Burned review: A political story with all the ingredients of a good old-fashioned scandal

There aren’t many books about Northern Ireland politics that make the general public sit up and take notice.

That’s not to say that there aren’t many good, thoughtful, challenging books about devolution: but most of those books tend to be aimed at a specific and fairly limited audience. Most won’t even get much media attention beyond a review and a short published extract.

‘Burned’ is different. Word of mouth alone led to a second reprint before the book was in bookshops. It’s not just the story of poor decisions, financial scandal, political in-fighting and chicken sheds being maintained at sub-tropical temperatures; fascinating though that is. That’s just one dimension. No, the real story is what it reveals about how devolution works and why all of us should be worried.

Another thing ‘Burned’ has proved is that there is a public appetite for long-piece, detailed analysis of politics. On the surface the story doesn’t actually sound all that interesting – and when it kicked off in December 2016 I don’t think anyone believed it would still be running three years later – yet it turned out to be a saga that captured the public imagination. Even people who used to tell me they had no interest in politics were interested in this. It was the stuff of water-cooler conversations.

It has all the ingredients of a good old-fashioned scandal, complete with smoke-and-mirrors, dodging politicians, ‘porkies’, shadowy background figures, drunken exchanges, leaks, whistleblowers, clashing egos, vanity, stupidity, more than the whiff of corruption, mountains of cash, chicken sheds and gifts of turkeys. With one particular party at the centre of it all: the DUP. A party with a long acquired reputation for being competent, managerial, good in a crisis and packed to the rafters with the brightest and best young brains in local politics. Yet, as the evidence began to tumble out, we saw a party within a party, people operating by their own rules and trying to bend the structures of government to suit their own agenda. It is, as it says on the book’s blurb, ‘a riveting political thriller’.

Every political journalist yearns for the Woodward/Bernstein Watergate story: a story that has a huge impact on the public perception of politics, destroys reputations and puts on show some very ugly truths that powerful people have tried to hide. That’s what Sam McBride, a natural, remarkably easy to read writer, has done. And done in the face of ongoing pressure from, as he puts in, ‘several powerful people having made clear in robust terms that they (did) not want parts of this book published’. He was threatened with legal action. I heard talk from well-placed DUP sources about boycotting the News Letter. Arlene Foster refuses to do interviews with him. Some DUP representatives have dismissed Sam and the paper as ‘no friends of unionism’ and ‘helping Sinn Fein’.

It was a risky story for a young journalist who was still in the process of cutting his teeth. It was also a risky story for a newspaper whose core readership remains solidly unionist and might have been uncomfortable with a perceived campaign against the leadership of unionism. But Sam, with the paper’s blessing, ploughed on. Attending the inquiry day after day, firing out questions to key players, assembling the various threads of the story and bringing both a spotlight and coherence to the real elements at the heart of RHI: how Northern Ireland was governed.

Quite aside from the Spads, the RHI Inquiry also revealed, to put it at its most benign, a very unique way of doing government in Northern Ireland. Senior civil servants made decisions not to keep paper trails or record what specific decisions had been taken. Assembly committees which should have been deconstructing and forensically examining the decisions of the department at the heart of the RHI process weren’t doing it. MLAs did very little in the Assembly chamber to hold ministers to account. Even at Executive level there was a tendency just to nod things through: almost a case of we won’t ask your minister too much if you return the favour.

Some key players within the DUP have pushed the argument that ‘Burned’ is a deliberate hatchet job on their party. But it was never about a DUP hatchet job. It just happened to be the DUP at the centre of this story. It is actually the story itself – and what it revealed about government, the civil service, Spads, accountability, the decision making process, oversight and individual politicians – rather than any particular political party which is what the book is about. It is also about how a party leader responded to a crisis; and how that, in turn, had a knock-on impact on so many other things afterwards.

I used to think – and often used to write – that it was just our politicians who weren’t very good at governance. Now it looks as it is also the civil service and an elite pool of unaccountable, yet hugely influential and powerful Spads who were not very good at it, either. Very bad habits and practices have crept in since 2007 and there is a real danger that those habits will remain the template for future government. That, I think, would be a big, big mistake.

It is now very clear – and this book has highlighted the serial problems – that headless chickens from Moy Park could probably have made a better job of providing confident, cooperative, coherent governance. Even people who recognise that key decisions need to be made will be fearful, and rightly so, of returning powers to Stormont without a major reappraisal and overhaul.

There is no love for the Assembly from the general public and even less respect. The governing classes in Northern Ireland – and I don’t just mean those linked to the Assembly – lived in a bubble from 1998 to January 2017, wrapped in the delusion that the Good Friday Agreement process and out-workings remain ‘too big, too important, to be allowed to fail’. I’m not sure that’s an opinion which is endorsed by most people outside the governing classes.

‘Burned’ has done us all a huge favour by providing the hard evidence of dysfunction and structural distemper at the very heart of our devolution process. We need to learn the lessons from the book and demand something better. We could begin by raising our windows, putting our heads out and roaring, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore.” Okay, all together ...