“STAY calm,” UUP leader Jon Burrows told us on Monday morning as Loyal Ulster struggled to come to terms with The Great Betrayal.
I’m old enough to remember the 70s, 80s and 90s when “Stay calm” calls were code for “This is really, really bad.” Jon Burrows is old enough too, and as a former Trevor he surely knows as well as I do that “Stay calm” calls invariably convinced people to do precisely the opposite. Indeed, I suspect that papers printed in medical journals of the future may well point out that the legendary and cross-generational over-dependence of these six counties on anti-depressants can be traced back to politicians repeatedly telling people to stay calm.
Hot on the heels of The Great Betrayal came The Great Noticing as the DUP and the TUV suddenly discovered that nothing Donald Trump says is under any circumstances to be taken seriously, and for the first time since the Orange Don took office in 2016, MLAs, councillors and MPs were keen to document the winceworthy details of the slug trail that Trump has left behind him in the past ten years.
Trump’s in favour of a united Ireland?
Did you know that he once told people to put Domestos up their jaxies if they got Covid?
Trump thinks the idea of a united Ireland is cool?
Yeah, but how many times was he on the Lolita Express with Epstein – and didn’t he talk dirty about his daughter?
Trump reckons a border poll could happen quicker than Andy Burnham thinks it will.
Is that the same Trump who’s trying to steal Canada and Greenland?
What bleach might do the lining of the colon; Trump’s sexual incontinence; his disregard for international borders and diplomacy: If unionist reps had harboured any misgivings about his CV in the past, it wasn’t enough to stop them knocking people out of the way in DC to get selfies with him on Paddy’s Day. But once his position on the national question put him in the same box as Gerry Adams and Jeremy Corbyn, the cataracts were magically lasered from their eyes and the desk selfies were popped into the bottom drawer.
It all had uncomfortable echoes of the DUP’s doomed love affair with Boris Johnson.
That get-a-room-ffs DUP conference in 2018 when grown men and women fell at Johnson’s pudgy feet and pestered hotel reception for his room number is at the top of the DUP’s long list of never-to-be-spoken-of events, and it’s perhaps because they don’t like to discuss or analyse one cruel betrayal that this latest one has led to yet more wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The mass outbreak in Loyal Ulster of Trump Derangement Syndrome was accompanied by a plucky but plainly ridiculous attempt to suggest that in their response to the Trump outburst nationalists and republicans had entered the MAGA tent. UUP Health Minister Robbie Butler tweeted: “For years we have been told that this President is beyond the pale: his character, his conduct, his position on Gaza. Some of those now cheering him on boycotted the White House over it. One sentence about a united Ireland and he is apparently a statesman of rare vision.”
Robbie didn’t supply an example of a person who on Friday hated Trump but by Monday was wearing a red baseball cap. For the very good reason that no such person exists.
The overwhelming reaction of non-unionists to Trump’s words was one of hilarity, quite simply because what happened was deeply, deeply funny. Family values unionists in the DUP and TUV backed Trump despite him paying off porn star Stormy Daniels; despite him paying out $5.6 million dollars to E. Jean Carroll for sexually abusing her; despite him telling the world that he grabs women by the p***y when he feels like it. And after 10 years of the DUP and the TUV loyally ignoring a tsunami of proof of his personal degeneracy, what’s the reward? Trump buys a ticket for the Wolfe Tones in the Falls Park. If you can’t laugh at that, what can you laugh at?
To give him his dues, Minister Butler was never one of those who rushed to grab a selfie with Trump or who ignored his appalling behaviour, but in suggesting that finding grim humour in the plight of the Stauncherati is to stop loathing Trump, he proves that the US President’s Ireland visit has discomfited unionism across the board.
If Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly found Trump’s enthusiasm for a united Ireland as objectionable as her colleagues, she didn’t have much of a chance to vent about it as she was tasked with taking the substantial sting out of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern First Ministers meeting in Cardiff for a modern re-enactment of the Gunpowder Plot without the barrels of explosives.
The challenge facing Emma was a daunting one, and it’s the same one that faces any unionist who speaks out about the latest development in the unity project: How to talk down a problem without actually acknowledging that it’s a problem. Before the weekend nobody was really convinced by the unionist impression of Captain Mainwaring: “Don’t panic!” is in the same bracket as the aforementioned “Stay calm” when it comes to message failure.
Emma fell back – quite reasonably – on the technical truth that in attending the Cardiff summit, Michelle O’Neill would be doing so without her sign-off and only in her capacity as northern leader of Sinn Féin. The First Minister/Deputy First Minister distinction is one that parties have struggled to explain to people in the North; what a Sisyphean task it is to convince the great British public that the First Minister is not in fact the First Minister and that the Deputy First Minister is not in fact a Deputy. “Furthermore,” Emma said, “it is in fact Unionism that is the largest designation in the Northern Ireland Assembly – not the separatists, republicans and nationalists.” Again, good luck with explaining to the man and woman on the Clapham omnibus that unionism is in rude health when what’s still viewed across the water as the political wing of the IRA is at the top of the political pile.
As for Emma’s resort to the use of the word ‘separatists’, portraying pro-independence types in such oddly anachronistic terms may scare the horses, particularly those in Scotland and Wales, but it is in fact a telling indicator that unionism feels the walls closing in.
I like being called a separatist. It makes me think I’m in a steaming jungle, gathered around a fire with my comrades, smoking cigars and plotting to take the capital.
Hasta la vista, baby.
