In a mood of exasperation, resentment, and disillusionment the United Kingdom’s voters elected a new Labour government with a supermajority. The result built on a sandcastle coalition, the third worst turnout since 1918, and what increasingly looks like a tissue of lies means national politics will remain volatile. What about Ulster’s dreary steeples? Will they be as volatile?

At the macro level little has changed.

In terms of the two traditional blocs Unionism gained more votes than Irish separatism — 43.2 per cent v 40.4 per cent. In contrast to the 2023 local government elections, when nationalism had eked ahead. Notably, this pro-UK win was secured despite the persistence of working-class turnout issues. So, there is identifiable slack for Pro-UK parties and groups to work on.

In terms of Westminster seat share in 2019 separatists held nine, pro-UK had eight and others one. The numbers did not shift in 2024.

However, the plates beneath moved in three ways.

Sinn Fein’s predominance within nationalism was solidified. The SF (UK) franchise is going strong, while the SF (RoI) franchise took a gut punch. SF were and are chasing simultaneous success, but it has and still eludes them. Ulster politics does not impact on Irish voting patterns and vice versa: it’s as if they are two different countries.

Following the poor results in local and European Elections SF (RoI) has moved. It apologised for its referendum stance. It has just launched a new paper on housing to reclaim lost credibility on a top voter issue. Their new policy on migrant centres is a full surrender. Coolock and Sinn Fein both say no now.

Yet the Irish polls show a continuing drift to the return of the present government. There is a giveaway budget yet to come. Simon Harris is a ball of energy that makes the existing leaders look listless. SF’s lost momentum is much more difficult to regain. Distrust amongst its old nativist base is deep and appeals to it are not risk free. The new left vote that had helped SF (Ire) grow are appalled how the party has thrown migrants under the nearest Bus Éireann.

The shift on immigration is a salient lesson for all those NI “progressives” who allied with SF. For SF it was all a means to an end with no real commitment to any of it. They were spawned by a movement content to do anything deemed necessary, up to and including mass murder. Thus, its political  front has no qualms behaving that way with its public positioning. From open borders to higher borders in the blink of an eye when necessary. How can genuine progressives assume anything would be different in future?

Yet SF (UK) wiped out the Social Democratic and Labour Party’s 2019 vote gains. One of the SDLP’s two seats was secured through Sinn Fein’s withdrawal and endorsement. Their strength meant it had the opportunity to completely smother the SDLP but did not — why?

Because the South Belfast seat would not have gone to them, which would have meant a loss to the separatist seat total (Had SF gone for the SDLP’s jugular). They were chasing the headline of a majority of NI seats being in nationalist hands.

Also, when you have so poor an opponent, why finish them off? Is it not safer to have a known non-threatening entity to crawl on than destroy it, and then deal with one or more new challengers? SF may have noticed that the Democratic Unionist Party’s hegemony was partly built not on its own capabilities but the inabilities of its opponents.

Colum Eastwood has since resigned as SDLP leader with their other MP, Claire Hanna, guaranteed to replace him. Since John Hume retired as SDLP leader the role has flitted between its two factions: Foyle v South Down/South Belfast. Neither side has been able to arrest the party’s decline.

The centre ground’s standard bearer, Alliance, fell back too. Its vote fell amongst the Catholic middle classes outside greater Belfast but equally the Unionist tap shut off. It lost the seat it had, North Down, but gained Lagan Valley (non-Unionist voters rallied to it defeating a divided pro-UK vote). The loss of North Down is a pattern that Alliance can take a majority Unionist seat but incapable of holding one. They lack the Liberal Democrats’ organisational capacity to “dig in”.

What has turned off the Unionist voter tap to Alliance?

It has attracted a number of younger representatives who should really be in the SDLP, except they want to get elected.

Its “thinking” is standard issue 21st century faux liberalism. In Northern Ireland’s own version of the “culture wars” this worldview’s discomfort and antipathy to Britishness and its Ulster forms shines through and contrasts strongly with their attitudes to Irish identity. “We can see you” has become a real problem for Alliance: their sneering at unionists and coddling of nationalists.

During the Tiananmen Square protests, both liberal and hardline Party factions tried to persuade or coerce the students to leave. The students summed this up as “Same rice, different chopsticks”. So too it often is with SF and Alliance in NI’s culture wars.

In day-to-day politics, Alliance is a happy warrior if it is DUP/UUP/TUV bashing but a reluctant one towards separatism. Stephen Farry, the now former Alliance MP for North Down, was all these tendencies personified and this explains why voters swung behind the Independent Unionist Alex Easton as the best bet to remove him.

On some of these issues an unhappy Unionist voter may agree with Alliance but all together it just makes Alliance no longer a “safe” choice.Importantly, such voters also have a new credible liberal option, the Ulster Unionist Party.

The Doug Beattie strategy had started to pay off for the UUP. It set and kept its stall at being the liberal pro-UK alternative. Others had experimented with it but not maintained it. Beattie did. This has not seen the party grow but stabilised it. It provided it with what it lacked since it became the second party of Unionism, a raison d’etre. It gained the reward of its first MP since 2010 and makes his subsequent hissy fit and resignation as leader bizarre.

The largest tectonic shifts were amongst Unionism.

The smallest pro-UK party, Traditional Unionist Voice, saw its leader Jim Allister take North Antrim. It would be easy to characterise it as the Reform Party of Ulster, especially as it had a nominal relationship with Reform. However, it owes more to the rose-tinted truisms of Unionist history than the schisms of the wider British right.

The DUP fell from eight to five seats. Five seats has a heavy symbolism for the DUP. When it secured five MPs in the 2001 Westminster election it was a clear marker it was going to challenge for the leadership of Unionism. Does five now mark its path to losing it? Neither further decline nor renewed success is guaranteed.

Yet the numbers indicate something deeper going on in the results amongst the pro-Union electorate. The DUP lost one seat respectively to the UUP, TUV and Alliance.

The primary targets for voter ire were Ian Paisley Jnr, Paul Girvan (who associated himself strongly with Paisley Jnr) and, in absentia, Jeffrey Donaldson (who did not stand).

Ian Paisley Jnr had dodged voter disillusionment in the 2019 election, partly by his significant role in saving a major manufacturing firm in Ballymena but the good will was temporary. An individual with political capability who, if he had behaved differently, could have become the leader of the DUP. However, a poisonous mix of ego, entitlement and scheming ensured he never would, and lead to his own downfall. The voters had legitimate grounds to act. They grasped the nettle the DUP’s leadership had repeatedly avoided.

Curiously, the DUP’s three top performing DUP MPs were Gavin Robinson, Carla Lockhart, and Jim Shannon. Gavin Robinson negotiated and supported the deal to restore devolution. Carla Lockhart opposed it. Jim Shannon, less a political beast and more a local legend for constituency work (as well as a parliamentary one for his adjournment debate interventions).

There is no consistent pattern in the results across all the constituencies except it was targeted on the DUP.

So, within this bag of contradictions what was going on?

It was the Unionist voters sorting house.

Understood clearly, Unionist voters said who they wanted to keep, who they wanted to give a warning to (Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson) and who they wanted rid of. Over the last one hundred years the levels and extent of patience exerted by Unionist voters with both the UUP and DUP owed more to Zen Buddhism than its influences of Presbyterianism and Anglicanism. It was one of the rare occasions that its patience ended.

This is not a surprise as testing its patience had been a central DUP tactic.

In January 2021, while I was a Special Adviser, I had conducted a sense check of the party’s MLAs. The mood was noxious. The existence of a letter of no confidence was confirmed and a non-stop campaign existed to secure enough signatures. Those who had not signed were wavering. The response from others was they knew better about what was going on inside the party and anyway there was no alternative. Their plan was to bully through and face the opposition down. Those other voices won that internal debate. The approach failed several weeks later. The signatures were secured. The letter arrived. Arlene Foster fell.

In the recent politically fraught times, the DUP over-relied on negative election messaging to keep its remaining voter coalition together. A plan to barrel ahead and face frustrations down saw the DUP MLAs finally bridle. But so too did a notable section of past DUP voters.

For the DUP to plan a way back it needs a harsh self-assessment. An internal memo should read something like this:

---

To All DUP representatives.

The DUP is no longer where it wants or needs to be. What we do next will decide whether it is an upward or downward trajectory from here.

The temptation will be strong to place the blame of the 2024 election result on the Good Friday bombshell — the horrendous allegations and charges against former leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. One DUP scandal too many? The scandal to trump all the others? A court appearance the day before the election making it fresh in voters’ minds. It may be a convenient public narrative to allow time for the introspection needed but it cannot become the accepted internal wisdom. The DUP’s vote share in 2024 was comparable to its vote share in 2023 and 2022. The true political legacy of the Donaldson era is that its series of near misses resulted in “carry on as is” rather than the change needed.

In terms of our future, we need to go further into our past and its internal cultural legacy. Central to the story of the 21st century DUP is Peter Robinson. We need to recognise he was not just another leader in a succession of leaders, he was the DUP’s Leviathan.

He was the primary architect and leader on its post Belfast Agreement strategy and campaigns, became its leader for a decade and dominated the most sustained period of devolution as Northern Ireland’s First Minister. He negotiated a series of political agreements which walled in opponents as much as they defended unionist interests. He forged and maintained the voter coalition that enabled the DUP to lead Unionism and Northern Ireland. He was original DUP and central to its attraction of new talent to reshape the DUP. His achievements were substantial, many and far-reaching.

However, with this mastery there was a cost.

Issues were long fingered in many of his deals and sat festering in his successors’ in-trays. The maintenance and development of the party and its structures were never a priority. In his time reports for change came and went unimplemented. This consciously and unconsciously led to a centralisation of power and decision-making that hampered the effectiveness of the DUP internally and externally. It was stuck in first gear when the leader’s attentions were elsewhere. Internal communication was a blackhole. Talent was not always properly prepared, developed or supported. Robinson drove himself hard. He treated others as he treated himself. This embedded a negative internal culture. Some revelled, and still do, in this centralisation of power and its culture.

Beneath the tough exterior there was a fragility to Robinson that led to over-use of negative political messaging, even when it was not necessary. Yet, it is a harsh reality of politics that hobbled structures, and impaired cultures do not matter if you continue to win but they do matter when times become difficult.

This all made the DUP fossilize as an organisation. It had a way of doing things and a voter coalition. This was the way it was to be forever. The world is not so static. Some liberal voters tolerated the social conservatism if the show/devolution was kept on the road. Some social conservatives stayed as long as the line on abortion held. Some hardline voters liked Unionism on top. The coalition frayed thread by thread. On top of which there was a post-agreement generation who were cold on constitutional politics and the past. The bag of tricks no longer worked as well but the same act kept touring to ever more restless audiences.

What else do we need to recognise, acknowledge, and do to stop the decline?

First, the 2024 Westminster campaign failed. It was “Apocalypse Almost”. THE DUP was 1400 votes away from only three MPs. The campaign prioritised three seats. The party lost two of them and another it had not expected.

Was this being a surprise election an excuse? No, 2024 was an election year. The basics were simply not in place. It was hard to discern or identify any day-to-day communication plan. A perfectly decent manifesto was produced. It could have helped shape the campaign narrative. But the manifesto played no role beyond its launch. Its five pledges were unfocused and thin gruel. They seemed more for an internal audience than voters. They did not communicate any sense of values, purpose, or vision.

Second, we need to get over ourselves. As had the UUP, we have fallen into the trap of essentialism. Unionism is the DUP and the DUP is Unionism. One cannot survive without the other. Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom would attract around 60-65 per cent support in a referendum and its various parties attract support in the low forties. It survived the fall of the UUP, and it could survive ours.

A trait this belief in DUP indispensability encourages is self-obsession. If you see yourself as essential, this elevates internal psychodramas to a significance they just do not have. It bores and repulses voters. In communications, it led to the belief that the world can wait until we are ready to hand the tablets down from the mountain top. This produced A messaging vacuum which was filled maliciously by our opponents. 

Third, the DUP is the establishment now. The road to power was so long. Many of us come from working class or lower middle-class backgrounds. We face consistent media hostility. It is easy for our internal self-image of outsiders to persist. But voters do not see us as that. At times we look and act tired. People do not want a tired establishment. Prickliness or whining are not attractive either. Voters have a choice; we do not; we have to be what they want; that’s how it works.

Fourth, what is the our story for Northern Ireland? The return of devolution was no guarantee of a renewed rapprochement with voters. It is the opportunity for a new conversation. In that conversation we need a positive vision, lead on it, and deliver. 

“Focus on delivery” has become a comforting mantra post-election but on delivering what exactly? Five threadbare pledges? The optics of devolution have gone well but when are we getting to the substance? Is the DUP shaping the Executive agenda and the Departments it controls? Are we over-fascinating on a plethora of constituency needs and not on the big picture that would address those needs? Some inside the DUP always smart when the term “narrative” is mentioned but it is central. Without it, bogeyman messaging is the stop gap.

Fifth, our communications model is completely outdated. It is trapped in the Mandelsonian model of the early 2000s, a hyper-centralised behemoth. Its shortcomings were fully displayed in the RHI crisis. Word games and parsing that always failed and made public perceptions worse. This does not work in the social media era. Any moves to include social media have been begrudging and belated. Our approach needs to be fundamentally overhauled. To use the most profoundly Ulster of all sayings, “We need to wise up”. 

Sixth, our candidates. We have no succession planning in place, which is partially why some Westminster candidates ran again when they would have been open to retirement. Succession planning at all levels needs to be built in especially as the DUP is no longer the first call for Unionist talent and has seen it drift away.

Seventh, de-centralise power. The answer to the loss of a leviathan is not to shoehorn someone into being the new leviathan. The Deputy Leader position is empty. The party rules should be changed to have two — one from the parliamentary and assembly groups respectively. The Assembly Deputy Leader would take on a new role of Director of Campaigns to lead re-engagement with voters in between elections (and thus should not be a Minister). A proactive Party Chair is needed. Party Officers should no longer be the sole preserve of the parliamentary and assembly parties. The Director of Elections should not be held by anyone in ministerial office and preferably not in full-time elected office. This is no reflection on those who have held it but simply basic time management. It needs to be preparing now for how it can keep its twenty-five Assembly seats and make gains in North Antrim, South Belfast, North Down and West Belfast.

Eighth, as a bare minimum implement the last set of internal reform proposals. This was led by Peter Robinson and Is a decent package. It has some flaws; a few thorny internal criticisms were sidestepped, not resolved. Yet some change is better than none. What further steps should be considered? The Chief Executive model has not delivered the depth and breadth of internal change needed or promised. It should shift to a separation of roles with a general secretary to focus on party structures and fundraising and a new Party Chief of Staff focused on policy, communications, and political coordination, chosen by the Party Leader.

Ninth, buy a voter database system and equally as important use it. No Unionist party has a voter database. In 2024 this constitutes an act of criminal negligence. This system would drive accountability of elected representatives helping the early identification of under-performance and dead wood.

Tenth, the toughest for last, the DUP is a negative brand. We have all seen and heard the reaction when you say those three letters, including from Unionists. The “Ohs,” the little pauses and the slight involuntary backward movements. It is not “liked”. The crisis of 2021 demonstrated this. Rebels believed the removal of Arlene Foster would restore party fortunes. They got worse. Her brand had suffered but it was still in a better place than the party’s. When Jeffrey Donaldson took over as leader he conducted an engagement tour. His conclusion was good will towards him but no sense it extended to the party. The robust performance in East Belfast of the new leader Gavin Robinson, as the party brand struggled elsewhere, is further evidence. The brand needs to be redefined up to and including a new name.

In terms of the broader pro-UK cause in NI, the DUP needs to do two things above all else: support new initiatives to maintain and develop Pro-UK referendum coalition; and work with the other Unionist parties on exploring the future options for Unionism particularly come the next Westminster election.

Too often all of Unionism lets the everyday distract from the strategic. Lastminute.com should not be viewed as an aspiration nor a challenge to be beaten.

The fundamental reality is that Unionism plc is not coming close to meeting its full electoral potential. It needs time to reflect, plan and work to tackle that. In the meantime, other mechanisms to reach pro-UK referendum voters need to be supported.

In terms of party-political futures; their viability; their achievability; and their strengths and weaknesses; need examination. A “Taskforce” report for the 2020s and beyond should be commissioned by the three main unionist parties (two if one does not want to participate) with a deadline of one year to produce recommendations. This will allow ample time to consider and act on what it recommends.

This is not a counsel of despair.

This may all seem like a lot, but it is all doable and achievable with will and focus.

The DUP has five core strengths to build on. It is still the largest Unionist party by far. It has incumbency. It has time, nearly three years until the next scheduled election. It has talent. The average Unionist voter likes its new leader, Gavin Robinson.

It is time to fully address the weaknesses and build on our strengths.”

---

No new leader, elected representative or staff member would enjoy reading this, but it is a “whole truth and nothing but the truth” situation.

The opportunity for new momentum is that DUP Leader Gavin Robinson has the political capital and space to act. He was likeliest to be the next DUP leader. Circumstances moved up the timetable. This is to his advantage. There is no challenger preening themselves. The Foster plotters were already weak and even more so after the election result. 

He is the only show in town and can use that power. This would be a demonstration of his leadership working while reducing its long-term burdens.

Recent history offers a warning. Arlene Foster ending up being DUP leader earlier than expected. Her reliance on what had gone before and the undelivered promises of some to deliver change contributed to her downfall. Gavin Robinson should not rely on what came before or their promises.

After the 2019 election, the party undertook an in-depth analysis of the University of Liverpool’s Northern Ireland survey of election voters. The PowerPoint closed with the warning that “What got us here is not going to keep us here.” It is truer in 2024 than it was then. 

Inaction is decline. Action is growth. It is time to act.