AS the DUP whirls ever-deeper into what former party big beast Jim Wells thinks may well be a death spiral, the corporate incompetence presided over by Gavin Robinson that has brought unionism’s biggest party to perhaps its lowest point is continuing to take a dread toll.

I’m going to be honest and say I feel sorry for Gavin. Rarely has a leader been so regularly and so publicly ragdolled by those over whom he is supposed to exercise control. Newly independent Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart, aka the Queen of Ulster, didn’t just tinker with party practice and protocol, she went at it with a wrecking ball. Her Upper Bann colleague, Jonathan Buckley MLA, is so alarmed by the prospect of losing his seat – either via the ballot box or via Gavin’s sacking of deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly – that he’s come up with a Jerry Maguire-style manifesto for peace and harmony amidst the political sturm und drang. The outcome for Jerry was a mixed bag – he lost his job but got the girl. How Jonathan – or Jonny, as he’s cosily known by the host of the Biggest Show in the Country – will have fared when the gunsmoke clears and the blood is mopped up is unclear at this point, but I must reluctantly point out that the DUP director of elections isn’t handling the crisis with either the charm or nous of Tom Cruise. Telling Stephen Nolan that he’s keeping his plan for the salvation of unionism to himself, a day after trumpeting his plan for the salvation of the union on the front page of the News Letter, spoke of a man driven more by panic than vision.

Emma, meanwhile, has taken to tweeting inspirational Bible quotes on Twitter; not entirely surprising as the dFM finds herself on a particularly sticky wicket. She’s gloriously unelected, not for the first time, having been gifted her Lagan Valley seat in 2022 by one Jeffrey Donaldson, Esq., and had every reason to hope that her high-profile position would see her win a real mandate, on name recognition alone. But with her colleagues fighting like rats in a sack, the insurgent Carla Lockhart gathering partisans around her by the day, and finding herself in the rather grubby position of being banned by Gavin from paying her respects with First Minister Michelle O’Neill at the Cenotaph this year, a once rosy outlook is now considerably more thorn than bloom.

Gavin Robinson is active on social media and he has his own podcast, The Lion’s Roar.

We follow each other on Twitter, which is rather refreshing for me as his DUP colleagues prefer to block me for unloyal thoughts. So he'll know my well-documented thoughts on Bryson, J., LLB. Not that I’m the only source left open-mouthed in astonishment at the rise of the Mantelpiece Rasputin in the Court of the Queen of Ulster. Like Jeffrey Donaldson before him, Gavin had every opportunity to stop the Bryson chaos before it broke out, and stopping the chaos is actually a very simple thing, as UUP leader Jon Burrows has impressively shown over the past month: You take nothing to do with him.
Granted, Gavin didn’t make the mistake that Jeffrey did. He didn’t dander along the street shoulder to shoulder with Jamie, chatting amiably for the cameras. He didn’t climb on to the back of a lorry to share a microphone and a union jack-draped table with him. But he let the DUP kids out to play with Jamie when he should have kept them indoors doing their homework. He stood and watched as Carla and Jonathan followed Jamie around like a couple of over-enthusiastic spaniels; he did nothing as Carla and Jonathan gave Jamie the DUP’s full and unequivocal backing; and he put his hands in his pockets and hummed as it became clear that by his inaction he had subcontracted the business of the DUP out to a man whose frequently stated dream is to bring the political institutions whose chambers he has never bothered down around the MLAs’ ears.

Whether it was political astuteness, his policing background or a combination of both that told Jon Burrows that Portadown District would never walk the Garvaghy Road I don’t know. But while he was not stupid enough to tell unionist voters that it was never going to happen, he knew it, and his every action and word during Drumcree MkII were based on that knowledge. He has benefited considerably from that– both in terms of his personal credibility and standing and an intact party.

By contrast, at every turn Gavin has spoken and acted as if the ‘Lawful 35’ were going to be forced down the road and when they emerged triumphant on the far side all that would remain would be for him to do circular handwaves from the Stormont balcony before an 1980s-sized monster unionist rally. The truth is that the lane at Drumcree and the road at Garvaghy were laid with more traps for him than an episode of Total Wipeout:

• No walk;
• The empowering of restive junior colleagues;
• A resurgent Sinn Féin;
• A carrion-crazy TUV;
• A cave-in by a crisis-averse No.10.

Any one of these contingencies would have been wargamed by a competent party as a hell of a risk; all five coming to pass would have been wargamed as a disaster-in-waiting. But Gavin either didn’t see any of it coming, or he did and he reckoned he had the goods to deal with it. Neither excuse covers the East Belfast MP in glory. And as the successor to the now notorious Jeffrey Donaldson surveys the blasted heath that is post-Portadown Ulster, it’s starting to look as if posterity might look on the three-week reign of Gavin and Jeffrey’s successor, Edwin Poots, with rather less hilarity.