Arlene Foster resigns after mass assault on her leadership from the DUP faithful

It’s done. And in double-quick time. Arlene Foster has resigned as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and First Minister of Northern Ireland. 

It happened so fast that the runners and riders in the race to replace her haven’t even had time to saddle up their mounts.

Foster’s departure was, however, a story that was waiting to be written. The DUP is in crisis because the province is in crisis, not only in terms of everyday life, but with the growing realisation that, as effectively an economic annex of the EU, its ties with the rest of the UK are growing palpably looser.

From the border country of Fermanagh, where her father, an RUC reservist, was shot in front of her when she was a child and whose best friend at school was murdered by the IRA, Foster did her best (critics would say her worst) to stem the tide of change, but in the end it was too much for her. 

Whoever replaces her will face exactly the same problems and will have to sit down with essentially the same colleagues in government, half of whom are either nationalists or hardline Republicans, both intent on achieving Irish unity. 

She is not the first unionist leader to be brought down by her own side. Every seven years or so since devolved government was restored in Northern Ireland, the DUP has sought to renew itself, replacing lessons learned with the demands of dogma. 

It happened with the Rev Ian Paisley, previously a towering figure, who was ditched as First Minister in the summer of 2008 after an increasingly high-volume whispering campaign that characterised him as too close to Sinn Fein and no longer a reliable firebrand. If there was one unguarded remark that did for him above all others, it was that you could not be an Ulsterman without also being Irish. 

It happened again in November 2015, when Peter Robinson, Paisley’s anointed successor, announced that he was ready to give way to Arlene Foster, who had twice stood in for him during a turbulent period in office marked by his wife’s very public infidelity and his own disinclination to work with Sinn Fein. 

Now, in the spring of 2021, it is Foster’s turn, charged by DUP stalwarts with clinging to power while allowing it to slip through her fingers. They point to the fact that the NI Protocol which she backed, has resulted in the nightmare of Ulster being cut off from the motherland. They also note that during the three years in which Stormont was suspended during a stand-off with Sinn Fein, she allowed the British to make it possible for women in Ulster to obtain abortions while allowing the “abomination” of same-sex marriage. 

A reported 21 of the DUP’s 28 Assembly members, as well as four of its seven MPs and several Peers, signed a letter in which they urged Foster to stand down and make way for a new leader. A similar call was issued by an unknown number of party councillors. 

She was left with no option than to obey.

As First Minister, she at first attempted to shrug off the rebellion, arguing that she was too busy dealing with important matters of state, most obviously the Covid crisis, to deal with petty internal squabbles. Nobody believed this for a moment. Much more likely, she was already mentally engaged in clearing her desk and writing her valedictory. 

Foster’s five-and-a-bit years in office were almost unbelievably miserable. Prior to taking up the top job, there had been talk of a language act that would have given Irish an enhanced status in public life and allowed nationalist communities to have street signs in Irish as well as English. But no sooner had Foster been elected First Minister than the language act was ditched. 

At the same time, the Cash-for-Ash scandal was unfolding, involving the widespread abuse of a renewable heat grant introduced by Foster when she was minister for economic development that ended up costing the public purse some half a billion pounds.  

Sinn Fein, led by the ailing Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the Provisional IRA in Londonderry, walked out of the Executive, which remained in aspic until January 2020, resuming only after threats by the Northern Ireland secretary of state, backed by Downing Street, to close it down and restore direct rule from Westminster. 

In the meantime, the House of Commons took the opportunity to liberalise abortion law in the province and to permit same-sex marriage, both of which were opposed by the DUP as ungodly and in defiance of scripture. As a member of the politically unaligned Church of Ireland, Foster (née Kelly) had never been entirely trusted by the DUP’s Free Presbyterian leadership, whose instincts – if not their interpersonal behaviour – are best interpreted by reference to the Book of Revelations. 

With the party already seething, Foster next found herself embroiled in the Brexit negotiations, then approaching their lowest point. The general election called by Theresa May in the summer of 2017 had resulted in the DUP winning 10 seats that would prove crucial in keeping the Conservatives in power. Foster, together with the party’s leader in the Commons, Nigel Dodds, pulled every possible lever to ensure that Ulster would leave the EU on exactly the same basis as the rest of the UK (i.e. with the Irish border restored and no trade barrier down the Irish Sea), but were stymied when yet another general election saw May replaced by Boris Johnson. 

The Northern Ireland Protocol, negotiated by Johnson as the only way out of an impasse with Europe, was cynically miss-sold to the DUP as confirmation of Ulster’s British identity. The only mystery is why she believed the prime minister when he gave her his word that there would not be an Irish Sea border. It was this that drove the first nails into Foster’s political coffin. The final nails are subsequently provided, in typically tragi-comic fashion, by way of the First Minister’s refusal to endorse efforts by the party faithful to introduce gay conversion therapy along the lines of schemes that had already foundered in several southern states of the US. 

All hope was now lost. Not only had she consorted with the traitor Johnson, she was also willing to avert her eyes from those who would walk the path of wickedness.

It was all too familiar. Failing some last-minute twist of fate, Foster’s legacy, as an inveterate unionist, will be having allowed Northern Ireland to become an economic annex of the EU, separated from Britain’s free market, and – equally bad – leaving it with the scourage of abortion and gay marriage. In the streets, loyalists ­– few of whom are in the least interested in religion or sexual orthodoxy, but see themselves as more British than the British – have expressed their frustration by burning cars and pelting the police with rocks and petrol bombs.  

As to who will take over from Foster, it hardly matters. There are names: the MPs Ian Paisley Jr, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson, and from within the Assembly, Edwin Poots, currently the minister for agriculture, the environment and rural affairs. All of them are opposed to abortion and have spoken out against gay rights. But whoever takes over, the fear is that, at bay, the party may lurch to the right.  

The DUP stands for just two things: the link with Britain and Bible-based government – the latter of which happens to coexist alongside a torrid recent history of extramarital dalliances by party hacks at every level up and down the land. “Not an inch,” “What we have we hold” and “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right” are their watchwords.