

“We would be damaging the fabric of the Union with regulatory checks and even customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea that are already envisaged in the Withdrawal Agreement. Now I have to tell you no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

The DUP is gathering today at the same hotel in Shaw’s Bridge, outside Belfast, where Mr Johnson uttered those words. Now, on back of similar pledges on Brexit, made by him around the UK, he is in Downing Street.

It is a humiliation for the DUP to have to assemble in the shadow of those words last year, when media from around the world was in Belfast. Already the media interest this year is much lower, due to a perception that the DUP is no longer needed.

The perception is a reasonable one, given that the House of Commons showed a comfortable majority for Mr Johnson’s Brexit deal, but rejected his timetable for it, despite the DUP voting against the plan.

The party will put a brave face on its abandonment, although you do wonder how they can sustain the confidence and supply arrangement having been so betrayed.

But it is not merely the u-turn on the words that seems to me to be the big problem with Mr Johnson’s conduct.

It is two things that he did afterwards that, to adapt his comments above on Mr Gaffadi, should cause ay unionist to “... shake with rage, one thought that brings foam to the corner of the jaws ...”

The first was the way in Brussels that he went round the European leaders, of whom he had been so implicitly scathing in the preceding weeks, slapping and smiling and posing for selfies and hugging.

The man who apparently as a boy wanted to be king of the world was, if not that, then certainly now the king of Europe.

This was not a person who had come to realise that he had no option but to jettison economically part of his national territory, and had had to face that horrifying truth in the way that many national leaders have come to realise that the country they lead has lost a war.

This was a not a man who was wracked with guilt at his failures, his past pledges echoing round his head and tormenting his conscience, in much the way that one senses that Theresa May, for all her attempts to both keep the UK together and deliver Brexit, seems haunted by the failure.

Oh no, Boris was on cloud nine.

And then, last Saturday, he did something particularly reprehensible in the House of Commons.

When Nigel Dodds MP, leader of a party that has sustained the Tories in power since 2016, calmly cited Mr Johnson’s words at the DUP conference of 2018 back to him, the prime minister didn’t miss a beat.

In fact, he stood up and, turning to MPs to draw their support against Mr Dodds, said how regrettable it was that any one party would want to use a veto in NI against the deal.

The very veto that the PM had allowed the DUP to think he, Mr Johnson, also supported, only days beforehand.

This from a prime minister whose party has said nothing, nothing at all, ever, about the veto Sinn Fein has been allowed to hold over Stormont, and will wield until it gets its Irish language act.

It was a deadly, vicious moment.

The seminal abolition of Boris Johnson’s character was written in October 2012 by his former editor Max Hastings. No-one who read that could be surprised that he would do this to the DUP.

And yet in a way we were. Even us cynics. Not the outline of the betrayal, but its speed and scale and the circumstances of its delivery.

I remember always expecting this moment, the writing for which has been on the wall since the December 2017 backstop showed Tory intentions, yet I began to think maybe something really had changed at Downing St with Boris. Well informed sources insisted it had.

This week almost every unionist in NI swung against the deal.

Our hopes that maybe it would be OK sunk by the cluelessness of ministers on details such as whether NI small businesses will have a major paperwork burden sending to the rest of the UK.

Even if that turns out not to be the case, we know the thrust of what has just been done to us.

We also noticed that not one member of the eurosceptic Tory ERG, not a single backbencher, none of those who spoke of their support and solidarity with the DUP, voted against this massive Irish Sea border.

I never thought they were unionists but thought that of the 80 or so ERG, there might be a handful.

But not one.

It will take years for NI unionists to grasp, and respond to, the horror show of what has happened.

Our few friends are Tory moderates, the Theresa Mays, David Camerons, Dominic Grieves. But we let ourselves think otherwise.

This is no day for DUP celebration. On every front there is crisis, as the appalling performance of Julian Smith in Westminster this week demonstrated, giving weight to the latest nationalist attempt to tear up the Belfast Agreement (on citizenship).

Meanwhile, MPs across the UK still do not understand how terror apologists have quietly taken control of legacy.

On cultural creep, on Irish government overreach, on the whole notion of Northern Ireland being allowed to work, this is a grim time for unionism — and certainly no time for any celebration.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor