IT’S the endless fun that keeps non-unionists coming back for more. Every time Stephen Nolan hits up Jamie Bryson on speed-dial, drivers in their cars turn the volume up a couple of beeps; tradesmen nod at their dust- and paint-stained radios and smile at each other; joggers roll their eyes to no-one in particular, but press their ear buds a little bit tighter.

The sheer reliability of Bryson’s gormlessness, delivered in a sub-Joe Pasquale key that has dogs howling at the ceiling and scratching desperately at the doors, is catnip to bookers whose job is to harvest clicks and likes and calls and texts. It's a long time since anyone at the BBC worshipped at the Reithian triptych of information, education and entertainment, but nowhere has the veneration of the third at the expense of one and two been more consistently practised than on BBCNI’s morning phone-in; and no single figure is more central to the Nolan business model of noise over light than Jamie Bryson.

In the hyper-reactionary world of unionist politics, the North Down would-be lawyer is king. I don’t use the word reactionary solely as a pejorative, by the way, because in any disputed polity the defenders of the status quo are inevitably tasked with fighting off perceived threats. The trouble is that when so much time is spent in defensive mode, everything becomes a threat. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to march hopefully forward towards a sign marked ‘The Future’ when there’s a big dog called Saoirse constantly lunging at your legs.

To the unionist factory setting of reaction, Bryson has added a number of personal apps. He’s clearly someone who’s deeply insecure about his professional standing in a media, political and legal milieu where he’s surrounded by people who do what they do for a living. Hence the faintly comical lawyerly mien; hence the regular, sweetly vague updates on his meandering journey to the bar; hence the bewildering array of designer clothing, casual and formal; hence the charming malapropisms as he navigates the strange jargon of whatever new field of endeavour he’s wandered into.

He's a Dickens character out of time and just as the Victorians queued up to pay their pennies to follow the latest magazine travails of Miss Havisham or Oliver Twist, so present-day audiences clamour to keep abreast of the adventures or My Cousin Binny, Eddie the Legal, Rumpole of the Failey, or whatever contemporary Comic-Con persona Bryson is inhabiting on any particular day.

But behind the familiar exterior lies a darker, meaner side; a side that, for me, has been highlighted more vividly this week than ever before.

On the face of it, Bryson’s call for loyalists to “flood” a new body investigating the past is merely another Baldrick-style cunning plan that’s in reality dumber than a box of bricks. The Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) is the lipstick on the British government’s legacy pig. It is already so deeply compromised by its provenance and its composition that it is expected that there will be little or no interest shown in it by nationalist and republican victims or their representative groups. Bryson’s not a huge fan of it either as he thinks it unacceptable that the British government seeks information from the UVF, UDA and RHC while pursuing them and ignoring republicans. In Ulster-Scots it's called 'two-tier policing'.

Nevertheless, Bryson remains alert as ever to the main chance and is now urging Loyal Ulster to embrace the ICRIR. He thinks that the likely absence of state/loyalist victims from the ICRIR in-tray is an excellent opportunity for IRA victims to fill it up, thereby correcting what he sees as a massive imbalance in legacy cases. And who’s standing ready to help the families of IRA victims should they agree to become actors in this new drama? Why Master Jamie, of course: parajournalist, paradoorman, parapolitician, paralegal. 

At this stage he’s helping a trickle of relatives, which naturally he hopes will turn into that flood he talked about. But helping them do what? In a piece in the News Letter outlining his strategy, he was heavy on the need to stick it to republicans and level up the playing field, but offered not a word about what the victims might get out of the process. In my unfortunately considerable professional and personal experience, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles don’t take their courage in their hands and enter the strange and hostile world of the courts in order to get one over on the Brits. They don’t put themselves painfully and awkwardly in the public eye because their presence there is another step on the road to Irish freedom. They seek help, they seek support, they seek redress, they seek truth and they seek justice because someone they love has been murdered. They trudge to the court steps and stand there reluctantly and broken-heartedly before the cameras because they want to understand why their son or daughter never got to fall in love; why their brother or sister isn’t going to be standing round the tree on Christmas morning; why their child got a coffin the same colour as their first communion dress.

Victims groups never forget this. Not only do they never forget this, it is the reason they go to work in the morning. 

In his News Letter piece, Jamie Bryson prefers to concentrate on strategy. “Loyalism,” he writes in his first paragraph, “has a unique opportunity to rebalance ‘legacy’ by unionist and loyalist victims flooding the new body that will look at the past”. He doesn’t say in his first paragraph it's an opportunity for broken people finally to find something that can stop them waking up at night crying. He doesn’t say in his first paragraph it’s an opportunity for a parent to make good on a whispered and tearful graveside promise. In his first paragraph he says it’s an opportunity to make a point.

And that’s okay. Bryson is not a child of conflict. Bryson grew up by the post-ceasefire seaside. Adult Jamie has never seen a British army foot patrol or been stopped by the UDR. If his interest in legacy is a politically strategic one then it’s not for me to tell him that the people he is dealing with are first and foremost fragile and vulnerable human beings – he will learn that for himself. 

But it is for me to tell the victims that Bryson is helping that they will get none of what they think they may get via the ICRIC. The Shankill Bomb victims Bryson is helping, for instance, know that those who planted the bomb were i) killed and ii) jailed; but they are now under the impression, as Bryson told Cool FM, that the driver might be found; that the planners might be found; that – get this – everyone who “helped on the day” might be found.

None of this will happen, of course, not a chance; and when it doesn’t happen the relatives will be left with nothing except more resentment, more anger, more grief. But at least the legacy league table will have been levelled up a bit, right?

More widely, Bryson’s bright idea will kill the agency it’s designed to exploit. In the absence of nationalist and republican buy-in and against the background of the complete disinterest of unionist politicians in doing any serious work on legacy, the ICRIR would have pottered along quite happily doing what it was designed to do: justifying itself by the mere fact of its existence. The occasional meaningless investigation for unsupported and malleable families, the odd press release with plenty of words and zero substance: job done. But if the Bryson Blueprint works out, and if sufficient families join the crusade (which, given Jamie’s past strategic acumen is by no means guaranteed), what will the ICRIR become?

Well, it’s a ship already holed below the waterline as far as victims of the state are concerned, but if it embarks on a flurry of investigations of IRA killings only – investigations prompted by Bryson – then as the SS Declan Morgan lies listing and leaking oil in port, its very public and very Jamie partiality will be the torpedo that sinks it.