Ben Lowry: Northern Ireland was barely on the radar at the Tory party conference in Manchester

Back in 2019 any events at which Northern Ireland were mentioned were packed. I joined a long queue on the last night of conference for a gathering hosted by the DUP. I interviewed English rank-and-file Tory members and asked them why they were present. They said the Union mattered to them. Where were such people this year, with the Union in continuing peril, I wondered?

At that 2019 DUP event, Boris Johnson was the guest and was met with cheers of: ‘Boris! Boris! Boris!’ He gave a barnstorming address, about how NI was one of the best places to do business because it “is part of the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland [crowd roars] and always will be”.

Mr Johnson said then: “I am very sad by the way talking about buses [a reference to a humorous comment by Arlene Foster about the prospect of the DUP being thrown under a bus by Mr Johnson] I was very sad to see what happened to Wrightbus.”

To laughter, Mr Johnson said the mayor of London had not given the Ballymena firm fresh orders, unlike the previous mayor [him]. The prime minister said that when he looked at the “sea of eager happy faces tonight supporting our precious Union I know it is in good shape”.

The then DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds and the party leader Arlene Foster also spoke to cheers, and Mr [later Lord] Dodds told the News Letter that Mr Johnson made clear “he is a unionist through and through”. Mrs [later Baroness] Foster said: “It is wonderful to hear the enthusiasm for the Union.”

The next day Mr Johnson relayed little of his gushing support for Northern Ireland to Tory Party delegates in his main conference speech. There were only two mentions of NI, the issue that had been holding up the UK’s departure from the EU after the 2016 referendum vote (the 2019 conference slogan was ‘Get Brexit Done’). Instead, Mr Johnson told delegates that that day he would be tabling compromise proposals in Brussels. “We will under no circumstances have checks at or near the border in Northern Ireland … And [the plan would have] renewable democratic consent by the ... assembly”.

See the slyness? After all his gung-ho talk to the DUP Mr Johnson was emphasising to the world that there would be no land border, as demanded by Ireland, but making no such pledge against an internal UK barrier.

In those remarks Mr Johnson was unveiling the deal, supported by the DUP, which would have put Northern Ireland in the EU regulatory zone, although the party says it only agreed that on the basis of a Stormont lock and NI staying in the UK customs zone. While the DUP is sensitive on this point, with hindsight it is clear that their concession would have resulted in the regulatory problems of the later NI Protocol. It emboldened Mr Johnson to go further, tell the EU he had unionist support, and then abandon the DUP and give the EU a full regulatory and customs border in the Irish Sea.

Mr Johnson was re-elected to Downing Street weeks after that 2019 conference, and then for more than a year he denied he had agreed an Irish Sea border. But by 2021 he, and everyone, including the current NI Labour spokesperson, Hilary Benn, realised that the NI Protocol was ruinous. Thus it was never fully implemented.

Last weekend the Windsor Framework introduced much of the Irish Sea border that the EU has always insisted upon. The new barrier, while less than the NI Protocol would have been if implemented, is nonetheless bigger than the protocol as it has operated to date, with grace periods.

There was no Tory conference in 2020, due to Covid, but the party was back in Manchester in 2021. It was a much reduced event, due to ongoing coronavirus caution, but Sir Jeffrey Donaldson – then newly elected as DUP leader – was there, and I interviewed him. By that point Mr Johnson’s government agreed on the need to overhaul the protocol, but it was unclear the extent to which they would deliver on emerging ideas such the Northern Ireland Protocol bill.

Last year the Conservatives were in Birmingham, and the DUP did not attend. Northern Ireland was little discussed, but Liz Truss was in office and she was adamant that the Irish Sea border was unacceptable. Within days her premiership imploded.

To a greater extent even than 2021 or 2022, NI was not on the radar this year. It was barely mentioned in fringe meetings. The veteran Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon told me: “It's very rare for Northern Ireland to be this invisible in party conference season.”

That was my sense too. At the NI Tories reception the prime minister was not doing interviews but I asked him as he greeted party members if he was expecting to mention NI in his main speech the next day. “I am expecting to be mentioning a lot of things,” he replied with a smile. He did mention Northern Ireland in the speech, but in the vague terms of his love for the “family” of the UK, the four home nations that include NI.

Some nationalists sneer that such invisibility shows that people in Great Britain do not care about Northern Ireland. It is certainly fair to say that most people in England, including most Conservatives, do not care in the way some Tories told me they did in 2019. But if the UK had wanted rid of NI it would have happened long ago. That is the simultaneously perilous and secure position in which we find ourselves.

What does this mean for the return of Stormont? Some sources close to government talk as if it is near. Some sources in the DUP say it is certainly not.

But it is worrying that an event so bursting with ideas and debate and seminars and gatherings as the Conservative and Unionist conference can barely even mention NI, despite the start of the conference and the start of the Windsor Framework Irish Sea border having coincided last Sunday.