As it happens, I think Tom Elliott handled the latest internal wrangling within the UUP fairly well. It is reasonable to assign a senior colleague to discuss issues in confidence with another party; reasonable to allow him to speak to the press as agreed; and reasonable to discipline him when he clearly goes overboard.
However, it is just the latest in an inevitably ongoing series of spats. Ongoing, because the UUP has failed to grasp that being a “broad church” is a negative, not a positive; and because as the UUP continues to “research” why it exists, the DUP continues to eat into any reason for it to do so.
This week, the next DUP move became apparent at the weekend. We are now in a situation where the DUP membership elected a Leader who attends GAA matches, whereas the UUP membership elected one who specified he won’t. Any UUP member spurned in any way now has the straightforward option of joining the DUP; any UUP voters increasingly turned off by ongoing internal wrangling which has no relevance to the lives of the daily public in this brutal economic climate can simply switch to the DUP (or a resurgent Alliance Party). People are now openly questioning which the “more liberal” Unionist party is.
The nature of “Unionist Unity” became clear too. The UUP has consistently set out its stall that it is not the DUP and that it puts country before party. Yet now it turns out that its Minister is effectively part of a joint Unionist team on the Executive with five DUP colleagues, and that, in that guise, he was behind the ludicrous plot to split a Department between his supposed arch rivals the DUP and Sinn Fein – a move all about putting party before country.
Tom Elliott reluctantly answered questions about David McNarry’s role, and did so reasonably well (although he still has to explain quite why his party was so keen to hand more power to Sinn Fein). However, he has not yet answered a somewhat more straightforward question: why does his party exist?
