LEE Reynolds, the new Commissioner for the Ulster Scots and Ulster British Tradition, seems like a decent spud. Squinter has crossed swords with him online on numerous occasions and Arlene Foster’s former SPAD comes across as a thoroughly reasonable and refreshingly self-deprecating bloke who understands that difference on the nationalist question does not have to mean pistols at dawn.
He's the polar opposite of new UUP leader Jon Burrows, who seems extraordinary pleased with himself and whose faux blokey charm is appreciated by nobody more than himself.
Lee and Jon both faced a big challenge this week as they got down to business, and that challenge came in the form of a bin-balancing Lego Lawyer from North Down.
Jamie Bryson attempted to railroad Jon Burrows ahead of the former senior policeman’s UUP coronation on Saturday. Last week Jamie wrote John a letter saying he was looking forward to continuing the “strong personal relationship” the two men have struck up and expressed his confidence that the UUP leader elect would be on his side as he confront the republican hordes.
But what happened to Jamie on Saturday reminded Squinter a little of that scene in Goodfellas when Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, is taken into an empty room to be initiated as a ‘Made Man’, only for things to go rather gorily wrong. When asked after his appointment about Jamie and that close relationship, Jon said he’s only met the doorman-wrangler and paralegal once. Oooft! He followed that stinging left jab with a knee-buckling straight right when he said he wouldn’t be enlisting in Jamie’s culture war army, thanks all the same. The wince from the assembled press pack was an acknowledgement of the fall-out to come, and Jamie didn’t disappoint, tweeting over the next 48 hours with searing but also rather worrying regularity and passion about the betrayal he had just suffered.
But nothing’s so bad that it couldn’t be worse, and Jamie brought his starfish toddler tantrum on the floor of the Bangor Tesco to an end in time for a photo opportunity with Lee Reynolds on Monday. Lee duly posted the picture on Twitter with the caption: “Engage-ment meetings began this morning with Jamie Bryson of UVPS on a range of issues and ongoing matters”.
Squinter’s not altogether sure why Lee’s first engagement pic as Commissioner was with a man whose stated aim in life is to stop welcome signs in Irish going up at Grand Central Station; a man who’s shrilly announcing every five minutes his determination to confront and conquer the Irish language community, rather than meet and converse with it; a man who’s factory setting is discord and anger.
If he’d been asked last week whether Jon or Lee would be the man to stand up to the serially unelected and chronically unrepresentative Mr Bryson, Squinter wouldn’t have hesitated in pointing to Lee. But maybe all those years in the DUP are making it harder for him to break tribal ranks. And maybe all those years in riot gear behind the water cannon have made it easier for Jon to make difficult calls.
DUP: Epstein bad, Trump still sound
THE DUP thinks it’s right and proper that we be told whether Peter Mandelson ever entertained Jeffrey Epstein at Hillsborough Castle when the disgraced Labour stalwart was Secretary of State here between 1999 and 2001.
Squinter’s with them on that. After all, wherever Epstein went crime and debauchery went with him and if any children or young people were abused at Hillsborough Castle or anywhere else then it's important we know about it.
Squinter can’t help but wish the DUP would show just a little consistency when it comes to rich and powerful men who abuse women and girls. Donald Trump publicly boasted to shock jock Howard Stern about creeping the dressing rooms of beauty pageants he owned in order to ogle women and girls in various states of undress. He’s on tape admitting to grabbing women by the genitals and being able to get away with it because he’s rich and famous. He’s made sexualised comments about his own daughter that would make a rhino’s flesh creep. He’s an adjudicated rapist who’s been ordered to pay his victim nearly $100 million in damages by a civil court. He’s already appeared in the Epstein Files countless times and the vast majority of what’s in those files is still to be divulged. He thinks Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and wishes his army could have generals of the calibre of the Nazis.
THE TRUTH: Donald Trump
And what’s the DUP’s position on Donald Trump? Is it to distance themselves from a man with the morals of an alleycat and the principles of a Borgia?
Not really, no.
The response is to wave Trump flags and wear MAGA hats. The response is to have selfies taken with him. The response is to dismiss as virtue-signallers their Stormont colleagues who very properly will have nothing to do with him.
Just as we knew as sure as eggs are eggs that the truth would emerge about people like Epstein and Jimmy Savile even while they remained in public life, so we know that the full truth about Donald Trump’s excesses will one day be laid bare. And just as we see today with Epstein, some of us will feign shock and say they wished they’d known. And some of us will tell such people the truth – that they did know and they just didn’t care.
