Whatever the reasons it seems clear to me since the meeting of senior party officers that Peter Robinson is preparing to leave the Office of First and deputy First Minister today… It is unlikely that he will have been pushed, rather it is likely that Ulster’s most pragmatic and intelligent senior politician has sized his own position up earlier in this crisis and has seen the writing on the wall… What the party need from him now is for the opening of tonight’s Panorama programme to begin with the words “Peter Robinson, leader of the DUP, resigned from his position earlier today…”
Update: Looks like this may be my very own egg on face moment in this crisis… See Miss Fitz’s comments below…It’s a high price to pay for a bit of graft on the part of your mentally ill wife… But politics is a brutal game… A more sympathetic politician might have survived… But this story puts other politicians in other parties that the base standards for examining their public and private affairs has risen… And if the local newspapers are seeing a rise in readership anything near to the equivalent to rise in our readership then, then hopefully lessons will be learnt that the pale imitation of journalism that’s passed for many years of the Peace Process™ doesn’t pay as well as tough investigative probing.
The expenses scandal barely rippled the surface of Northern Irish public opinion… But politicians in all political parties should now be looking to their own backyards and making sure that everything is in order… It should be time to clear out the Augean stables and some of those nasty woodsheds… That’s a matter for editors and producers, as much as for individual journalists…
Time will tell if they have either the will and the resources to press their case home to the bone… And for once begin to tell the public what’s really going on in our politics…
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