Tom Elliott, the Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party seems to be a decent and upstanding man. He appears to want to do and say the right thing and is less concerned about the consequences than your average politician. However, Mr Elliott is fast developing a reputation as the Frank Spencer of Northern Ireland politics as everything he touches, says or does implodes faster than a John Terry captaincy.
They say that even most alcoholics bottom out but the Ulster Unionists must be wondering just how much further they have to sink before the long road to recovery starts. On the plus side in Danny Kennedy they have a competent, affable and diligent minister. Basil McCrea and Mike Nesbitt are very credible media operators. They have broken their taboo of being male dominated by having media friendly female representatives with Sandra Overend and Jo Ann Dobson. Yet they are an incredibly fractious party with links that are more to do with the Orange Order than the communities they purport to represent. The space the DUP has moved into is mainstream unionism. The Ulster Unionists appear increasingly out of step not only with the so-called ‘stay at home gardening Protestants’ but also with your average voter concerned about jobs, the economy and their children’s futures. So despite the modernity and changing faces of the Ulster Unionist party its leader represents a form of unionism that is fast disappearing. Politically speaking, Mr Elliott is the unionist equivalent of Ian Duncan-Smith.
The recent spat between Mr Elliott with the seemingly tedious and erratic Mr Mc Narry is really only a symptom of an under-lying malaise within Ulster Unionism. Mr McNarry’s crime appears to have been saying out loud what others have been discussing. Its hard to have sympathy for Mr McNarry as he rarely comes across as a team player but its even harder to understand why the Leader, Mr Elliott decided to take a sledge hammer to crush such a small nut. The irony is not lost on any political commentator that only weeks before the contentious exploratory discussions with the DUP, the same Mr McNarry warned about the threat of some of his colleagues supping with the NI Conservative Party.
Apart from not having been able to decide which route the Ulster Unionist Party should take, Mr Elliott is being out-played by the skilful hand of the master puppeteer in Unionism, Mr Robinson, who is all over the rudderless UUP.
In fairness to Mr Elliott it is not easy for him. Perhaps tellingly the party website cover photograph shows Mr Elliott wagging a finger at his would be rival Mr McCrea. One suspects that Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness have a better workmanlike relationship. The UUP website also makes no listing of their peers at Westminster- perhaps that omission comes from fact that three of their peers opted to sit on the Conservatives benches including the immediate two past leaders and that another peer and former leader actually endorsed two DUP candidates against the UUP at an election. These divisions show how deep the fault lines within the Ulster Unionist actually run. Yet some of the UUP’s more colourful and better-known faces sit in the Lords and not the Assembly.
Wider unionist unity is a political inevitability, as unionist self-preservation becomes threatened. Peter Robinson senses this and his call for a more integrated and shared society is much aimed at the wider unionist family as any overture to the catholic community. Tom Elliott is clearly failing to connect across the breadth of his own party, never mind wider unionism. His gaffes on other matters such as the GAA show that he can’t even gauge cross community goodwill.
A key problem for Tom Elliott is that in an ever-demanding modern media environment and no matter how, sincere he is, he comes across flat, unenthused and detached. There was a time when the very thought an animated Ulster unionist leader skilled in oratory would have sent shivers down the spines of the blue rinse brigade at a UUP conference- nowadays it’s a necessity to be alive above the neck if one is to survive on TV. The first political causality caused by the media in Northern Ireland was UUP old-timer Cecil Walker’s demolition at the hands of the DUP’s Nigel Dodds. It was devastating.
Ulster unionism and not Ulster now stands at a crossroads. It would seem that farmer Elliott is content to be in that space but unfortunately the cats he is herding are not.
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