Tom Peck – The Independent
Boris Johnson is still occasionally whispered of as a rockstar politician, so we hope the former foreign secretary understands there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in being 54 years old, well past your best, and having to come all the way to the junior ballroom of a business hotel on the outskirts of Belfast just to find a crowd that still wants to hear the only tune you’ve got.
In the Boris Johnson Story as imagined by Boris Johnson, this is not where Boris Johnson was meant to be by now, which is to say being the hype man for the annual conference of a once obscure and soon-to-be-obscure again Northern Irish political party, firing off material about bendy buses that is so far beyond its best before date as to pose a significantly greater risk to public health than anything ever threatened by the buses themselves.
Still, at least Boris Johnson and the Democratic Unionist Party have finally found each other, and together must be wondering how such a blistering run of combined victories appear to have brought them to the brink og humiliating defeat.
At this event last year, in the wake of Theresa May’s disastrous general election, the DUP’s deputy leader Nigel Dodds modestly concluded that it was probably god himself that had decided to intervene and give Nigel Dodds and the DUP so much power over British politics.
Fast forward 12 months and you’ve even got Boris Johnson on hand to lend to this year’s event a kind of Winners Anonymous feel, like a support group for people who’ve got precisely what they wanted and can’t quite work out how it’s ruined their lives.
Yes, it’s a real headscratcher, this one. Ask absolutely anyone at DUP conference what they cherish above all else, and contrary to popular belief, it won’t actually be their Werther’s Originals, it’ll be the union with Great Britain. It is “the guiding star through the darkness”, the never ecclesiastically under-clubbed Dodds said on Saturday. “We don’t gamble,” he added. “Not with the union.”
But history kind of intimates otherwise. They backed Brexit, for a start, that thing that absolutely everybody said would risk breaking the union, and they won that one. And then, as a little bonus, they got an election that allowed them to dictate terms over the actual government.
So how on earth has it come to be that, as of now, Brexit, the very thing they wanted, and through the medium of a prime minister over whom they claim to hold sway, is looking rather like it might, whisper it guys, actually, erm, kind of break up the union?
God, in his unknowable ways, has really buggered this up, hasn’t he Nigel? Still, as the search for someone to blame for all this hurtles towards its most desperate phase they really should be thanking the Almighty for putting himself in the firing line at this opportune time.
“It’s hard to imagine how the results could have done more to maximise our influence,” were Dodds’s precise words last year. And yet here we are, long past the point at which the negotiations were meant to have been finished, with a deal on the table that the DUP won’t tolerate, and with precious few ideas what to do about it, other than to use their fully maximised influence to smash everything to pieces because they can’t get their own way.
It’s proper mad stuff, this Northern Irish politics, even if they’re doing their best to emulate it over on the mainland.
That the DUP can be pro-Brexit, put their beloved union in peril, then clean up the electoral advantages that come from claiming to be the only ones who care about it is the sort of national gaslighting that would make Donald Trump jealous. Then there’s the fact that they can squeeze a billion quid out of Theresa May, and when a plan comes together, namely the backstop, that almost all Northern Irish businesses agree would be an absolutely wonderful “best of both worlds scenario”, they’ll gladly give the money back to make sure it doesn’t happen.
There are such things as “liberal unionists”, who aren’t heard so much from anymore, who’ll admit to not having a clue who to vote for. Welcome to 2018. Fun isn’t it.
More to the point, if it’s ideas the DUP were after, I’m afraid to say they flew in the wrong act. Having to listen to the Brexiteers constantly fight the same absurd battles was the price Remainers imagined they’d have to pay for winning the referendum not losing it.
Watching Boris Johnson continuing to fight the referendum campaign two years after winning it is one of Brexit’s most troubling realities.
Every ingredient was there, it’s just that the EU has become the backstop. There were lies about EU regulations that restrict British businesses, this time pertaining to hovercrafts. There was Brussels “having the UK exactly where it wants it.” There was the “freedom to do our own trade deals,” all that stuff that should have come to pass so easily by now, and the mere fact that absolutely none of it has should not in any way lead you to believe that none of it was ever true.
And of course, there was the promise, again to build a bridge to Scotland, over Beaufort’s Dyke, an unexploded Second World War munitions dump at the bottom of the sea, and for precious little economic benefit to either side. “The problem isn’t Beaufort’s Dyke,” he said, “The problem is a lack of political will”.
It was the perfect distillation of eau de Boris, a fragrance of which everybody recognises the smell. Who knows, maybe he’ll build the thing one day, and when the central supports are suddenly blown away in the middle of rush hour by some giant German bomb everybody told him was there, that too will be the EU’s fault.
But the real purpose of his attendance was clear enough. He knows very well that all that either he or the DUP have come up with by way of a solution, which is to “bin the backstop”, is something the European Union could hardly have been clearer they will not countenance. The answer, both he and the DUP think, is to “carry on negotiating”, to “use the time we have left” to come out with a different solution, one that, in a few short months, can resolve the irresolvable questions that no one has managed to resolve in the last 18.
The only solutions at the DUP’s disposal are a series of very drastic levers, and he has to make sure they pull the right one. In the last few days, Arlene Foster has publicly flirted with ending the “confidence and supply” arrangement with the government, an agreement her senior colleagues already speak of in the past tense. This may very well not be in the national interest, not even in the DUP’s interest, but most of all, it wouldn’t be in Boris Johnson’s interest, and that definitely will not do. So, after savaging everything Theresa May, and his own government, has achieved in the last 18 months, it was, all of a sudden, “absolutely vital that we keep this partnership going”.
Don’t bring down the government, in other words, just bring down the Brexit deal. Let’s keep this machine ticking over, and I can slot right into the driving seat. Then we can do wondrous things together, in this precious United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that together, me through my utter lack of all shame, and you through your mad flag waving nationalistic self harm, will have brought fully to its knees.
