{"id":567023,"date":"2026-07-03T13:51:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T13:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/567023\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T13:51:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T13:51:26","slug":"unionist-leaders-face-losing-voter-trust-warns-former-communications-chief-alex-kane-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/567023\/","title":{"rendered":"Unionist leaders face losing voter trust, warns former communications chief Alex Kane \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unionist leaders in Northern Ireland <\/a>will lose the support of their own voters if they keep telling them they can trust nobody, a leading former Ulster unionist official has warned.<\/p>\n

Former UUP <\/a>communication head and now political commentator, Alex Kane, said unionist leaders have for years warned that their community is beleaguered.<\/p>\n

However, that strategy could mean voters get behind a united Ireland<\/a>: \u201cLet\u2019s be 20 per cent in a united Ireland, rather than 2 per cent in the United Kingdom,\u201d Kane told The Irish Times\u2019 Inside Politics podcast.<\/p>\n

Every time unionism pushed Westminster during Brexit to make a choice between what it wanted and what Westminster needed to accept to make a deal with Brussels, unionism lost, he said.<\/p>\n

The then Conservative government \u201cchose to anger unionism\u201d every time, \u201cwhen it had a choice between doing something they knew would make unionism happy and doing something they knew would anger unionism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not its own policies. It\u2019s not its own strategies. It\u2019s not its own leaders. It\u2019s not what Sinn F\u00e9in does, the SDLP or anyone else does,\u201d said Kane.<\/p>\n

\"\"How the duplicitous double life of Jeffrey Donaldson threatens the future of unionism <\/p>\n

Instead, he said unionism faces big choices<\/a>: \u201cTheir clash is between what they want and what the long-term intentions of a British government may be.\u201d <\/p>\n

On the jailing of former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson<\/a>, he said the party\u2019s supporters \u201cwould have fallen off their chairs when they heard\u201d stories of Donaldson frequenting gay saunas in London.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s always made a very big thing of his belief in Christianity. All of that is central and core to who Jeffery Donaldson was. People took that at face value.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve known him for 40 years. I\u2019ve never seen him drunk. I knew he took the odd glass of wine. I just accepted that because there\u2019s nothing in theology that says you can\u2019t have the odd glass of wine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

However, reports that he was seen in the House of Commons <\/a>\u201cholding two bottles of wine, while swigging from one of them\u201d was … almost like it was being made up.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe there\u2019s a circle inside the DUP who were aware of the other side of him when he was away from Northern Ireland.\u201d He said \u201cfor the rest of us\u201d, the \u201c99 per cent of people in Northern Ireland, it was a shock\u201d. <\/p>\n

Clearly, some people in Westminster knew about his lifestyle but operated by the old adage that \u201cwhat happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas\u201d, where people are away from the curbs of their constituency, he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou live a different life. It\u2019s a different lifestyle,\u201d he went on. \u201cYou\u2019re still there till maybe 10, 11, 12 at night and bars are kept open to keep you going and food\u2019s kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n

During Kane\u2019s Westminster experience, he said it had not been unusual to see people who are \u201cto put it mildly, not entirely sober\u201d as they waited for late-night votes, but he had witnessed reckless conduct. <\/p>\n

However, Donaldson\u2019s conduct was on \u201ca different level\u201d, especially because it happened when he was the DUP\u2019s chief whip and when the party\u2019s votes were crucially needed by the Conservatives.<\/p>\n

Such behaviour would have come to the attention of the security services, the government chief whip and the prime minister\u2019s office, and \u201cyet, for some reason, nobody stepped in. Nobody went to Arlene Foster, who was then leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and said, \u2018It might be advisable to have a word with your chief whip\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cNobody seems to have thought this was necessary, which in turn fuelled this argument that he was being used by the intelligence services to fuel the government.\u201d <\/p>\n

He said Donaldson is \u201ceasily\u201d in the \u201ctop six most influential political figures in Northern Ireland in his generation and most people thought they had a handle on him. They may not have necessarily liked him. They may have thought he was this or that, but there was no sense that this was a hypocrite they were dealing with.\u201d <\/p>\n

His use of his faith has \u201coffended\u201d many, especially Presbyterians, because he is \u201cdeliberately using that faith, that evangelical call[ing] card to protect himself, to say, \u2019None of this is my doing\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even late in his trial, Donaldson carried the Bible with him; \u201cthat somehow, even in this huge mess, that he was going to be lifted and saved by God\u201d.<\/p>\n

Since Donaldson\u2019s conviction, many in the party had told him of their hurt because, as one party member put it, \u201che is using my God to try and find excuses for the evil he knows he has done\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unionist leaders in Northern Ireland will lose the support of their own voters if they keep telling them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,23935,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,954,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-567023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-common-ground","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-northern-ireland","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116856376327428025","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}