The embattled members of the Democratic Unionist party gathered at a hotel on the outskirts of Belfast this weekend for their annual conference, the last before next year’s Northern Ireland Assembly and council elections.
The ghost at the feast was sitting in a cell at the high security Maghaberry prison just over 20 miles away. Jeffrey Donaldson, former DUP leader and paedophile, continues to cast a shadow over the party he once led after he was found guilty in June of this year of a myriad of sexual offences against two women when they were young girls.
For a party which still trades off its roots in the morally upright and uptight strictures of evangelical Protestantism, to have been led by a convicted child abuser presents an existential challenge. Following his trial, further disclosures were made, including by colleagues in the DUP, which painted a picture of Donaldson’s sordid shadow existence, composed of trips to gay saunas, extra marital affairs and copious drinking on foreign trips.
The DUP has commissioned an investigation by the child protection expert Jim Gamble into Donaldson’s time with the party, with the Ulster Unionists, Donaldson’s party prior to jumping ship to the DUP in 2003, also initiating their own review.
Donaldson’s sentencing is expected in October, and it has been made clear he intends to appeal. His wife, Eleanor, was deemed medically unfit for a normal trial but was nevertheless found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a jury of aiding Donaldson’s offending in a ‘trial of the facts’. She has already lodged papers with the Court of Appeal.
There is clearly mileage yet in the Donaldson affair. This is not encouraging for Gavin Robinson, the party’s current leader, as he prepares his troops for an election. Indeed, this morning’s Belfast Telegraph carries a story about a DUP representative fathering a love child with another married DUP employee, to add to the fug of sleaze hovering around the party.
The moral stain left by Donaldson is accompanied by the constitutional disaster that is the Windsor Framework, a deal signed off by Donaldson mere weeks before he was first arrested. There is a convinced rump within unionism which subscribes to the theory that the British state, reprising the role of Perfidious Albion, used its knowledge of Donaldson’s proclivities to bounce him into accepting the trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
Polling is unsurprisingly not looking good for the party given this confluence of circumstances. The most recent Northern Irish polling has it a point behind the resurgent Ulster Unionists, and only a few points ahead of Traditional Unionist Voice who can easily outflank them on the constitutional front.
Little wonder that Robinson spent his conference speech invoking the bogeyman of unionist division handing seats to Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance.
Robinson, a decent man who has demonstrated sincere moral clarity in his own response to the Donaldson affair, told the party rank and file and wider unionism that ‘staying at home, or voting for parties that spend more time attacking fellow unionists, and who have no plan, will deliver a weakened and divided unionism – and that is exactly what Sinn Féin hope for.’
After a decade of disaster for unionism largely caused by the DUP’s missteps, Robinson’s call for everyone to rally round the flag grates. That unionism is on the backfoot and increasingly atomised lies squarely at the feet of those who have led unionism’s largest party for the last ten years. In that time, they have overseen an unholy brew of strategic constitutional reversals, a party civil war and scandal.
By and large, the unionist electorate has stuck with the DUP, but the tide seems like it is starting to turn. The TUV’s Jim Allister defeating Ian Paisley Jr in North Antrim in 2024 – the first time someone not called Ian Paisley won a Westminster election for the seat since 1970 – was a significant reversal in the so-called buckle of the Northern Irish bible belt. Other seats were lost and majorities were slashed, all of this before Donaldson’s trial and subsequent conviction had played out in public.
Unionism undoubtedly needs a refresh. The DUP, given what has happened on their watch, are not the party to do it.
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