WE’RE back to Gordon Lyons. Again.

This time, though, Gormless Gord doesn’t find himself in the headlines for accidentally walking into a lamppost, but for deliberately walking into one.

The Minister for Communities took a proactive executive decision last week, which was nice. He changed the letterhead on the department notepaper.

The trilingual letterhead featuring English, Irish and Ulster-Scots has gone, replaced by the same template only with the Irish and the Ulster-Scots removed. Why? Well, the Minister said last week, or rather his department said last week (which is the same thing, really) that the new logo is  “a single language logo, an abbreviated single language logo and a refreshed trilingual language logo which is used when correspondence relates to Irish or Ulster-Scots language, identity or culture”.

Which isn’t really telling us why, but, as ever, we can use our vivid imaginations.
There was zero pressure on Gord to do what he did. Stephen Nolan wasn’t on the case; the Donaghadee Dynamo hadn’t threatened to go the mattresses over it; even the TUV had somehow managed to miss it. The world turned, no-one fell off, and all was quiet and calm in relation to Gord’s headed notepaper. Until the East Antrim MLA decided it wasn’t.

If the DUP has learned anything in recent years it is that while some rows are purchased at great expense, others can be had for a song. Paul Givan thought the £50,000 being spent on the Irish language bursary scheme Líofa was so paltry that he could scrub it at Christmas 2016 and earn multiple brownie points with his constituents and colleagues with little or no blowback. That disastrous decision and subsequent arse-clenchingly embarrassing u-turn now looms large in the story of his career, as it always will.

A few months earlier, DUP Agriculture Minister Michelle McIlveen similarly reckoned that changing the name of a fisheries protection vessel from Banríon Uladh to Queen of Ulster would earn her endless delighted pats on the back at the annual conference with very little downside. The subsequent days and weeks were anything but plain sailing.

Now Gord has decided not only to poke a sleeping bear, but to boot it in the snout and hose it with cold water. He did so without an angry mob outside his constituency office demanding that he do so. He did so without a News Letter editorial telling him Carson’s ghost is angry and unquiet. He did so without the TUV warning that this is worse than the Trans desserts in the Stormont canteen. In short, he invented a problem.

Now in the normal run of things a problem is… well… a problem. But as the DUP continues its headlong rush towards oblivion, and as Gavin Robinson continues to snap upright in bed in the middle of the night with the image of Jim Allister’s coffin-plate smile burned into the back of his sleepy eyeballs, some problems are welcome problems. And the Irish language on the very headed notepaper on their desk is the kind of problem that the DUP dream of. Why? Because they have decided that the best way to battle the creeping threat of the TUV is to outdo the TUV.

Don’t get me wrong, the old cúpla focal has always been kryptonite to the keepers of the Loyal Ulster flame, but inventing Irish language problems is a risky business for a minister in a party still scarred by the Líofa debacle and still walking around with a crocodile tattoo on its forehead.

But needs must when the devil drives, and Gordon’s game but doomed effort to look stauncher than the TUV’s Staunchy McStaunchface was kind of inevitable. Some people were born to exude flinty staunchness: Gregory Campbell, springs to mind. But while Gordon longs to ascend to the Pantheon of the Staunch, he’s doomed to fail, because, as Squinter has previously observed, he has the political gravitas and the suppressed threat of a Tesco branch manager; worse than that, though, is the fact that when he’s under pressure he looks like a Tesco branch manager who suspects he may have left the immersion heater on.

It's hardly a battle worth fighting for Dream Dearg, or for the Shinners, not only because it’s unlikely to be a cross-cutting matter, but also because it would give Gormless Gordon another problem he could well be doing with.