After his annus horribilis, the First Minister receives a powerful show of party solidarity, writes GERRY MORIARTY
ON SATURDAY Peter Robinson looked back on his annus horribilis – his bum year, as the Sun might call it – while looking forward to an annus mirabilis for himself and his party.
In politics, as Harold Wilson noted, time moves at a different rate. It’s hard to believe that it’s less than a year since the public, political and personal crisis that afflicted the family Robinson first erupted into public view. So much has happened since then, it seems like five years ago.
This time last year, Iris and Peter were on the platform of the same venue together – the La Mon Hotel on the Castlereagh Hills – apparently happy and oblivious to the scandal and controversy that were about to engulf them.
Just over a month later as 2010 kicked in, the Robinson family were in personal meltdown with a strangely named cast of characters such as Selwyn Black and her former lover 19-year-old Kirk McCambley helping inflict the damage.
The real danger was that the Robinsons possible personal collapse could also bring down the powersharing project. Through the winter of this year, it was touch and go whether he could survive as First Minister and DUP leader, and whether the Northern Executive and Assembly could remain standing if he should fall from grace.
Remember how it all forced a huge dark-night-of-the-soul political decision for Robinson to finally opt for the transfer of policing and justice powers to the Northern Assembly.
Politics stabilised after that watershed, but life was still miserable for Iris and Peter. She sought psychiatric assistance in London while Peter experienced his political nadir with the loss of his East Belfast Westminster seat in May. But he hung in, taking stock over the summer. Then Iris returned to Belfast and is now at their home and continuing to improve, as Peter Robinson told this newspaper last week.
Some reference to Iris in his keynote speech on Saturday might have been expected but there was none – but that’s Peter Robinson’s personal business. Instead he spoke of his “most testing year” and, with some minor melodramatic effect, how the “real test of any person is not how they stand up in a gentle breeze but how they weather the battering when the relentless gales blow”.
And he thanked his colleagues in the party for their loyalty, love, friendship and support over the past year. On Saturday, they returned that gratitude thunderously, according him standing ovations at the start and at the end of his speech. They were pointedly saying their faith was restored in their leader.
And he’s taken strength from that powerful show of solidarity. For, as musical impresario Louis Walsh might say, Peter has got his mojo back.
After such a year, it’s probably dangerous to say that no more ambushes, whether political or personal, will surprise us or Robinson, but for the moment at least he’s in chipper form, game for the challenges ahead which include next May’s Assembly elections. And he has the party with him. What more would a leader want.
Robinson delivered a strong and balanced speech, assuring DUP delegates that the union was safe but advising them that “out of the ashes of conflict, a new generation is emerging” who are “more interested in the future than the past”.
He said his East Belfast Westminster seat could be recovered from Naomi Long of Alliance and added that while dissident republicans “could never achieve their goals”, neither must they divert unionists from achieving theirs.
He rubbished the Traditional Unionist Voice anti-Belfast Agreement opposition, accusing them of being “wreckers”.
With such an audience of 600, he could have engaged in some schadenfreude about the Republic’s economic crisis but instead reworked a famous Downing Street Declaration line (properly, without use of commas) about unionists certainly having a “selfish strategic and economic” interest in the South doing well. “As a unionist I sincerely want their difficulties to be resolved.”
But he couldn’t resist a dig at Gerry Adams’s move South. “If you take economic advice from the IMF, it’s not a disaster; it’s a disaster if you take economic advice from Gerry Adams,” he said, adding deadpan: “Although to be fair, he does bring a different perspective to the banking issue.”
Robinson’s overall view of the state of the party (and of himself) was that it is back on track after a bad year. “We have reconnected,” he said. And that’s how it sounded and seemed on Saturday.