Ben Lowry: DUP seems to be staking out the centre of unionism

This time last week Doug Beattie was secure in his job and a significant political threat to the DUP.

Within hours he was fighting to retain his leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party over past tweets of his, which revealed chauvinistic attitudes.

Now he seems secure again.

Days ago Boris Johnson seemed finished as prime minister.

It was being reported last night that the only people who can sack him, Tory MPs, were now beginning to rally behind his leadership.

And if a week is a long time, a year is an eternity.

Arlene Foster’s demise was sudden. Edwin Poots’s rise to be her DUP successor was swift and his fall from that post almost as fast.

Then only weeks ago there seemed to be a Westminster solution to the DUP’s challenge in getting its third leader in quick succession, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, into Stormont without having immediately to give up his Lagan Valley constituency and force a risky by-election there.

But then that proposal — a temporary exemption to the double jobbing ban — was pulled from under him and there was fresh focus on how the DUP would manage the various obstacles to finding a seat for Sir Jeffrey in the constituency where he is long established, but so are Mr Poots and Paul Givan.

What then does last night’s political twist within the DUP mean?

By going for the South Down MLA nomination, Mr Poots was leaving the way clear for Mr Givan and Sir Jeffrey to be DUP MLAs for Lagan Valley (rather than all three standing and one of them losing).

What did Jim Wells make of the Poots bid to move to the constituency in which Mr Wells is long established as the main DUP personality?

Perhaps it was a disappointment, after Mr Wells had been such a gushing supporter of Edwin Poots as DUP leader.

Or perhaps Mr Wells already knew that he was not going to be on the DUP shortlist, so it was not too much of a problem.

Mr Poots will now have to cast around for another constituency.

His leadership manoeuvre last May clearly annoyed much of the DUP establishment, who treated his victory with an overt coolness, even contempt, that the party rarely displayed in public towards senior figures, whatever private misgivings there might have been about any of them.

Do some such figures now want to bury Mr Poots’s career entirely or were they only motivated by the view that Diane Forsythe was a better standard bearer in South Down?

One thing that strikes me about Mr Poots is an admirable ability to weather setbacks and even humiliations like his astonishingly brief tenure as DUP leader, and to soldier on without seeming bitter, so he might well cheerfully continue his search for a seat.

The various developments in unionism in recent weeks do not tell us much about ideological direction, except that the UUP and DUP are both chasing the liberal vote.

In the case of Doug Beattie, it is a more explicit pitch to the values of the Alliance Party.

In the case of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, it is a move to capture the centre of unionism.

But while the DUP is not moving in what anyone would call a strongly liberal direction, and while it still wants to be a broad church, it seems to have calculated that very traditional or fundamentalist Christian voters are sufficiently small in number that it can afford to lose many of them.

It cannot afford to lose the growing numbers of people who are moderate on social questions such as abortion policy or same-sex relations. People, in other words, who are by no means radical on such matters but who are not traditionalists on them either.

But all these political labels at times seem confused or contradictory.

Doug Beattie is a ‘liberal’ who has, as a result of his tweets, potentially fallen foul of voters who have a ‘woke’ outlook on the world. He also took quite a robust unionist line on matters such as legacy and the Irish language.

Edwin Poots is a ‘conservative’ who was in fact notably pragmatic on issues such as Gaelic and even (it seemed at first) on the Irish Sea border.

While it would not be quite right to characterise his politics as ‘liberal’ it was in no way hardline.

Where will this all end?

Over the longer term unionism seems destined to become a centrist-leaning conservative movement.

It will always been seen as somewhat on the right of the political spectrum because its primary position is preservation of the status quo. At the moment things seem bad for unionism, but that might not be so for long.

There are still signs that very large numbers of voters, probably a comfortable majority, are themselves happy with the status quo.

And radical liberal or leftist movements, in both the UK and the United States, have helped to bolster both the Conservative Party in England and the Republican Party in the US.

In Northern Ireland, Alliance has been riding high for some years now, and certain polls suggest it could go higher still.

But it might yet be damaged by its embracing of what some voters still consider to be ultra liberal values, or its europhilia (note how it is distancing itself from any concept of rigorous implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

A thing to watch is support for the TUV.

Jim Allister’s standing in opinion polls fluctuates significantly. He is trying to capture traditionalists, as is obvious from the party name, but also that large number of people who are very strong on the Union but not religious.

l Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor