Will the DUP’s Brexit gamble pay off?

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, new-ish leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and first minister of Northern Ireland, quietly spoken and conservative in style, doesn’t have the demeanour of a man who likes to take existential gambles. Yet this is precisely what he is now doing, putting his leadership on the line, throwing his party’s future into the balance and, with it, the future of the peace process in the province and its place in the UK.

The stakes could hardly be higher, yet Donaldson has few options open to him. The problem is, of course, Brexit and specifically the Northern Ireland Protocol within it. It was signed, for the record, by the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, who may or may not have read it carefully. At any rate it allowed/forced Northern Ireland to stay economically within the EU, which has potential advantages but also more immediately pressing inconveniences, such as being unable, soon, to “import” sausages, and many more essentials, from the UK.

Johnson once travelled to the DUP conference to declare that no prime minister could tolerate such checks and restrictions. It was one of his most faithless moments, the only excuses being that he didn’t understand the issues, or else thought it could all be wished away or ignored until Brexit got “done”. At any rate, he betrayed them.

So now the DUP, like many in Northern Ireland, finds the protocol intolerable and wants it gone. Hence Donaldson’s decision to boycott cross-border meetings with Irish counterparts, and the threats to collapse the government of Northern Ireland and try to force an early general election for the Northern Ireland assembly. (The timing of a poll, though, is down to the UK secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, who may not be in a hurry to provoke yet more division across the six counties.)

Here, then, is Donaldson’s gamble: if he places himself and his party at the head of the resistance movement he will scoop the Unionist and Loyalist vote and claim a mandate to scrap the protocol. Then the EU might just listen. If he does not gamble in this way and appears too weak, like his short-lived predecessor, Edwin Poots, then a humiliating defeat beckons at the scheduled elections next May. If the DUP doesn’t get the protocol gone, or at least make the effort, then the opinion polls suggest that the electorate will get the DUP and Sir Jeffrey gone instead, sooner or later.

Donaldson may not have that much to lose, then. Presently the DUP, which was, under Ian Paisley, for so long a dominant voice in the land, would come fourth equal in an Assembly election. In a highly fractured party system, Sinn Fein would, shockingly, easily top the poll on 25 per cent of the poll, and grab the prize of nominating the first minister. Some way behind (15 per cent) would be the more moderate Ulster Unionists, with the more militant Traditional Unionist Voice (14 per cent) completing the fatal split of the Loyalist/Unionist vote. Donaldson’s party would tie, on 13 per cent, with the Alliance Party and the nationalist SDLP. In such a kaleidoscopic assembly, few could claim to be winners, but the big loser – the DUP – would be quite obvious.

Taking his ball away and leaving the pitch seems the most rational course for Donaldson, then, as he (like Boris Johnson and Lord Frost) is getting nowhere with renegotiating the protocol, ie the Brexit treaty. The EU vice-president in charge of the matter, Maros Sefcovic, arrived in Northern Ireland just as Donaldson was escalating the cold war. He was emollient, but betrayed no willingness on the part of the EU to be bullied into jeopardising the integrity of the single market. Donaldson thinks this can be done by passing a law to prevent smuggling across the open land border on the island of Ireland, but there is much more to the dispute than that. Sefcovic, in response, advised Donaldson to “dial down the rhetoric”, and has tweeted his optimism that “we need to make full use of the opportunities the protocol offers”. The two sides remain as far apart as ever.