Owen Polley: 'Trust me, I'm a Tory' is way past its sell-by date for unionists

Strictly speaking, he is obliged by legislation to take this action, but we have seen before that the government can easily get round the six month deadline for forming an executive.

It is pointless to ask voters to go to the polls again, whether it’s before Christmas or after. Mr Heaton-Harris’s decision is likely to benefit only Sinn Fein, but the DUP will certainly renew and probably improve its mandate as the biggest unionist party. And, naturally, it will interpret that as an endorsement of its policy to boycott power-sharing institutions until the protocol mess is sorted out.

The government’s stance, meanwhile, looks ever more contradictory.

Take the recent statements of the NI minister Steve Baker: by far the least low key politician that I can remember filling that post.

On Monday morning last, the News Letter reported that Mr Baker said there would be no devolved executive at Stormont until the ‘legitimate interest’ of unionists to end the jurisdiction of EU law in Northern Ireland ‘takes place’. The next day, readers learned that the minister wanted the DUP to ‘choke down’ its refusal to engage with the institutions until the protocol was reformed.

In defence of this position, Mr Baker offered reassurances that the government would resolve the problems with the Irish Sea border. “For unionists the direct application of EU laws and the jurisdiction of the Courts of Justice… show that, while Northern Ireland is an integral part of the UK, it is treated differently… It is important to remember this is crucial for Conservative eurosceptics too.”

What explains the difference in tone? Perhaps, through one statement, Mr Baker issued a warning to the new PM to retain the previous government’s policy of dealing with the protocol. In the next, he repeated the NIO’s line that the DUP should go back into the executive, irrespective of progress on the sea border.

In a revealing recent interview with this newspaper, the Northern Ireland minister hinted that foreign office officials could not be relied upon to pursue more than a ‘technical negotiation’ of the protocol. “I very much hope this will be heard in the foreign office,” he said, “because I am very clear that when I was a minister before (in the Brexit department), I was removed from the negotiations and I was betrayed.”

If Mr Baker is not sure whether he should trust his own government, why should Jeffrey Donaldson?

Remember that Theresa May promised that “no UK prime minister could ever agree” to a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As late as August 2020, Boris Johnson claimed that, “there will be no border down the Irish Sea - over my dead body.” And when the former PM reneged on that pledge, Mr Baker supported the protocol in the House of Commons. He recently apologised for being abrupt with Dublin and Brussels during negotiations, but has not yet apologised for 'subjugating’ the Act of Union.

In Northern Ireland, unionists have been rather indulgent toward the assurances of various iterations of the government that it will restore the UK’s integrity. Many of us still believe that influential Conservatives, including Baker and Heaton-Harris, understand the problems with the protocol and want to put them right, but the line “trust us, we know what we’re doing” expired a long time ago.

In the past week, with the connivance of Alliance, nationalist parties launched a fresh assault on the three strands of the Belfast Agreement, by demanding that the Dublin government be granted ‘joint authority’ over devolved issues in Northern Ireland. This unconstitutional suggestion was eventually refuted by the NIO, but only after it first issued an ambiguous statement.

In case anyone has forgotten, the largest bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly is still made up of unionist MLAs. Yet, remarkably, because nationalists and the unaligned form a narrow majority, it was implied that, if their interests coincided, they could unpick vital parts of the Belfast Agreement and remove key aspects of our UK membership.

It’s worth restating; the Northern Ireland Protocol is such an exceptional arrangement, with such wide reaching consequences, that unionists’ response has been comparatively patient and proportionate. It impacts the province’s constitutional position directly and, within most of our lifetimes, people were being killed for defending that constitutional position.

You could make exactly the same points about joint authority. It is, and always has been, an incendiary issue in Northern Ireland. Yet, so complacent have our politicians become about stability here, and so entrenched are their views on Brexit, that even the so-called ‘centre ground’ is prepared to use it as some form of negotiating tactic.

As this week’s performative Stormont ‘recall’ showed, the parties are already in election mode, and the campaign is likely only to stoke tensions and delay action on the protocol. While the last election was being fought, the EU and the UK declared an informal go slow on talks.

At times, government ministers have shown that they understand how the sea border continues to poison relationships in Northern Ireland. They’ve even used that argument rather effectively in their discussions with the EU.

While it’s understandable that they want Stormont back, it’s disappointing that there is not more sign that they recognise removing the protocol is far more important to our future than reviving a malfunctioning executive.