Sam McBride: Even Arlene Foster’s internal explanation to the DUP doesn’t stack up – so what really explains her abrupt U-turn?

The dithering, the horse-trading, the days of chaotic indecision, the disrespect shown to workers and business owners agonising over their future, and the DUP’s highly unusual deployment of its Executive veto to block proposals for further restrictions – only to seven days later accept far harsher restrictions without so much as a whimper.

So incomprehensible is the scale of Arlene Foster’s U-turn that inside the DUP that question is being asked just as loudly as outside the party, piling pressure on a leader now weaker than any of her predecessors since the party’s foundation in 1971.

At 8pm on Thursday night, as news of the Executive’s decision was leaking out, a virtual meeting of DUP MLAs and MPs was taking place – not to consult them, but to tell them what had happened. During the meeting several senior party figures expressed concern about what was going on, something exacerbated by the fact that for weeks the party has been positioning itself as opposed to lockdown and its members had been defending it on that basis.

Indeed a month ago, Arlene Foster wrote in this newspaper: “We cannot keep closing the country down or forcing specific sectors to close in order to beat back this virus. That strategy, designed to buy time, is in reality a failure and will ultimately ensure total despair engulfs all of our people. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Tested against her own words, what happened on Thursday night was a failure which she has allowed to happen. But why did the First Minister engage in such political self-flagellation?

Even within the DUP there’s no real attempt to spread the blame to the other parties because those parties have at least been consistent (with the exception of Sinn Féin’s brief move a fortnight ago to go against medical advice and relax restrictions) in saying that they would be led by medical advice on what was necessary to ensure hospitals were not overrun.

More than two weeks ago, the Executive was presented with a paper from Health Minister Robin Swann setting out the Chief Medical Officer’s firm advice that the restrictions then in place had to be extended for two weeks or the NHS would be unable to cope. The DUP and Sinn Féin refused to take a decision and instead spent the next few days drawing up an alternative plan to relax restrictions before Sinn Féin abandoned that and then the DUP deployed its cross-community veto to block Mr Swann’s proposal.

A chaotic week ended with the DUP accepting an extra week of some restrictions in return for dates when hospitality could re-open.

Last Thursday, just hours after that deal had been agreed, DUP Economy Minister Diane Dodds appeared on The View. Explaining why she had not accepted Mr Swann’s proposal, she said: “It didn’t have a date for the re-opening of hospitality whereas what we eventually got through did give further hope and clarity to our hospitality sector.”

It is now clear that the hope of which she spoke was false hope and the clarity she claimed to have secured was not the sort of absolute certainty which many business people would expect from a role which commands an £87,000 ministerial salary.

On Thursday night the DUP accepted that all the closures which have been in place over the last five weeks will now go on for another two weeks – but churches will also be shut, most retail will now be shut, and the public will be strongly advised not to leave home unless it is essential. The DUP is no longer giving guarantees that at the end of that two-week period the restrictions will definitely end.

How could it be that last week the party was prepared to go against medical advice to oppose limited restrictions but it is now prepared to accept far more draconian rules without even voting against them, much less deploying its veto?

Rather than answer that question when it was posed to her yesterday, Mrs Foster denied that she had performed a U-turn at all.

With Trumpian audacity, she said: “No, we didn’t have that information last week. Of course the new medical advice in terms of where the R number was at, of course the new information around our hospital numbers – that’s all new information and it’s in that context that we had to make the decision.”

But that explanation does not stand up to basic scrutiny. SDLP minister Nichola Mallon immediately said that Mrs Foster was misrepresenting what ministers had been told. Other Executive sources agreed with Ms Mallon’s view.

Last Wednesday, the Executive was given an alarming health paper which is now publicly available. In the first paragraph it stated that the R number “has increased somewhat and is around 0.8 and rising”. In that context, it is not some great shock that it is now around 1 – that was where ministers were warned it was heading.

They were also told that there was a “major concern” around hospital capacity and that because the hospitals were full and community transmission was still widespread even after four weeks of limited restrictions, “there is likely to be very limited headroom for relaxation without quickly reaching the point where the hospital system is at the point of being overwhelmed”.

Because of last week’s DUP proposal, cafes had ordered in perishable stock to re-open yesterday. And because the DUP and Sinn Féin cancelled Tuesday’s Executive meeting, leaving this decision until hours before the existing restrictions ran out, by the time ministers came to trade their horses it would have been viewed as grossly unreasonable to tell small firms that they could not open the following day.

Indeed, it was so late that many of them may have opened oblivious to any news that there had been yet another Stormont U-turn.

Thus Stormont came to the decision to allow them to re-open for a week before everything is shut.

In political terms, the DUP’s priorities seem strange from its own perspective. Peter Lynas of the Evangelical Alliance – an influential voice for many DUP supporters – observed that off licences were being allowed to stay open but places of worship were being made to shut as Advent begins.

A DUP source last night said that they had been told by someone very close to Mrs Foster that they had used the veto last week because they felt it was wrong to keep cafes closed and there were concerns about the accuracy of the data they were getting from the Department of Health.

The source also said that it was claimed hospitals were now over capacity and could be overwhelmed without intervention.

But the DUP member who was told this was unconvinced. For one thing, if the accuracy of the Department of Health data was questioned last week, why was it accepted this week?

And hospital bed occupancy – while still alarmingly high – is actually slightly lower than a week ago (99%, down from 101%).

What the party is telling its own members does not adequately explain such a monumental shift. However, there are at least three possible explanations for Mrs Foster’s abrupt U-turn.

Although having been prepared to reject blunt medical warnings for weeks, it may be that belatedly she realised that the situation is precarious – particularly so because winter has not yet begun. With hospitals last night 99% full and no credible alternatives from the DUP, the First Minister may have panicked at the prospect of her party precipitating a health catastrophe.

The second possibility is that last week Mrs Foster privately knew her position against more restrictions was untenable but felt she had to be seen to be fighting against that outcome in order to create a fig leaf to cover her embarrassment at having unwisely given businesses a pledge that they would re-open after four weeks.

The third possibility is that the real change last week was Naomi Long’s threat to resign over the DUP’s deployment of its Executive veto. Mrs Long appears to have been underestimated by the DUP until her warning suddenly upped the stakes.

If the Alliance leader quit then the DUP and Sinn Féin would struggle to agree on a replacement for the sensitive post. In those circumstances, using the DUP’s veto again could imperil devolution itself – and Mrs Foster’s own position. If so, then the DUP’s veto now carries risk so great that it is almost unusable – the political equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.

But if that was the case, why not simply vote against the restrictions – allowing them to pass on a simple majority, but maintaining the consistency of the DUP’s political position against lockdown?

In arguing against lockdown earlier, Mrs Foster has presided over lockdown at the most economically, socially and religiously significant point of the year.

Whatever lies behind the mystery of the DUP’s U-turn, this episode has been devastating for Mrs Foster’s credibility. She has managed to alienate both supporters and opponents of lockdown.

The Executive – which has long been tolerated rather than respected by many voters – is diminished. Based on recent weeks, the best way to predict what might happen at the end of these restrictions is to prepare for the opposite of what DUP ministers are now saying will happen.

If this Executive was a car, it would have been declared unroadworthy long ago. But it is still on the road and Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy spent some time at Thursday’s Executive meeting attempting to persuade ministers to vote against Jim Allister’s bill to bring in tough reforms which could jail those guilty of some of the behaviour exposed in the RHI scandal.

Increasingly, the Executive appears unable to comprehend how it is viewed by the voters impacted by its actions. There is a belief among some at Stormont that the pandemic means devolution cannot collapse. That may be true, but if the recklessness of recent weeks continues that theory may be tested.

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