Sometimes the Ulster Unionist party seems to have the political equivalent of Aids. The defence mechanisms of an otherwise healthy body appear to be breaking down, attacking healthy tissue, and leaving the whole organism prey to every infection it encounters.
In the past fortnight particularly, and the past year overall, almost everything that could go wrong for the UUP has gone wrong. Every setback has been magnified by infighting, almost every imaginable clanger has been dropped, and the party has changed course with the frequency of a drunk navigating a merry-go-round as it staggers from one crisis to the next.
Yet the UUP has a range of assets many other parties would envy. With the arguable exception of Sinn Fein, it is the oldest political party in the island, with a formal history going back to 1905 and a direct line of descent leading through the Irish Unionist party to the 1880s.
It has a formidable branch structure, considerable if depleted financial resources, and is a broad church. So broad, in fact, that it appears unable to maintain a consistent line of policy on anything, fights with its shadow at every opportunity, and leaves itself open to caricature. Sam McBride, the political editor of the Belfast News Letter, wrote recently that the party seemed at times like “a collection of individuals united only by their hatred of the DUP”.
The UUP just about ran Northern Ireland for most of the state’s history, with a grip on the levers of power surpassing even Fianna Fail’s in the south, and during most of that time the News Letter was a firm supporter. Now, Ian Paisley is a columnist, as is Sammy Wilson, the DUP finance minister, and it is not the only UUP asset to have been lost in recent years. Most of the DUP backroom team — and key members of its assembly and Westminster team — are former UUP members.
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The Alliance party has also gained from its meltdown. The UUP’s last MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, resigned from the party in protest at its electoral link-up with the Tories, which bore the unfortunate acronym UCUNF and is now officially acknowledged as a mistake. Hermon held her seat comfortably as an independent, while her former party, and their Tory allies, lost in every other constituency.
It was similar to the recent meltdown of Fianna Fail, a formerly impregnable political machine reduced to a rump with almost every other party feeding on its remains.
There are still some pickings left, but this was an unpromising moment for Tom Elliott, a pleasant Fermanagh farmer who is friendly with Enda Kenny and has a similar manner to the taoiseach, to take over as the UUP’s 14th leader. He was chosen as the solid option in preference to Basil McCrea, who stood on a platform of radical change and was considered too flashy and divisive.
So far, Elliott has been unable to stop the rot. A defining moment came when he addressed his first party conference as leader last September. It was a good speech overall, aimed at healing divisions of the past and wounds left by the elections. Unfortunately, the only soundbite people remember is the party leader saying: “Let no one try to say that Tom Elliott is some sort of political dinosaur, for I am not.”
No politician should ever draw attention to negative stereotypes about himself. That is a job best left to opponents. You would never have caught Bill Clinton saying he wasn’t a philanderer any more than George W Bush would have announced that he wasn’t stupid.
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Elliott’s words inspired a spate of jokes about his “long scaly tail” and the danger posed to his party by meteorites. They have been a gift to cartoonists and bar-room jokers ever since. And from the moment he uttered the words, the pall of threatened extinction hanging over the party only intensified.
To be fair, Elliott hasn’t been the only UUP bigwig making mistakes. Michael McGimpsey, his colleague, spent most of his time as health minister fighting cutbacks and blaming them on the DUP and Sinn Fein. He turned up at trade union rallies and helped to shake off the damaging legacy of UCUNF. McGimpsey even broke the ministerial code to vote against the budget because, he said, it did not defend the old and the sick. In some of the newspapers, and in the minds of many voters, he was winning his funding debate with Wilson, the DUP finance minister, hands down. Then he finished his term of office, with an election coming on May 5, by pulling the plug on a radiotherapy unit in Derry.
The cross-border project was partially funded by the Irish government, who had agreed to meet half the running costs. The idea was to open up the facility to cancer sufferers in counties such as Donegal and Sligo, who were travelling to Dublin at great expense for therapy. Although he had the capital budget to build the Derry facility, McGimpsey complained that the revenue side was not guaranteed so there was no point in proceeding. The idea may have been to put the blame on Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, who of course is from Derry, and Peter Robinson of the DUP. If so, it has backfired.
In a show of cross-community solidarity, Robinson and McGuinness announced that, after the election, they would use the combined might of their parties to ensure the radiotherapy unit was built. McGimpsey had a point about the funding, but it was poor political tactics to use his last day in office to annoy cancer patients in a huge swathe of Northern Ireland west of the Bann. The UUP’s deputy chairman resigned in protest, the latest in a long line of stalwarts to walk.
This could be a good moment for the UUP, if it could only pull itself together in time to take advantage. The all-party government at Stormont is big and cumbersome, and both Sinn Fein and the DUP did so well in the previous assembly elections that there should be some opportunity for the UUP and SDLP to recover lost ground. Instead, the UUP has been shooting itself in the feet like a millipede with a tommy gun.
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In the assembly, the posts of first and deputy first minister are of exactly equivalent authority; they must agree on every big decision. However the largest party gets to nominate the first minister so, if unionists don’t vote in sufficient numbers for the DUP, then Sinn Fein could get the job. Since the DUP can grow only at the UUP’s expense, this is something, like dinosaurs, that should never be mentioned by the smaller party. Yet so far they haven’t been able to keep away from it.
Elliott, who stood on a platform of keeping independent from the DUP, has talked of linking up with “other unionists” after the election, a proposal dismissed contemptuously by the DUP and subsequently withdrawn. Leading members squabbled about it live on radio, but have now apologised and made up.
This week, the UUP hopes to move on from this inauspicious start to its election campaign. The law of averages suggests it should be able to do so, but Elliott’s party seems so strangely drawn to banana skins that further upsets can’t be ruled out.