“I MUST also acknowledge that some did not agree with the direction and path I set for the party and the vision I promoted. I hope they can see that in the long term only an inclusive Ulster Unionist Party, promoting a positive message, can secure our future. I hope the new leader is given the freedom to act.”
So ends the resignation statement of Doug Beattie, the outgoing leader of a party which has gone through leaders more quickly in recent years than most parties go through light bulbs. It was a telling paragraph, but also terribly depressing, illustrating as it does the party officers’ antipathy towards an “inclusive” and “positive” politics that Mr Beattie can only see in the future.
It’s doubly dispiriting, because it’s not even as if Doug Beattie was the pioneering progressive that much of the media coverage of his shock resignation has painted him as. He started off his tenure battling for his political life after a collection of social media posts were revealed of a nature that would make a drunk Reform UK candidate blush. And he bookended his time in office by siding with the DUP and the TUV in the controversy over PSNI officers celebrating Armagh’s famous All-Ireland football victory.
In between he made noises that suggested he knew what direction he needed to take the party if the gathering momentum towards an agreed new Ireland was to be halted, or at least slowed; but he never followed through and now that he’s gone posterity will not remember him as a harbinger of change.
The line is that Mr Beattie threw the head up after losing a battle of influence with senior party members over the naming of a replacement for Robin Swann, who’s giving up his North Antrim MLA seat after taking the South Antrim seat from the DUP in the recent Westminster election. Was it the party officers’ decision to overrule him and select an older, more traditionally unionist figure than the one favoured by Mr Beattie that led him to step down? That’s unlikely – an essentially local, isolated incident can surely not have led to his decision to pack it it. It’s much more likely the lack of inclusivity and positivity among senior members of the party that Mr Beattie complained of in his resignation letter had been an albatross around his neck and the row over the North Antrim MLA seat was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
And while the UUP attempts to deal with one crisis brought about by the continuing dominance of dinosaur politics in unionism, another crisis suddenly appears – nobody wants the job. The heir apparent, capable Lagan Valley MLA Robbie Butler, immediately ruled himself out of the running, and such is the dearth of young or youngish talent that speculation immediately shifted to another failed leader – Mike Nesbitt – and then even on to a return of Mr Beattie himself before the ink on his farewell note is dry.
The word mess doesn’t begin to do it justice. But the mess will remain uncleared as long as the UUP is commanded by the old guard.
