Lee Reynolds is no more as Special Adviser to Arlene Foster. Writing in today’s Irish News he is very forthright in his views about the current mess the DUP finds itself in. Some choice extracts:
Partly DUP princelings coming to avenge their forefathers and claim their entitlement but supplemented by MLAs genuinely concerned about the upcoming elections.
It is the DUP brand that is in greater trouble. Arlene Foster’s popularity had dropped but not as much the DUP’s.
Does the choice of new leader, Edwin Poots, restore the brand?
Whether it is the private polling by Jeffrey Donaldson’s campaign or LucidTalk, the message is clear and the scale too wide to be sampling problems. He has negative favourability ratings amongst all age groups, both genders, DUP voters and voters of all other parties.
In the public mind, he is part Jeremy Corbyn part Tom Elliott. This is not a recipe to keep voters, attract new first preferences nor transfers in an Assembly election. 19 people may have drunk the kool-aid but there is no independent evidence that voters have or will.
Then we have the Vote Poots – Get Paisley dynamic. This will drag the DUP brand down even further.
All this has substantially increased the likelihood that the 2008 Dromore by-election will be repeated across Northern Ireland.
The DUP, eaten from the left by the UUP and Alliance and the right by the TUV, loses and all the consequences that flow from that.
It would be remiss of me not to point out that as a key player in the DUP for the past decade Lee shares more than a little of the responsibility about the situation the party currently finds itself in.
Lee Reynolds doesn’t hold back on Poots in today’s @irish_news
Extraordinary. The DUP truly are in a mess.
— Chris Donnelly (@chrisadonnelly) June 15, 2021
In a further blow, Lee has also missed out on reclaiming his Beard of Ireland title. Still good to see a DUP man recognising all Ireland structures 🙂
Now that he has time on his hand’s, we would be more than happy to see Lee resume his Slugger posts.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
