History will not remember Arlene Foster fondly

Having campaigned for Brexit – which Northern Ireland rejected in the 2016 referendum – the DUP has plunged the union into its greatest jeopardy since the height of the Troubles. Ms Foster needs to take her shame for that monumental miscalculation, writes Sean O’Grady

Arlene Foster has resigned as leader of the DUP (Getty)

Rather ungallantly, one of Arlene Foster’s colleagues in the Democratic Unionist Party has described her as a “dead woman walking”. They were right, however. She has jumped before she was pushed. Some 22 of the 27 DUP members of the Northern Ireland Assembly had signed a letter calling for the election of a new leader, along with “at least” four of the party’s eight MPs at Westminster, plus a couple of DUP peers. Given those figures, the game was up for Ms Foster, who now ends her turbulent spell as party leader and first minister of the province.

The reason so many in her party want rid of her can be summed up in one word: Brexit. The operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, negotiated as part of the UK-EU withdrawal agreement, has meant that many in Northern Ireland feel like strangers in their own country. They feel, not for the first time, betrayed – not least by Boris Johnson, who promised no economic controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to the 2018 DUP party conference, no less), and was filmed telling anyone who’d listen to send any pesky paperwork to No 10. It appears that his assurances were incorrect, even though the UK has since unilaterally, and illegally, suspended the protocol.

In the eyes of many unionists, in the DUP and beyond, Ms Foster simply did not do enough to stop the imposition of the new economic border in the Irish Sea, though she and her party always voted against it. Now they seem more or less lumbered with it, though there is provision for periodic consent to the protocol to be agreed (by a simple majority) by the Northern Ireland assembly in Stormont – an unusual provision in an international treaty. That, though, does not kick in until 2024, and in any case there is no guarantee of an anti-protocol majority in the new assembly.

Ms Foster’s critics believe that the protocol could (and should) be ditched without the need to impose a new border on the island of Ireland, thus preserving peace and the Good Friday Agreement. Others (and logic) suggest that a border between the UK and the EU has to be put somewhere.

Ms Foster has also come under attack for an expensive and botched “green” scheme for farmers, which led to Sinn Fein boycotting the executive and power-sharing being suspended between 2017 and 2020. She is also regarded as being too accommodating over abortion, gay rights, and the use of the Irish language. Recently unrest and violence have erupted on the streets. What might be termed “the Protestant street” is deeply unhappy.

All of that has meant a slump in support for the DUP, whose poll ratings are now down to dangerous levels. It is losing support among moderates to the centrist Alliance Party, and from more staunch working-class unionists to Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), a group that has come from nowhere. From first place and 28 per cent of the poll at the last assembly elections in 2017, the latest opinion polls place the DUP on 19 per cent, jostling for second place with the Alliance Party. Sinn Fein has also lost ground, but its support is only down to 24 per cent, meaning that it might be able to nominate the first minister in a new executive – though in effect they would not be senior to the deputy first minister in the power-sharing arrangement. More worrying, the DUP could even cede the deputy role to the Alliance Party, meaning the unionists would not be in a position of leadership in the province for the first time since its establishment a century ago.

Hence the need for fresh leadership and a more militant tone. Leading candidates to succeed Ms Foster include Edwin Poots, Geoffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson, but whoever it is will have to appeal to those in particular who have defected to TUV, led by Jim Allister, a QC and ex-DUP MEP with a talent for connecting with the “left behind” elements of Ulster society. Equipped with an uncompromisingly conservative creed extending to creationism, Mr Allister stands ready to do what so many unionist politicos have done in the past and outflank any mainstream unionist party, or any “Lundy” of a leader – that is, one suspected of betrayal and treachery, usually through compromising with nationalists and engaging in power-sharing. It was how Ian Paisley supplanted the old Ulster Unionist Party led by Brian Faulkner a half-century ago, and many others besides.

The great irony, of course, is that under the EU and the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland’s place in the UK was relatively secure. Despite a dilution of Britishness in cultural areas – such as language, flags and banners, acceptance of Irish identity, and reform and rebranding of the RUC – Northern Ireland was politically and economically as British as Kent or Cornwall, and Sinn Fein were (though they’d not admit it) ministers of the crown in a partitionist parliament they had once boycotted. Having campaigned for Brexit – which Northern Ireland actually rejected in the 2016 referendum – the DUP has as a direct result plunged the union into its greatest jeopardy since the height of the Troubles. Ms Foster also needs to take her shame for that monumental miscalculation.