Orange front may save Robinson’s face and wipe McGuinness’s eye

IT’S 125 years old this year and if some reports are to be believed, the Orange Card is still the one the British Tories feel should be played. It was Sir Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who coined the phrase in the aftermath of the 1885 election and it continues to have a chilly resonance for nationalists.

That year, the Irish Parliamentary Party’s (IPP) representation leapt from 63 to 85 of the 103 Irish seats on an extraordinarily high turnout. With the Liberals unable to form a majority, Charles Stewart Parnell became kingmaker. His instinct had been to keep the Tories in power, but when news filtered out of Gladstone’s conversion to the cause of Home Rule he duly transferred the IPP’s support. Queen Victoria reluctantly accepted the “half-crazy” grand old man as her prime minister for a third time.

The impact in Ulster was immediate: Liberals and Conservatives came together, Churchill making rousing speeches about the danger of Ireland becoming “the focus and the centre of foreign intrigue and deadly conspiracy”. In the face of this threat, loyalists must organise: “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,” he famously declared.

This heralded a robust Tory-Unionist alliance that lasted all the way into the 1970s. In effect, the Conservatives turned a blind eye to Stormont’s slummier practices; the unionists guaranteed them, in return, a 10 to 12-seat advantage come general election day.

Long after the link was well and truly ruptured by the Anglo-Irish Agreement which Margaret Thatcher signed with Garret FitzGerald, the Tories continued to be accused of cynicism in relation to the North. When John Major’s government’s majority was whittled away in the mid-1990s, any hesitation in relation to Sinn Féin’s admittance to talks was pounced upon as evidence that the UUP held him to ransom. It is, however, a charge Albert Reynolds – who should know about these things as he was Taoiseach at the time – categorically denied in his autobiography last year.

But with British opinion polls pointing to a possible hung parliament, David Cameron’s Irish imbroglios have become a source of considerable legitimate speculation. As the cannier Tories know, even the more distasteful unionist elements carry far shorter shopping lists in their back pockets than the Liberal Democrats with their demands for proportional representation.

So it’s not surprising revelations about a secret meeting between the Conservatives, the DUP and the UUP in Hatfield House, the stately pile of the grandest friend of the union of them all, the Marquess of Salisbury, have provoked an indignant reaction.

Alasdair McDonnell – a patently decent politician who is vying to replace Mark Durkan as SDLP leader this weekend and would likely lose his South Belfast seat if there were a single unionist candidate standing against him – was first out of the trap, accusing the Tories of “naked sectarianism” and of trying to arrange a pan-unionist electoral pact. Gordon Brown’s spindoctors were not slow claim the Tories were “endangering the peace” either.

The Conservatives, for their part, played dumb: we were just trying to iron out differences between the UUP and DUP on the devolution of policing, they claimed. These protestations didn’t entirely convince: the Marquess of Salisbury’s agenda – although not anti-Good Friday, contrary to reports – is not so mundane.

It didn’t help that the DUP started talking up unionist unity. Peter Robinson suddenly appeared chipper again after his recent domestic woes. With the talks seemingly in crisis and the DUP potentially staring into a difficult Assembly election as votes leak to the even more hardline TUV, the glimmer of a Plan B, an escape hatch for him, began to emerge.

After recent electoral reverses and revelations about the private lives and finances of DUP politicians, the very real prospect of a Sinn Féin First Minister emerged because the unionist vote is currently split three ways. If that had happened, the DUP would have attracted the blame for handing a massive propaganda advantage to republicanism, even if technically the First and Deputy First Ministers are co-equal.

Shortsightedly, they negotiated a change to the Good Friday deal giving the largest party the automatic right to nominate the First Minister. Previously, the First and Deputy First Ministers were elected as a joint ticket on a cross-community basis, for practical purposes ensuring a unionist First Minister and a nationalist Deputy First Minister, regardless of whether the largest party in the Assembly was unionist or nationalist.

So what were the Tories playing at? Was Hatfield House a deliberate attempt to stymie a deal on policing? That seems unlikely: the Tories have said again and again that they support Gordon Brown’s position on policing devolution. If they had some nefarious agenda, Hatfield was an unlikely place to hatch a plot: word was bound to leak.

Still, the optics were not good. Surely talks between the Tories and their UUP allies and the DUP could only be about giving the DUP a free run in some seats? Cameron’s promise to fight all 18 seats in the North seemed hollow. Three Conservative candidates, two of them very able Catholics, were immediately spooked, and resigned (The DUP brand is toxic in Catholic unionist circles, as it is among many English Conservatives).

Is it possible, however, that a more subtle arrangement was under discussion? In return for a pact in the next Assembly election to thwart a Sinn Féin First Minister, might the DUP be prepared unilaterally to withdraw from South Belfast and Fermanagh and South Tyrone, the other Westminster seat where a single unionist candidate could unseat the incumbent, Sinn Féin’s Michelle Gildernew?

THIS is tricky territory for the Tories. On the one hand, they claim to be non-sectarian; on the other, they are treating with not just the UUP but the DUP, a party with a fairly blatantly bigoted recent past. Still, if the DUP could have been persuaded to stand aside to give a Catholic (albeit a unionist one) a clear run, wouldn’t that have represented a maturing of that party’s position? And where is it written in Holy Scripture anyway that, despite their narrowing differences, 57 varieties of unionist must run in every seat?

We have become used to studied indifference to the North’s constitutional position in London, notwithstanding Tony Blair’s early declaration that he “valued” the union. But, should the Conservatives prove victorious in May, there will be a change of tone. Unlike most leading figures in New Labour who became politically aware during the civil rights period, today’s top Tories are younger. Their earliest recollections are of pointless tit-for-tat terrorism. They never did believe in “a united Ireland by consent”.

That isn’t necessarily problematic. The Taoiseach’s impartiality and that of his officials is not questioned, notwithstanding Fianna Fáil’s declared republicanism or the constitution’s expressed desire for Irish unity. The Government’s silence is telling, therefore. It is not just unionists who have reservations about the destabilising message a Sinn Féin First Minister would send to the world. Dáil politicians of practically every hue have done their bit by legitimate political means to curb that particular brand of nationalism. Aren’t the Tories, if a little artlessly, entitled to do the same?