When Sir Jeffrey Donaldson took over as DUP leader last summer, someone close to a very senior figure in the Northern Ireland Office told me that the British G overnment would have a plan to help Sir Jeffrey resolve a dilemma.
The consequences of what has happened over recent days go beyond the issue at hand, because they point to it now being government policy to help Sir Jeffrey where that is possible. But if one has friends in high places, it is best that those friends are competent.
There are aspects of what has gone on here which do not quite add up based on what we now know. The law had been changed more than a decade ago to ban ‘double-jobbing’ — MPs also sitting as MLAs.
During the Westminster expenses scandal in 2009, Peter and Iris Robinson — at that point a power couple who comprised the DUP leader, First Minister, East Belfast MP, East Belfast MLA, Strangford MP, Strangford, MLA and Castlereagh councillor — were described by tabloids as the “Swish Family Robinson” because of their income from politics.
David Cameron, then in alliance with the Ulster Unionists, seized on DUP discomfort, and pledged to ban double-jobbing. He jibed that there would be nothing swish about his MPs.
One of several incongruous aspects of what has happened is that the Tory strategy on this issue — including that speech — was crafted by Jonathan Caine, then the key Conservative adviser on Northern Ireland. It is Lord Caine, now an NIO junior minister, who just over a week ago set out a plan to effectively roll back parts of his former policy.
He proposed allowing “MPs to become MLAs at Stormont and hold both seats for the duration of the remainder of that parliament”, making it explicit that it was to “provide stability where Northern Ireland parties need to reconfigure their representation across Parliament and Stormont without the triggering of parliamentary by-elections”.
The only party facing a problem was the DUP, and the only individual within the DUP facing a problem was its leader. That leader needed a quick decision because the DUP selection process for May’s Stormont election is under way.
That move was so transparent — the government was moving to help the DUP in a way which it had not helped other parties — that the reaction was overwhelmingly negative.
Last Wednesday, Tory peers received text messages from their chief whip instructing them to vote for the change. Half an hour later, Boris Johnson announced on the floor of the Commons that the plan was being ditched.
Disastrously for the DUP, it endured a week of criticism for no benefit. Both Sir Jeffrey and Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, highlighted that it was Labour’s shadow secretary of state, Louise Haigh, who last June proposed relaxing double-jobbing rules. Sir Jeffrey stressed that she did so before he was even leader. However, that is not the devastating rebuttal suggested.
Examination of the timeline makes that intervention more — not less — intriguing. Ms Haigh’s comments came days after Edwin Poots resigned as DUP leader. At that point, Sir Jeffrey was the sole candidate and it was clear he would be leader.
Ms Haigh’s fleeting intervention drew criticism at the time. It was all the stranger because no one had been raising the issue; even the DUP publicly accepted that double-jobbing was over. I contacted Ms Haigh to ask what had prompted her comment. She did not reply.
After that, the issue again vanished until last month when ex-Alliance leader Lord Alderdice tabled an amendment in the House of Lords to allow temporary double-jobbing. It is that amendment which was then adopted by the government.
Even if Ms Haigh and Lord Alderdice acted entirely on their own volition, the government selected this amendment — after rejecting multiple others — to be government policy.
There was a time when the NIO coming to Sir Jeffrey’s aid would have seemed strange. He was, after all, the young MP who walked out of the Good Friday Agreement talks, becoming a constant critic of David Trimble’s efforts to implement the Agreement until he defected to the DUP.
But a closer inspection of Sir Jeffrey’s career shows another story. In recent years he has been the DUP’s arch-pragmatist. He has been rewarded with many of the baubles which government can dispense — from a peerage to a prime ministerial appointment as trade envoy to Cameroon and Egypt. But recently declassified government files suggest that there has been a latent pragmatism to Sir Jeffrey which his stance on the Agreement obscured.
In 1997 he privately told the NIO that his party would not make life hard for the new Parades Commission but “needed some cover”.
The previous year he privately advocated compromise on the Drumcree parade dispute.
A 1997 internal civil service profile of the then UUP MP said that in the 1992 talks he had been “one of the most liberal and moderate members of the UUP team” but suggested he was hardening his stance for votes.
It was not just British officials who found Sir Jeffrey amenable.
In the late 1990s, the Irish ambassador in London privately described him as “extremely open-minded and is moving unionism away from its instinctive tendency to focus on the negative”.
There are benefits to being close to power. But there are also drawbacks. If the NIO are doing favours for Sir Jeffrey, it is fair to assume that he might be expected to return them. And this episode shows that even when his friends in government want to deliver for him, they sometimes can’t.
He now faces an awkward Lagan Valley by-election in September. That’s a problem for him, but also for the government. If the DUP wants to compromise on the protocol or the Irish language after May’s election, that is now trickier.
