Two weeks ago, we reported that Chris Heaton-Harris had pledged to call a fresh set of Stormont elections at one minute past midnight on October 28th if the Democratic Unionists didn’t go back into the devolved Executive in Belfast.
Last week, we looked at Steve Baker’s not-so-helpful interjection, when (fresh off apologising to the Irish Government for the way the ERG approached the negotiations) he urged the DUP to “choke down” their objections to get devolution going again.
This week, it looks as if yet another firm deadline from the Northern Ireland Office has come and gone without anything much happening. No new elections have been called. The DUP haven’t blinked.
Now in fairness, and unlike the previous deadlines over triggering Article 16, sources at both the NIO and the Foreign Office do think elections will be called sooner rather than later – although per last week’s column, it isn’t obvious what these will change, as polling doesn’t suggest the DUP are going to lose their position as the largest Unionist party.
Whilst some parties in Northern Ireland are now talking about reforming the institutions to prevent a single party being able to bring them down, that would be an extremely difficult job for the Secretary of State in current circumstances.
He’d have to explain why the right time to do it was now rather than any of the times when Sinn Fein collapsed Stormont, and try to find a way to bring sufficient unionists with him to justify scrapping the power-sharing arrangements at a time when a) all the significant Unionist parties are demanding changes to the Protocol and b) Doug Beattie, the leader of the UUP, is calling out the NIO for failing to push back against nonsense from Sinn Fein and the alliance about any direct rule requiring involvement from Dublin.
Good will between the Government and the pro-UK parties is running low; some sources accuse ministers of essentially patronising the DUP and especially Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, their leader. There seems to be a fairly consistent pattern of ministers sent to the NIO being seized by the idea of being statesmen of historic consequence to the extent that it often stops them getting much useful done.
Even with an election, then, the near-term future of Stormont seems to hinge on the fate of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill – specifically, how intransigent the House of Lords decides to be, and how much political capital Rishi Sunak is prepared to spend getting it onto the statute book. Opinion seems to be split between the NIO and the FCDO on how hard it will be to see off the avalanche of amendments.
(Ministers seem also to have developed the counter-productive tic of referring to the NIP as the Government’s “fall-back position”. It isn’t, it is one mechanism for achieving the UK’s primary objective of material change to the sea border. Negotiation is a second, perhaps preferable means of getting to that same objective.)
After that, of course, there is the question of whether or not the Government will actually lay down the Statutory Instruments needed to give effect to the Bill’s provisions. As drafted the NIP Bill does very little merely by passing into law, and the DUP would be fools to treat its mere passage – which was all the Prime Minister seemed ready to commit to during the leadership contest in July – as sufficient grounds for abandoning their leverage.
In the meantime, Northern Ireland will continue to tick along without a proper, democratically-accountable government. With the single exception of delivering abortion services, the NIO continues to take on Westminster’s responsibility to provide good governance to the Province in the absence of a devolved Executive.