I HAVE to admit I was a little surprised by Mike Nesbitt’s ‘adopt me’ appeal last week. He has been nursing the Strangford constituency since early 2010, so why didn’t he do this sort of thing much earlier?
He could have done it below the radar, collected and collated information, liaised with local organisations that specialise in the field of multiple deprivation and then fed his research into the UUP’s 2011 Assembly manifesto.
Instead, it just sounded like he had thought of the idea for the first time and just ‘put it out there’.
Announcing it in the same interview as he confirmed that he would join the Executive in the lifetime of this Assembly (which brings an extra £30,000 or so in salary and a chauffeur) also seemed a little crass.
But being talked about is what a new party leader most wants and he is certainly being talked about. Yet he chose an issue that was guaranteed to divide opinion and invite accusations of gimmickry and patronising.
It’s probably a non-winner in electoral terms, if only because the general response to it was so divided. The UUP is a right-of-centre party, a party of small business, farms and mostly professional or semi-professional types.
I’m not sure the bulk of its members or natural supporters will be particularly enthused by their new leader getting hands-on experience of life on the other side of the track.
I was also slightly surprised about his comments on the Programme for Government: “I’m looking at the targets for deprivation for the last PfG and not one of the nine got a green light. There’s a lot to do to make it happen for this PfG.”
Yet during the leadership contest he said — on at least two occasions — that “the Programme for Government is OK”.
The UUP trooped through the lobbies to support the PfG a few weeks ago and I don’t recall a blistering speech from Mr Nesbitt on its inadequacies in the areas of deprivation. It isn’t that long ago, either, that a major report pointed out that the previous Executive had missed a huge dollop of targets and goals and raised concerns that the present Executive was heading in precisely the same direction.
In other ways it seemed like a slightly self-centred start for the new leader. The UUP website has got rid of all photographs other than his on its front page.
After his reshuffle last Tuesday (the contents of which were being tweeted to journalists as the UUP meeting took place) he decided to leave his MLAs behind while he did the press conference alone. Why didn’t he suggest the ‘adopt me’ idea as a plan for all of his MLAs, allowing the party as a whole to get their own personal experience of the difficulties faced in their constituencies?
Why offer to address a Sinn Fein meeting about promoting unionism when both Basil McCrea and John McCallister have done something very similar in the past few months? As someone joked last week, “the UUP’s broad church is being replaced with the cult of Mike”.
Again, his talk of putting the ‘last 14 years behind us’ sounded to me like someone who hadn’t all that much interest in the collective identity and legacy of the UUP.
That’s not surprising, I suppose. He wasn’t there to do the heavy lifting. He wasn’t there to take the personal electoral risks. He wasn’t there at critical moments of the peace process.
He’s too old to belong to the post-conflict generation and too short a time in the UUP to suggest they dump what is, I think, their greatest achievement.
It’s also now clear that David McNarry is going to dog his footsteps. The accusations he makes against Mr Nesbitt (one of which is that he was aware of the DUP-UUP talks and raised no objection to them) are quite serious. They need a serious and unambiguous response.
During the leadership campaign Mr Nesbitt spoke of the need of loyalty to him as leader, a loyalty he would return. Yet he belonged to the ‘Erne Group,’ a group that deliberately excluded key members and officers of the party and Assembly group. Surely loyalty has to be inclusive?
So, all in all, it has been a pretty shaky start for the new leader. That said, it is very early days, far too early to reach any conclusions. He won and won handsomely, even though it is worth reminding ourselves that much of that success was built on the expectation that he would be a safe pair of hands in presentational and campaigning terms.
Yet what struck me most during the leadership campaign and during his first week in office is that he isn’t yet comfortable at this level of politics. He is neither a career politician nor a natural politician. It’s still very unclear to me what his personal view is of both big U and small u unionism: and I just don’t have the sense that he fully understands the tone and beat of unionism.
He has mentioned Tony Blair a number of times in the past few weeks, but I would argue that the reason Blair was able to turn the Labour Party upside down and make it electable again (something he wouldn’t have been able to do, by the way, had he not been leader of the Opposition and had not the Conservative Party imploded) was that Blair was — in bone, blood, birth and instinct — a natural party politician. It was in his DNA.
That is not true of Mike Nesbitt, someone who still insists that the UUP is a business.
He needs to lay some sort of concrete foundation. What is the difference between the UUP and the DUP, TUV, Alliance and Conservatives?
What are his socio/economic policy priorities and how does he intend to deliver them?
What does he offer the growing numbers of non-voters from within the pro-Union community who are clearly disillusioned with the Executive and the overall thrust of the Programme for Government?
How does he define a ‘shared future’?
What, in fact, is the point of the UUP?
What is Mike Nesbitt’s agenda and vision for Northern Ireland?
He avoided all of these questions during the campaign and was still sidestepping them during interviews last week. He really does need flesh on the bones, because the next election — for the European Parliament — kick-starts in about 22 months!
A report in the News Letter on Saturday described the UUP as ‘almost on life support’: so it’s Nesbitt’s task to resuscitate it and confound the shroud wavers. Hmm!