THE internet memes, the jokes and the puns have been flying around since the shambolic events of Monday evening when DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson finally took the step he’s been dithering over for far too long.

When the big moment actually came, it came in six hours of toe-curling buffoonery and farce. Given the havoc that’s been wreaked by Mr Donaldson’s decision to stand down the political institutions at a time of unprecedented economic distress, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him or his party as the full facts of the comical DUP Executive meeting are rolled out with an imaginary Benny Hill theme playing in the background.

But there is a real danger here for those who are – quite rightly, as it happens – welcoming this week’s events as another landmark on the tortuous journey towards the union’s end. For it is in no-one’s interest that the sense of self of any party or of any community comes apart in such an epically public fashion.

It is has long been a tenet of political and military conflict that a wise protagonist will always leave an enemy with their dignity. But in this battle for the future of the island, it is unionism which has chosen to subject itself to the humiliation of inevitable defeat after inevitable defeat while nationalists and republicans stood aside and let them get on with it. Before a vote was cast in the 2016 EU referendum, the DUP was told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that leaving the EU would open up not a golden gateway to the sunlit uplands touted by lying Tories, but a trail of tears towards the union’s end whose milestones would be a series of painful blows to the unionist psyche.

And not only has that proven to be the case in spades, to add insult to injury the blasted field left after the Brexit has been occupied by a tiny cabal of bucketmouths and professional refuseniks whose vulgar outbursts are like catnip to a local media ever desperate for clicks and likes. But it is also the case that these people – who are now furiously plotting their next move in reaction to the imminent return of Stormont – have been empowered by no less a personage than Jeffrey Donaldson himself.

When we say that Mr Donaldson showed a stunning lack of foresight when he agreed to climb up on the back of lorries with these people, we are not saying it with the 20-20 benefit of hindsight. The DUP leader was warned time and time again that there was a massive political price to be paid in throwing in his lot with people who would remain disaffected whatever the outcome of those damp-squib Protocol protests.

They are now what stands between all of us and a return of the devolved institutions and the hoped-for boost that London’s promised £3.3 billion will bring to struggling families and communities. They will continue to attract media attention like a magnet, and when they do, Mr Donaldson must acknowledge when he complains bitterly about the “naysayers” that he helped put them where they are.