The Hearts and Minds video seems to have improved in quality since moving to its new iPlayer site, but I don’t think last night’s programme is up to date yet. But we have this YouTube clip of an interesting confrontation between Basil McCrea and Jeffrey Donaldson, in which the latter does a nice job of smoke screening his own party’s difficulties by picking a fight with the former over the price David Trimble extracted on behalf of John Gorman, and Reg Empey: ie knighthoods Jeffrey’s line: “Ian Paisley was looking for things that were constituency matters, David Trimble was looking for personal favours”.
Most interesting is what Donaldson says in response to a question about the ‘succession’, evidently a hot topic amongst his fellow MPs, but according to himself not a matter that will be settled by parliamentarians like himself. An unprompted reference to the straw poll in the Irish Times yesterday?
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty