From Potemkin’s Village to Little-Pengelly’s Removed Border

One of the more famous political terms is that of the Potemkin Village. A Potemkin Village is

‘… in its original meaning, any of a number of fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great. The term has also come to be used to describe an elaborate facade designed to hide an undesirable reality.’

As with all the best stories and sayings, it seems the origin story is apocryphal, but the term itself has become incredibly useful to point out one of the most common foibles in politics, when a politician or political party attempts to spin the truth with the public, or even just outright lie.

Which brings us to Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly’s unfortunate WhatsApp conversation with the Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Jayne Brady.

As both the Irish News and Belfast Telegraph have been reporting

“Emma Little Pengelly described a plan to recruit a Stormont official to oversee post-Brexit trade arrangements as “hugely politically embarrassing for me” because it exposed the fallacy of the DUP’s claim that the Irish Sea border had disappeared.

The DUP deputy first minister last year messaged the head of civil service, arguing that plans to appoint a ‘head of regulatory divergence’ had “the potential to become a story”.

The WhatsApp exchange between Ms Little-Pengelly and Jayne Brady took place in October and has been revealed through a Freedom of Information request.

The messages show Ms Brady subsequently apologised to the deputy first minister “for any embarrassment”.

So before I continue, I want to emphasise that the main issue here is not about Brexit, or the Irish sea border. Not really. We are all well familiar with what happened. The DUP, through gross political negligence, ended up with precisely the opposite outcome of what they intended as the outcome of Brexit. In an attempt to pressurise all other stakeholders into undoing that outcome, the DUP collapsed Stormont (for what turned out to be two years) and set a series of seven tests they demanded would need to be met before they would restore power sharing. The flaw in the plan was that Unionism needed Stormont more than any other stakeholder to advance their argument that we are better off in the Union, and amidst crumbling public services pressure inexorably built on the DUP to restore power-sharing, which they did with the ‘Safeguarding the Union’ deal they negotiated with the then Conservative government.

At the time, the DUP went on a massive PR offensive to convince the public that the deal represented a massive win that fulfilled their seven tests. Then DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson even claimed that it heralded ‘the removal of the sea border’.

The problem is, this was false. In hindsight we can see that the Safeguarding the Union deal was less about dealing with the Sea Border than it was with constructing a fig leaf framework that would allow the DUP to climbdown and return to Stormont as the political pressure to do so had become overwhelming.

Now while the DUP under Gavin Robinson has resiled from claiming ‘Safeguarding the Union’ eliminated the sea border, it did expose a pain point for the DUP for whom their failure over Brexit is neuralgic and that their opponents within Unionism are always willing and eager to press upon.

This is the background which informs why Emma Little-Pengelly reacted as she did to the news that the Civil Service was seeking to appoint someone to oversee the Irish Sea Border. It is harder to maintain the fiction that you succeeded at removing something if the civil service is advertising for someone to run that very thing.

And that is the real issue here. It could just easily have been a story about the economy, or the health service, or education. A political party saw that it could be embarrassed, not even by the Civil Service publicly contradicting the fiction that political party was peddling, but simply by the Civil Service operating within the reality of the situation, and a leading member of that political party messaged the Head of the Civil Service complaining she could be politically embarrassed by this action.

And if Emma Little Pengelly can get an apology from the Head of the Civil Service for ‘embarrassing her’ simply by operating in reality, who is to say what other parties in the Executive have taken Jayne Brady to task for?

I’d like to think that our civil servants are responding to the world the way it is rather than trying to coddle politicians, of whatever background or predisposition, who maybe misrepresenting reality to the public for their own benefit. The Civil Service doesn’t need to connive with that.

The politicians in question would be better served levelling with their voters.