Ben Lowry: Jeffrey ​Donaldson’s religious language was turned against him to devastating effect as he sat in the dock in sex trial

(to read Ben Lowry’s column on the unusually warm night-time temperatures, click on this link here)​

It was a ferocious interrogation. The press box was behind where Donaldson was sitting, so that we could see the back of his head and her face. Beyond her, we could see the 12 jurors on the far side of the court. For much of the grilling, they were looking straight at him.

In the most memorable part of the exchange she said he was lying in his denial of sex assaults on two girls. “You were sinful and deceitful,” she said. “Not true,” he replied.

The barrister’s wording was deliberate, because the trial had seen Donaldson’s fondness for religious language. A letter he wrote to a complainant, in which he referred to the “sinful nature I have failed to address for far too many years”, was suffused with religiosity: “… my trust in God … I have seen what grace can do … seeking forgiveness ... I know our God is a God of hope … first steps in a journey in which I must transform myself ...”

At other times we heard how Donaldson spoke of God’s plans for him.

I recount this not to sneer at evangelism, as some critics have almost done in recent days, but to illustrate something unexpected about his politics. Donaldson had epitomised a steady stream of defections of Ulster Unionist Party members to Ian Paisley’s DUP, in the years after David Trimble’s Belfast Agreement led to power-sharing with Sinn Fein. Such politicians were less overtly Christian, if Christian at all, than existing DUP and were part of the secularising needed by the party to become mainstream.

Back in 1987 I was struck by a British Association (now the British Science Association) lecture in Queen’s University I attended while at school in which a speaker discussed Free Presbyterian Church dominance in the DUP (the News Letter headline was along the lines of ‘DUP too strong on church’).

As I got older I began to dwell on how Free Presbyterians, for all their influence, were only 1% of Ulster Protestants (10,000 people out of a million). I began to notice nationalist mockery of unionist ‘bible bashers’, yet Protestants had begun to quit church long before Catholics (I often cite a 1968 finding that put NI weekly church attendance at under 50% of Protestants but 95% of Catholics). Donaldson was part of the religious softening of the DUP yet at times used devout rhetoric, something turned against him to devastating effect in the trial.

Donaldson’s political breakthrough, in a 1985 Stormont by-election in South Down, coincided with my emerging interest in politics. By the Belfast Agreement thirteen years later, I was in my 20s, he in his 30s. As a pragmatic supporter of a flawed deal, I disliked how he undermined his leader – David Trimble – for six years, and only defected to the DUP in 2004 when safe to do so. A contrast with Jim Allister, who left the DUP once it accepted power with Sinn Fein in 2007.

Donaldson, having been supposedly bold in 1998, became the DUP’s diplomat – just when it seemed that unionists and London needed to become firmer in the face emboldened republicans. He was key to the Stormont House deal of 2014, which I think worsened the legacy imbalance against the security forces. We now know he met Sinn Fein at Harold Good’s house in 2004, that first year he joined the DUP – contacts the party denied years later. He began the year arguing against speaking to SF at the Oxford Union.

When I interviewed him over the years I found him occasionally moody but mostly affable. He was thin-skinned if challenged. After the DUP deal to restore Stormont in early 2024 he was annoyed when I insisted that there was clearly still a border in the Irish Sea. He also sent text messages of complaint about our coverage (which was highly sceptical of the deal).

Weeks before the assembly’s return, I had written a column, gently criticising his emotional claims in the House of Commons of loyalist threats against him (Click here to read it: ‘Fellow unionists were hardly the best target for Donaldson’). I found it a queasy display – opposition to the Irish Sea border had in fact been placid. But nationalists rushed to defend him against unionist ‘bigots’. My criticism was mild because I knew he was under extreme pressure to reach a deal, and assumed the strain was showing. He had no idea then, January 2024, that he would be soon arrested but we now know that things were falling apart for him personally.

Within days of the plausible, often hideous, testimony against Donaldson in Newry court I became very confident that he would be convicted, although – like some journalists I spoke to – I did not think all charges could be proven to the extremely high criminal standard of beyond all reasonable doubt (particularly not in the counts against Eleanor Donaldson).

The jury did find against them on all counts. Donaldson had a resigned expression, standing with his head tilted to the side, when the jury foreman read out the unanimous findings, before he was led to prison (click here to read Ben Lowry’s account of the moment he was convicted).

Two years ago he was being feted in Stormont, Downing Street and the White House. I have seen no more dramatic fall from grace.

• I planned to write about 10 years of Brexit. Owen Polley does so in Monday’s paper and I will on Tuesday

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor