Like so many of these “moments” it wasn’t, in fact, a huge surprise. On July 30th, I sent a message to Doug Beattie asking him for an off-the-record response to a story I had heard that the Ulster Unionist Party’s officer team was prepared to accept his resignation immediately. His reply: “Not accurate Alex.” Yet on Monday morning he announced his resignation, citing “irreconcilable differences between myself and party officers combined with the inability to influence and shape the party going forward ...”
It had been an open secret since the general election on July 4th, when the party won its first Westminster seat since 2015 (below its own expectations) that Beattie was in trouble. In the early hours of July 5th, before counting was complete, a party officer told me the result “probably” wouldn’t be enough to save his leadership; while a senior member added, “If we couldn’t make traction when the DUP was at a very low ebb, then when will we ever make it?”
In 1968 Terence O’Neill talked about “Ulster at the Crossroads”. Just about every leader of the UUP since then has had what might be described as his “UUP at the crossroads” crisis. Because since 1968, and more particularly since the Northern Ireland Parliament was prorogued in 1972, the UUP has faced crisis after crisis: a process that culminated in elections in 2003 and 2005 when, for the first time in over 80 years, the UUP lost its position as the dominant party of unionism.
It was the party’s ongoing failures over that post-1972 period – which included the collapse of Sunningdale, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Downing Street Declaration – that provided the platform for David Trimble’s rise to the leadership in September 1995. He argued that the UUP needed to be bolder in its approach to policy rather than simply reacting to what Westminster was doing.
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He was right and carried a majority of the party with him over the next five or so years. But it was never a big enough majority to see off the challenges from his internal and external opponents. In 1997, his first general election as leader, the party won over a quarter of a million votes and 33 per cent. By 2005, his last election, the vote had collapsed to 127,414 and 17.7 per cent. None of his successors has even matched his low point and the party has still only one MP.
Can yet another leader succeed where the other six since 2005 have failed? That depends on whether that leader and party officers can figure out precisely what they want the party to be and whether the members – notoriously independent in their approach to policy – unite behind them. But it’s the “what they want the party to be” question that will be the main hurdle – as it has been since March 1972.
It’s that hurdle that Beattie failed to clear after he became leader of the party in May 2021. In his pitch for the leadership, he said he would be able to “reach out to all people in Northern Ireland, regardless of what your religion is, or sexual orientation and ethnicity”. In the event he was elected unopposed, meaning the party was led by someone about whom the membership had very little knowledge. It was also being led by someone with a limited understanding of how the party functioned. He had a military approach to leadership of a party that was no respecter of authority.
In January 2022, shortly before an assembly election, he was criticised – and he apologised – for a joke he posted on Twitter about the wife of DUP politician Edwin Poots. Shortly afterwards historic tweets, from when he was still a serving soldier, re-emerged with content that was described as “casually misogynistic”. In a gruelling live interview, he apologised for the content and spoke of a different era and different circumstances and the different man he had become. But there’s no doubt that damage had been done: the party lost a seat and 2 per cent of its vote in the election.
He also tended to abandon measured responses and diplomacy during other set-piece interviews and was often accused of making policy and other decisions on the hoof. One colleague noted: “One of Doug’s issues was that he had no patience and didn’t want to do the basics. If he didn’t like doing it – he didn’t. He didn’t realise how important it was to keep people on board. UUP members are a nightmare – but you have to at least pretend to like them.”
None of this would have mattered if Beattie had delivered electoral success; or hadn’t, as Bill White, managing director of the NI-based LucidTalk polling company put it, been “uniquely more popular among nationalists/republicans/Alliance” than other unionists.
The incoming leader has now to do what no other leader has done since O’Neill resigned in April 1969: find a role for the UUP, in an era when political realities and demographics have shifted against unionism and do so against a background where the beep-beep-beep of the UUP’s electoral life support machine can still be heard at every meeting of the leadership team and governing council.
What it mustn’t do is try to become a broad church for all types of unionism. That simply won’t work. And nor can it pretend to be liberal (as some recent leaders have tried) while still being prepared to consider electoral pacts or understandings with other unionist parties. Reinvention will be talked about, but that hasn’t worked before. So, the most sensible thing it could do is take the time before the next election in 2027 and try to understand why it collapsed in 2003/05 and why there hasn’t been a Phoenix-like revival.
One final note of caution for the new leader. Read Beattie’s resignation statement: “It has not been easy and at times it has been both lonely and isolating. [It takes] a toll both physically and mentally. It also strains friendships and political relationships.” That’s true. And in my experience it begins on day one.
Alex Kane is a commentator based in Belfast. He was formerly director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party
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