First Minister on his last legs,so stand by for the political fireworks

ARE those Northerners sick, you might well ask? Their vital political institutions might be on the brink of collapse and what are they doing? Laughing their heads off, that’s what.

It’s entirely characteristic. Through 30 years of pointless, murderous violence, the people of the North remained grimly cheerful and that gallows humour has been much in evidence this past week.

In fairness, though, you would need to be a particularly humourless person not to listen to the spoof version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson’ without allowing yourself at least a smile. Sung in the style of gospel artist-cum-DUP politician Willie McCrea and complete with lyrics about Exodus Chapter 20 and Iris Robinson “munching sausages behind Lock Keeper’s cottages”, it has become an instant YouTube hit.

Does all this levity mean people want Stormont to fall? Far from it. Only the ultras on the loyalist and republican fringes seek a return to direct rule. Nor is mental illness funny per se, but those ‘sinners’ who have been at the receiving end of the fundamentalists’ strictures – and who hasn’t? – can be excused a moment’s schadenfreude. If the boot were on the other foot, would the DUP be quite so understanding of human frailty, many ask?

The party would like us to believe that for one of its members to have an affair with a man 40 years her junior, she must be “mad”. Darragh McIntyre, the BBC investigative journalist who uncovered the murky goings-on emphatically rejects that notion: any psychological strain she is under is the result of his team’s legitimate investigations, not the cause of her wayward behaviour, he matter-of-factly told the BBC’s Today programme on Friday morning. There is clearly no love lost there.

Two weeks ago, I compared the Tiger Woods’ silence in the face of allegations about his own marital infidelity with Gerry Adams’ apparent candour about paedophilia in his own family. I argued that it is almost always a strategic mistake to allow others, many of whom do not have your best interests at heart, to shape a story. To that extent, Gerry Adams is a cuter media operator than Tiger Woods.

But baring your soul as a preemptive strike only works if you are seen to be full and frank. Otherwise, you just come across as cynical. That is the trap Adams fell into and, many feel, Peter Robinson has made the same error. He tried to divert attention away from allegations about his wife’s financial impropriety and allegations about breaches of the ministerial code on his part into a tragic tale of psychological and marital breakdown.

The man and woman in the street, who showed themselves capable of more humanity than we have come to expect from the DUP, felt they had been taken for a ride. The suspicion grew that those were crocodile tears welling in Peter Robinson’s eyes during that unprecedentedly personal on-camera interview.

Perhaps he is telling the truth and he really was in the dark about some of the sexual and financial shenanigans until the BBC put out its programme. The growing suspicion, however, is that Wednesday night’s simpering was a cynical ploy. Poor Peter, we were expected to feel: his wife has been putting it about and then when he found out she tried to kill herself.

But that was all nearly a year ago. If she was mentally ill and unable to continue with her public duties, no one in the DUP was saying so then. And why was he not more affected at the time, if things at home were so bad? The footage of Peter Robinson at Stormont cracking jokes the same day as his wife of 40 years tried to kill herself isn’t an easy watch.

He does have an arguable case to make. Once he discovered that his MP wife had procured gifts and loans of money from property developer friends to help set up her toyboy lover in business, he insisted the £50,000 be paid back.

But why did he try to ensure repayment if he hadn’t felt the transactions were improper? And if he did feel they were improper, why did he, as a minister, not draw them to the attention of the Westminster and Stormont authorities?

Many will say shopping your own wife is too much to ask of any man. But once the facts were in the public domain he, as leader of the DUP, either insisted upon – or acquiesced in – Iris’s removal from all her public offices without any pretence of due process.

Some will be surprised he is still nominally leader of the DUP. After all, last Friday he was claiming it was “business as usual” in her Strangford constituency. Within 48 hours she had been cast adrift. One minute he was staying as First Minister, the next he was taking a break and handing over the reins to Arlene Foster.

Clearly, Robinson is not in control of events. The public silence over the weekend from senior DUP figures suggested the political sands were shifting beneath him. Off-the-record briefings suggested he was toast. But by Monday afternoon, party colleagues were expressing their unanimous confidence.

What happened? Three things. First, although there were new allegations about Iris and her touchy-feely friendships, including an affair with her teenage amour’s own father, the weekend papers had nothing new to pin on Peter. Many newspapers are nudging and winking about housing development in the Robinsons’ political fiefdom but no specific allegations have been made – yet.

Second, once Robinson’s nemesis, Lord Trimble, came out saying it was all over for him, that had the ironic effect of bolstering Robinson’s position. But then with four months to go before a British general election none of Robinson’s opponents within unionism really wants him to go just now.

BUT the third, and by far the most important, factor was the attitude of Sinn Féin. If Robinson had resigned as First Minister, Sinn Féin would either have had to insist on a commitment to the devolution of policing and justice powers from another putative DUP First Minister – which would not have been forthcoming – or force an Assembly election.

An election would have been a useful distraction for Sinn Féin because of its own leader’s woes. There is every chance it would emerge from such an election as the largest party and, therefore, entitled under the terms of the St Andrew’s Agreement, the mild reworking of the Good Friday Agreement, to nominate Martin McGuinness as First Minister.

The difference between First Minister and Deputy First Minster might only be symbolic but unionism would have found it difficult, nigh impossible, to wear. But it would have been a crisis entirely of the DUP’s making. They insisted on the change from the original Good Friday deal which the people of Ireland endorsed. Instead of a joint cross-community election which would always result in a unionist First Minister and a nationalist deputy, the DUP refused to contemplate voting a nationalist into any post.

As it is, Peter Robinson has bought himself some time but his capacity to cajole his colleagues into a deal on policing is effectively nil. He is a lame duck. How he must rue the day he first contemplated creating a political dynasty. The political crisis has not been resolved, only deferred.