Tag: Mike Nesbitt

The parliament building at Stormont is 365ft wide, representing one foot for each day of the year, but if she lasts in the job long enough it may also refer to the number of times Karen Bradley, Northern Ireland’s secretary of state, puts her foot in it. Politicians in Northern Ireland have lost count, but agree she outdid herself last week by telling Westminster that security force killings during the Troubles were “not crimes” but the actions of people “fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way”. Her subsequent apologies did not douse a clamour for her resignation. But few in Stormont think her departure would solve much. Northern Ireland has had no functioning elected government since power sharing between the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Sinn Féin collapsed in January 2017. Civil servants are left to run things but cannot make key decisions. “What’s surprising to me is we’re a third year into the breakdown and the public doesn’t seem to care very much.” Stormont, sited on an estate outside Belfast, looks formidable. Some assembly members still work from their offices but on really quiet days, one member confided, it can feel like the Overlook hotel in The Shining. Dissident republicans sense a historic opportunity. The DUP blames the collapse of power sharing on Sinn Féin, saying the party wants instability to portray Northern Ireland as a failed state.

His father, Norman, the Ulster Unionist MP for St Anne’s, Belfast, died in April that year and John won the seat in the consequent byelection. Son of Norman, a GP, and Margaret, he was born in Belfast into a unionist family. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and then went into banking rather than to university, owing to his dyslexia. In 1972, after the UK government suspended the Stormont government, Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, triggered Laird’s political involvement with the Ulster Scots heritage of those who were descended, as he was, from the Protestants settled in Ireland after King William of Orange defeated the Catholic James II in 1690. He set up a successful PR agency, John Laird Public Relations, and remained its chair until 2001. He opposed the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement, voting in defiance of his party whip, and developed links with the Vanguard Unionist party, which had been founded in 1972 by the former UUP cabinet minister, William Craig, and which organised rallies against Sunningdale. In 1976, when a further political experiment, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, was suspended, Laird left politics publicly but maintained links particularly with David Trimble, Craig’s deputy in Vanguard. In 1999 one went to Laird. During the Good Friday negotiations, Trimble sought parity for Protestant culture with Catholic Irish culture. • John Dunn Laird, Lord Laird, politician, born 23 April 1944; died 10 July 2018