Ben Lowry: ​This crisis could kickstart a realignment in Northern Ireland unionism

The News Letter tried to contact Sir Jeffrey and other senior members of the DUP yesterday but most of them were not answering their phones. Those who I spoke to were uniformly shocked, even people who are normally very well informed on what is rumbling and emerging in politics.

The party was reeling.

I know someone who met Sir Jeffrey earlier this week and found him in good spirit, talking about events optimistically. I presume the DUP leader had no indication of his coming arrest – lawyers and police officers I spoke to yesterday confirmed that an arrest time of 6am is chosen so that it is unexpected, when people are at home.

Sir Jeffrey is almost a decade older than me and his election to Stormont in 1985 in his early 20s, when I was just into my teens, is one of my earliest local political memories.

Over the years, I have bumped into Sir Jeffrey and got quotes from him at events that I have been covering such as election counts or royal visits. Recently he briefed a number of us journalists on the final stages of the negotiation.

Often I have found him easy to talk to, friendly and good humoured but for all his charm his mood can be unpredictable if he dislikes a line of questioning or an aspect of coverage. When I encountered one or two examples of such sensitivity recently I figured that Sir Jeffrey had been under intolerable pressure over the last year, facing a choice between two unpalatable outcomes: a return to Stormont to implement the Irish Sea border amid an emboldened Sinn Fein, or being punished for staying out in an increased say for the Irish government in internal Northern Ireland affairs.

Any sex offence case is a tragedy – for the victim if a serious offence has indeed taken place or for the accused if they have been wrongly named. To state an obvious, but important truth, there are many different outcomes in such cases. The music celebrities Cliff Richard and DJ Paul Gambaccini, for example, were completely cleared over historical sexual abuse allegations, in Richard’s case after his home was raided. The Tory MP Nigel Evans was acquitted of serious sexual assault after the case against him fell apart in court and police dropped a lengthy rape investigation into another MP Andrew Rossindell.

I know nothing about the detail of the allegations against Sir Jeffrey, which he strongly denies, but given that his career has been ruined, and that people’s lives can be ruined even if they are acquitted, it is worth reiterating someone’s innocence until proven otherwise.

The political fallout from Sir Jeffrey’s sudden resignation will be huge.

There is no obvious DUP leader, and there has not been since Peter Robinson resigned. Arlene Foster ultimately lost almost the entire support of her assembly party, and barely anyone was keen to take on the job when she quit.

Edwin Poots’s brief leadership split the party bitterly, and Sir Jeffrey did not seem enthusiastic about succeeding him.

Gavin Robinson is an intelligent and likable politician and the obvious candidate for the position, but he is young – not yet 40 – and his moderate, pro-deal stance will not have endeared him to the sceptics.

Sir Jeffrey had achieved a remarkable degree of success in delivering the agreement to return Stormont. Late last year I began to say in broadcasts and writings that it was increasingly hard to see a return to devolution without an internal rupture in the DUP. I said this after talking extensively to senior politicians in the party. Some of them were interpreting the DUP’s seven tests for any Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland in an utterly different way to Sir Jeffrey. He had wanted the tests to be malleable, and thus not rule out a return to Stormont.

But the rupture has simply not come. Lord Dodds, Lord Morrow and Sammy Wilson MP made clear their opposition to the deal, you might even say their contempt for it, but this was often done in speeches in Westminster that we covered, but barely anyone else did. There has been essentially no opposition in the DUP assembly team. Jim Allister has been dismayed at the failure of DUP MLAs even to question vigorously the impact of the trade barrier.

At the same time however, Sir Jeffrey made ludicrous claims of the Irish Sea border, even saying that it was gone. Gradually it has become obvious that it is still here.

And the rapidity of his u-turn in the tone of his leadership, from harsh-sounding critic of the barrier to gushing enthusiast for the new deal, did not impress everyone in the party. Nor did Paul Givan and Emma Little-Pengelly’s sudden enthusiasm for the Irish language and gaelic games, which are still widely believed by unionists to have been used in a tribal and divisive way by republicans.

This very week, Belfast City Council’s plan for dual language across all facilities and John O’Dowd’s plan for directional bilingual road signs, something we were told would not happen under an Irish language act, let alone independent of one, has shown that Sinn Fein will not rest until every part of NI has equal English and Irish usage, including in places where gaelic is seen as provocative.

It has never been clearer to me that there needs to be a unionist realignment. The current division into three parties is not feasible but nor is a single unionist movement. There is barely any difference between a DUP leadership so moderate that it sounds at times like like Alliance, and the moderate Ulster Unionist leadership, so why do they not merge?

At the same time, unionism is being assailed from so many angles, often oblique, and in so many ways, often subtle, that it needs a movement that firmly resists the nationalist direction of travel.

It might be that the sudden collapse of Sir Jeffrey somehow kickstarts this realignment. But still there are huge obstacles to it, ranging from Doug Beattie’s distrust of the DUP, which if anything has been heightened since the deal, which he thinks was badly oversold, to the ongoing refusal of the DUP sceptics to take any meaningful action against the Irish Sea border they so despise, let alone join Jim Allister.