DUP leadership: Party hangs out its dirty laundry in public

Edwin Poots spoke to media on Thursday night after his ratification as the new leader of the Democratic Unionist Party

When you cover politics in Northern Ireland for too long, you think you've seen it all.

I never thought I'd see the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) become the Ulster Unionist party circa the early 2000s, but that is what appears to have happened.

On a Thursday night, fittingly at a hotel where the Ulster Unionists used to hold some of their post-Good Friday Agreement bloodletting sessions, otherwise known as meetings of the Ulster Unionist Council, the DUP finally hung out the dirty laundry.

This is a party which, in the past, if it fell out, certainly did not do it in front of prying eyes.

People don't vote for divided parties and if you don't believe that, look what happened to the carcase of the UUP after Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster left in 2003 taking thousands of votes with them.

On Thursday night they were back at that south Belfast hotel, central players in a drama which threatens to eclipse even what happened to the DUP's unionist rivals.

Arlene Foster pictured as she left the Crown Plaza Hotel on the night her successor was officially ratified as DUP leader

It wasn't supposed to be like this. In the DUP way, Edwin Poots' victory was to be ratified without rancour so they could move on to more important tasks like tearing down the border in the Irish Sea.

That was what was supposed to happen. But something very different happened instead.

'Stabbed in the back'

First problem - the party officers called for a secret vote which was the last thing the Poots camp wanted.

After two hours of sometimes heated speeches from both sides a secret ballot was proposed - and just as quickly opposed by the Poots camp.

By 56 votes to 47 that was lost and so Mr Poots was ratified by a public show of hands 72 - 28.

He says he would have won a secret vote as well. We will never know.

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But the refusal to grant the same secret vote that was granted to, in the words of one Foster loyalist "a democratic elite of 36 people" entitled to vote in the leadership election in the first place, has caused resentment.

Next, one of those who had spoken most strongly against the way Mrs Foster was removed from power walked out and quit the party in the full glare of publicity.

Paul Bell, a former chairman of Ms Foster's Fermanagh South Tyrone constituency association, said she had stood up to the IRA and been "stabbed in the back" by a party he could no longer remain a member of.

Paul Bell resigned his DUP membership and made his views clear to the waiting media

Mr Poots, meanwhile, was getting ready to make his victory speech.

He delivered it to an audience without Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, Lord Dodds, Diane Dodds, Gregory Campbell and the East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson.

They walked out before he began. The point was made.

Another very senior figure told me it was "the worst DUP meeting" he had attended in 42 years.

All the more surprising then to hear Mr Poots describe the proceedings as "a good meeting".

His friend Ian Paisley said the party "will come together." It was in obvious contradiction of almost everything else we were hearing.

Died with a 'broken heart'

Possibly the most remarkable thing I heard during a remarkable evening was what he said next - that no-one needed to tell him or his family about brutal political coups.

What had happened to his own father, he said, had killed him and he had taken a broken heart to his grave.

Old sores run deep and the wounds caused by the fall of Ian Paisley run deeper than most on that side of the DUP still known as "the Paisley wing".

And so we await the next act. More resignations will surely follow. As will more recriminations between those still left.

If Mr Poots goes ahead and names his new ministers next week it is my understanding Mrs Foster will resign as first minister, thus triggering a potential Stormont crisis.

For a new first minister to be elected, Sinn Féin have to nominate a deputy first minister. What will they do?

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it, goes the saying.

The lesson of what happened to the Ulster Unionist party looms large over the DUP today and no learning appears to have been done.