Hurrah for the DUP! An Election Reflection with Sir Eugene Nicks 

Many Conservatives are concerned about their parliamentary party’s new deal with a hard right-wing, terrorism-linked outfit from Northern Ireland. Not so our regular pundit Sir Eugene Nicks, QC, KBE. 

Good Lord that election was a close shave, wasn’t it? We almost had for PM that buffoon who looks like he’s just staggered out of a folk music festival from 1967. And I know how much Star & Crescent readers hate him and his Monster Raving Stalinoid Labour Camp Party!

Alright, Mrs M’s campaign had about as much style as a solicitor has moral scruples or my old mate Peter Griffiths had cultural awareness, but I for one am very very very optimistic about our new collaboration with those lovely ladies and gentlemen of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). We are, at last, returning to our roots as true reactionaries. If only Mrs T* were still here to giggle about it as much as I am right now.

Hypocrisy being every politician’s secret weapon, isn’t it marvellous that, after Mrs M’s bunch trying to slight Jesus Corbyn as a terrorist-licker, we Tories are now in bed** with a party with deliciously close links to violent Loyalist paramilitary cells such as the Ulster Resistance Movement (URM)? Between 1989 and 1990, three men were gaoled for storing and transporting rather a lot of guns and bombs on behalf of the URM.  In 1991, Noel Little – father of current DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly – was prosecuted for arms trafficking and associating with terrorists. Further to all that, the URM worked with another band of trigger-happy yahoos, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which pilfered £300,000 from a bank in Portadown in 1987.

The DUP was once led by another old chum of mine, the Reverend Ian Paisley whose calm, generous and inclusive spirit was evidenced by the many wise things he said. ‘Catholics breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin’ is a particular favourite of mine. He dubbed Pope John Paul II as both ‘the antichrist’ and ‘the scarlet woman of Rome’. He was a multi-talented fellow, was old Pope JP.

‘Line dancing,’ he once told me, ‘is as sinful as any other type of dancing, with its sexual gestures and touching. It is an incitement to lust.’ To which I replied, ‘country and western music is truly the devil’s dirge.’ When I offered him a hot toddy once, he politely refused with this classic line: ‘Alcohol is the devil’s buttermilk.’ I pointed out to him that, in point of fact, a hot toddy is warmed whisky, honey and a few herbs and spices. He then tried to strangle me. But we remained close friends until he popped his jackboots in 2014.

If you think the modern DUP have moderated a little, think again. And a good thing they haven’t, if you ask me. They continue to oppose abortion, stand against equal marriage, deny climate change, support Brexit and one of their number, Sammy Wilson, recently agreed with a member of the public who said ‘get the ethnics out.’

Happy days ahead!

 

*May her name be praised.

** Not literally – they’re dead against that sort of thing being the rabid God-squaddies that they are.