Tag Archives: uk politics

Northern Ireland: The Forgotten Election

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As pundits speculate wildly about the scale of the coming Labour landslide and Conservative collapse in England, Scotland and Wales next Thursday, let’s remember that 18 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons are elected by voters in Northern Ireland.

This became briefly important in 2017, when the Democratic Unionist Party’s MPs propped up Theresa May’s government for the two agonising years before its collapse. There were also utterly rumours that Sinn Féin might take its seats in order to thwart or ameliorate Brexit. (This was never going to happen.)

In the 2019 election, the DUP got the most votes, but slipped back badly and lost two seats, finishing with eight MPs. This was one more than Sinn Féin, whose vote also slipped but who compensated one lost seat with a gain from the DUP. The SDLP, previously the dominant Nationalist party, came back from a wipeout in 2017 by regaining two seats from both the DUP and Sinn Fein. And the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland won the seat left vacant by a veteran independent Unionist.

Five years on, in 2024, the DUP face further losses, with half of their seats potentially at risk from other parties. Sinn Féin’s seven look safer, though a couple are wobbly. So do the SDLP’s two. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland could end up with anything from zero to three seats (some optimists even see a fourth potential gain). The Ulster Unionist Party, which ran Northern Ireland as a one-party state from 1921 to 1972, but has been locked out of Westminster for the last few years, see two potential gains. And there is an independent Unionist in the running as well. Unionism as a whole could win anything between six and ten seats of the eighteen. 

Nine of the eighteen seats can be regarded as pretty safe for the incumbent parties. East Antrim, North Antrim, East Londonderry and Upper Bann are solidly DUP these days, and West Belfast, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh and West Tyrone are even more solidly strongholds of Sinn Féin. Foyle was lost by the SDLP in particular circumstances in 2017, but regained with a massive majority in 2019, and can be safely tallied in their column again.

Three, or possibly four, of the DUP’s eight seats are vulnerable. South Antrim sees a strong challenge from the Ulster Unionist Party. In two other seats, the DUP faces fierce opposition from the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. The exit from politics of the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, after he was arrested on historic sex crime charges, has left his Lagan Valley seat more open than it has been since its creation in 1987; and his successor as party leader, Gavin Robinson, faces a tough challenge from Alliance’s leader, Naomi Long, in East Belfast – a rather rare case where the leaders of two significant political parties are candidates in the same constituency. Alliance optimists add neighbouring Strangford to the list of potential gains, but it is a longer shot.

Three of Sinn Féin’s seven seats are at risk on paper, though my gut feeling is that they will keep all three. In 2019 North Belfast was gained from the DUP after 130 years of Unionist dominance, and while in theory the margin is not irreversible, in practice the DUP will be putting their resources into defending East Belfast. Fermanagh and South Tyrone, normally a knife-edge seat, was regained by SF from the UUP in 2019, but I hear grumblings from local Unionists that they are further behind this time. And some SDLP optimists see grounds for hope in South Down, which SF have held since 2010; again, it is a long shot.

I noted Foyle as safe for the SDLP above; their other seat, South Belfast and Mid Down (formerly just South Belfast), is probably also pretty safe, given that SF are not standing against them and the incumbent MP, Claire Hanna has positioned herself well. (Her father was my landlord when I moved back to Belfast in 1992; it’s a small world.) The weird thing about South Belfast is that the Alliance Party got more votes than anyone else in two of the last three elections, including the SDLP. But South Belfast voters are volatile.

The most fascinating seat, and the least typical, is the Alliance Party’s current patch of yellow on the map, North Down. Here, Stephen Farry, Alliance’s deputy leader, faces a challenge from local independent Unionist Alex Easton, who has the support of the DUP despite having parted company with them acrimoniously in 2021, and also from the colourful retired British army officer Tim Collins, selected as the UUP’s candidate. To do justice to this very odd campaign would take more space than is reasonable, so I’ll leave it there.

One last point to make is that the Boundary Commission’s changes to the Northern Ireland seats were pretty minimal. They were also difficult to calculate because of the lack of co-terminosity between the different electoral units involved. I myself supplied the projections of the 2019 results onto the 2024 boundaries in Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher’s Guide to the New Parliamentary Constituencies. On the Northern Ireland politics blog Slugger O’Toole, Michael Hehir has been providing his own projections, which I am glad to say differ little from mine. We come to the same conclusion: that in this election, it will be voters, not boundary changes, that determine the results.

Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

My Brexit referendum campaign started with a hurried and unplanned departure from Europe. It was February 2016, and we were on a half-term family holiday in Paris. The tiny Airbnb I’d found on the top floor of an apartment block near the Arc de Triomphe looked much more attractive in the photos than it turned out to be in real life. We had only been there a few days when the call came from London: Prime Minister David Cameron had completed negotiations on his new deal with the European Union. He was convening an urgent Cabinet meeting the following day to showcase it and fire the starting gun on the promised referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU.

Liz Truss is the only British prime minister that I have actually met. (By contrast, I met Garret Fitzgerald and John Bruton many times, took Micheál Martin punting once in Oxford, and also have had a handshake with Albert Reynolds and a conspiratorial wink from Bertie Ahern.) We were both student Lib Dem activists in the early 1990s, though she is a bit younger than me, and I was in the room when she made her famous speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1994:

I congratulated her on her speech, though not long afterwards we found that our views diverged, and I never heard from her again.

As you may be aware, she failed to last even two months as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister back in 2022, but ably laid the foundations of failure that Rishi Sunak and his party are now digging even deeper. Her failure really should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Matthew Parris wrote about her rise and inevitable fall during that long hot summer two years ago. Here is the whole piece, but the first of many juicy quotes is:

In Times columns I’ve offered my first impressions of this candidate. They were that she was intellectually shallow, her convictions wafer-thin; that she was driven by ambition pure and simple; that her manner was wooden and her ability to communicate convincingly to an electorate wider than the narrow band of Tory activists was virtually non-existent; that she was dangerously impulsive and headstrong, with a self-belief unattended by precaution; and that her leadership of the Conservative Party and our country would be a tragedy for both.

Most, but not all, of this analysis is borne out by later history and by Truss’s own book, which I have now read. (I got it for free, don’t worry.)

The format of the book is a little unusual. The very first chapter is about her meeting with the Queen, and the Queen’s death two days later. Elizabeth II’s last words to Truss were “Pace yourself.” “Perhaps I should have listened”, she reflects, in a rare moment of self-examination.

The chapters on her political career in government, which form the meat of the book, are sandwiched between incoherent political rallying calls for Conservatives to get their act together and defeat the Left at home and China abroad. The first of Matthew Parris’s allegations, lack of intellectual depth, is amply borne out by these more polemical sections. One is reminded of the old saying that while the problem with liberals is that they only read liberal literature, the problem with conservatives is that they read no literature at all. It’s not that she doesn’t really engage with the arguments made by her opponents; she doesn’t even really engage with the arguments of those she thinks she agrees with.

Her account of her time as a minister under Cameron, May and Johnson (for all of whom she retains a certain loyal affection and sympathy) is surprisingly dull, because she didn’t achieve very much and wants to blame other people for that. She is clearly, as Parris points out, unable to communicate clearly outside her own office, and fails to put the hours in behind the scenes to build up what we in our business would call a stakeholder coalition. She seems to believe that having been put in charge is sufficient for everyone to start doing what she wants them to do. In real life, this is never the case, even in the most autocratic power structures.

She writes of one night that she lay awake worrying about a prison officer, injured in a riot, but apart from that, there is a surprising lack of reference to the human dimension of her policies. There are almost no personal glimpses of colleagues and few of her family. One doesn’t get much sense of Truss as a social animal from her own account. Maybe she just isn’t; but for me that’s one of the crucial political skills.

And these things all collide when tragedy strikes and she becomes prime minister. She explains at great length how the economic plans that she and Kwasi Kwarteng proposed weren’t really all that radical, but simply misunderstood and subjected to unfair criticism; but I think even sympathetic readers (which I am not) will be lost by her depiction of a grand Left Woke conspiracy to kill growth which includes the Bank of England and the financial markets. I was irresistibly reminded of the French presidential election debate in 2012, when the challenger François Hollande killed incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to fight back with the telling line, “Ce n’est jamais de votre faute!” – “It’s never your fault!”

In Truss’s world, it’s never her fault either.

In summary, this is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. It is clearly intended for the American right-wing conference circuit market – there are many explanations of basic British political concepts for the American reader, and also the annoying and frequent use of “math” rather than “maths”. You can skip it in good conscience; you haven’t missed anything. If you really want, you can get it here.

I think there is also some cause for reflection about how political parties should choose their leaders. Part of this is about having a good team of candidates, which the Conservatives have not had in recent years. But I am also unconvinced that a ballot of party members is such a good way of identifying a good potential prime minister.

The Conservative system allows MPs to winnow down the candidates to two, who are then voted on by party members. A contested vote among members has happened four times; twice party members confirmed the MPs’ vote, and chose leaders who went on to win the next election (Cameron in 2005 and Johnson in 2017), and twice they chose the candidate liked by fewer MPs, who then failed and was booted out before the next election (Duncan-Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022). Three leaders were elected without the need to consult members, Howard (2003), May (2016) and Sunak (2022); none of them was able to win the next election either, though May (who was also supported by MPs when they voted) came closest.

I don’t fundamentally mind if the Conservatives choose internal systems which increase their chances of electoral failure, but it’s probably not a brilliant thing overall for democracy.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hardman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Once upon a time, your constituency was just the seat whose name you bore when you spoke in the Chamber. MPs could get away with barely visiting the seat they represented in Westminster. Duncan Sandys, MP for Streatham and Norwood on and off between 1935 and 1974, boasted of his annual trips over the river to visit it. Winston Churchill rarely visited his constituencies either.

An interesting and gloomy reflection on the deficiencies of the British political system by a close observer.

I knew a fair amount of this, having hung around with politicians for most of my career, but there were some things I had not really thought of before – the sheer economic cost of running for parliament, putting your life on hold for a desperate contest that you may not win, and the toll that serving as an MP puts on your family life and mental and physical health, are really extreme. The path to Westnminster is a grim and terrible winnowing process which rules out many people who are not young-to-middle-aged men with a particular set of personality neuroses.

The interlinkage of executive and legislature then works to actively discourage good policy-making. Opposition MPs have no power at all, obviously; but most government MPs are struggling to get on the greasy pole of preferment, and therefore have no incentive to criticise, even constructively. There are a few exceptions – well known mavericks, and the chairs of Select Committees – but essentially, to make your mark in the House of Commons you need to abandon your political ambitions.

Hardman has some modest thoughts on how to improve things. She (rightly) discounts electoral reform, which was lost for at least a generation by the botched 2011 referendum. But reduction of the government payroll, and enhancement of the scrutiny powers of the Commons, could both serve to rebalance the system in a healthier way. She also discounts the complete division of the legislature and the executive, pointing at the deficiencies of the U.S. system of government; but the American way is not the only way, and Belgium, for instance, makes ministers leave parliament while remaining accountable to it.

None of this is going to happen, of course. The surgery that is needed requires either a fresh mandate from an energised reforming new government, or a carefully developed cross-party consensus that Something Must Be Done. The incoming Labour government will have many other fish to fry than constitutional tinkering; and MPs and peers at present can’t even agree on the basics of how to fix the crumbling physical infrastructure of the Palace of Westminster, let alone how to improve the way it makes laws. But if you want to get better informed, you can get this book here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next on that pile is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, by Robert D. Kaplan. I should add that although I bought the 2016 edition in 2018, my Kindle edition automagically updated with the author’s comments on the May and Johnson administrations, which gave her much extra material to illustrate her arguments.

Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“This is terribly awkward,” he [David Cameron] admitted. “The thing is … George has for so long had his eye on Dorneywood… He’s very close to me… Would you mind if he used Dorneywood instead of you?” He then proposed that I share the foreign secretary’s traditional grace-and-favour countryside retreat, Chevening, rather than Dorneywood, which was ordinarily used by the number two in government.

Published in 2016, just a year after the catastrophic defeat of the Lib Dems under the author’s leadership in the 2015 election, this is both an apologia and a call to consciousness. Clegg is clear about his mistakes, and in general accepts some share of the blame; though at time of writing, he still didn’t quite grasp how bad the debacle on tuition fees was in terms of betraying the trust of a lot of his own party’s core and new voters; he still didn’t realise how bad a mistake the AV referendum was in the first place, rather than going for proportional representation at local government elections in England and Wales which the Conservatives would likely have accepted; and while he accepted that the austerity narrative was fatal for his own re-election chances, he doesn’t appreciate the Lib Dems’ own role in that. Certainly what pushed me (temporarily) out of the party in 2013, despite having voted for Clegg as leader in 2007, was that Lib Dem ministers seemed to be exulting in the welfare “reforms” that purported to help the disadvantaged by giving them less money, and I could not take that. Come 2015 the Lib Dems needed a good and coherent narrative of what they had achieved in government, did not have it, and are still paying the price.

Those blind spots aside, the book is a very interesting reflection on UK politics as seen from the vantage point of the leader of the minority party in the UK’s first coalition government since 1945. I accept some of his points. First, a centre-left coalition in 2010 would not have worked. The numbers just were not there, and there would have been another election in six months which the Conservatives would have won with a large majority after the economy tanked. Second, of course the Lib Dems in government were never going to get everything they wanted. However, they made some bad strategic choices about what to get, and I think failed to respond to the tactical sneakiness of the Conservative establishment – especially Gove and Osborne. Third, it is the norm rather than the exception for junior coalition partners to lose seats, often a lot of seats, at the next election. (Though perhaps the Lib Dems could have prepared better for this both internally and with external messaging.)

The central message of the book is that the liberal centre of politics still matters, and is deserving of support, in an age of increasing populism. 2016 of course was the year of Brexit and Trump, and populism clearly remains very strong. Although I still count myself a liberal, it’s rather difficult to point to liberal successes since 2016. The Belgian prime minster right now is from the Flemish liberal party, who are currently polling at 8%, with the far-right Vlaams Belang in the lead with three times as much support. (And that’s just figures for Flanders, rather than Belgium as a whole.) The ruling Liberal Party in Canada is currently polling fourteen points behind the Conservatives. Whatever you may try to assert about being right in the long term, it looks like today’s voters are looking to the extremes.

One of the points of Clegg’s book that has dated most since 2016 is the assertion that Labour is unelectable. That was perfectly true under Jeremy Corbyn, whose flaws were manifest, but it’s obviously not true now, when the Tories are desperately claiming that an opinion poll result showing them less than twenty points behind is evidence that they can cling on. Keir Starmer will win next year’s election, and win big. The curious thing is that this is probably also good news for the Lib Dems, who have tended to do well when Labour does well. There is clearly a large-ish group of voters who normally vote for the Conservatives, will never vote Labour, but will vote for the Lib Dems, if they can be persuaded that they don’t need to fear a Labour government. If you plug the current poll numbers into Electoral Calculus, the Lib Dems make substantial gains just on a direct swing from Conservatives to Labour, and tactical voting is likely to magnify that. In the 1997 election, when Labour got a huge majority, the Lib Dems went from 18 to 46 seats, an increase of 156%. To equal that scale of gain next year, they’d need to go to 28 or 29 from the 11 of 2019 (now 15, thanks to by-election gains), and that seems very plausible. It won’t get them into government, but it puts them back in play for a future hung parliament.

Anyway, I read less about UK politics than I used to, but I am very glad I read this. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next on that pile is Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro.

A historic maximum: ex-prime ministers and iar-taoisigh

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There are more former British prime minsters alive today than at any time since the office was created in 1721.

Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Camero, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major make a total of seven living PMs since Truss’s resignation on 25 October last year. And from the looks of things, that number is likely to increase before it decreases – Rishi Sunak’s government looks to be in worse health than any of his predecessors.

On two previous occasions there have been six living ex-Prime Ministers.

Between the end of Sir Robert Peel’s first term, on 8 April 1835, and the death of Henry Addington on 15 February 1844, there were six living ex-prime ministers: Addington (whose time at the top was decades previously, 1801-1804), Viscount Goderich, the Duke of Wellington, Earl Grey (he of the tea), Lord Melbourne and Robert Peel. Though in fact Melbourne had a second term from 1835 to 1841, and Peel then came back until 1846, so there is an argument that there were only five living men who were former and not current prime minsters for that period.

Similarly, from the end of Ramsay MacDonald’s first term, on 4 November 1924, until the death of H.H. Asquith on 15 February 1928, there were also six living former prime ministers: the rather obscure Lord Rosebery (briefly PM in 1894-95), Arthur Balfour, Asquith, David Lloyd-George, Stanley Baldwin and MacDonald. Again, however, Baldwin was back in for a second term.

The most recent period when there was only one living ex-prime minister was between the death of Baldwin on 14 December 1947 and the end of Attlee’s term on 26 October 1951. The only living ex-PM then was the leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill.

When the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, died on 18 March 1745, there were no living ex-PMs. His successor, the Earl of Wilmington, died in office, as did the next in line, Henry Pelham, and there was no living ex-PM until the end of the first term of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, on 11 November 1756.

The number of ex-Taoisigh (?iar-taoisigh?) is also at an all-time high, at six (Bruton, Ahern, Cowen, Kenny, Varadkar, Martin) though again we have to enter the caveat that Varadkar is currently enjoying his second run.

That level has been hit twice before. Between the end of John Bruton’s term in 1997 and the death of Jack Lynch in 1999, Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey, Garret Fitzgerald, Albert Reynolds and Bruton himself were all living, and as Bruton’s successor Bertie Ahern had not previously been Taoiseach, there are no ifs nor buts.

And more recently, for the two months in 2011 between the end of Brian Cowen’s term and the death of Garret Fitzgerald, the living ex-Taoisigh included also Liam Cosgrave, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern; and again Enda Kenny was a first-time Taoiseach during that period.

There has been no period when there were no living ex-Taoisigh, thanks in part to the longevity of Eamon de Valera. After the death of John A. Costello in 1976, Jack Lynch was the only living ex-Taoiseach until Liam Cosgrave lost the 1977 election (and Lynch came back to power).

The number of living former heads of the devolved administration in Northern Ireland is also current at an all-time high, at five (Mark Durkan, Peter Robinson, Arlene Foster, Paul Givan and Michelle O’Neill – counting First Minister and Deputy First Minister equally, but not counting those who served only in an acting capacity such as Reg Empey and John O’Dowd).

In the olden days there was no living ex-Prime Minster of Northern Ireland until John Miller Andrews was kicked out in 1943, Lord Craigavon having died in office, and then again from Andrews’ death in 1956 until Brookeborough retired in 1963. James Chichester-Clark, briefly PM ion the dying days of Stormont, lived to 2002, by which time devolution had been more or less restored.

Aren’t you glad I worked that out for you?