Mike Nesbitt elected new Ulster Unionist leader by 80% margin

Saturday evening former Ulster Television anchor Mike Nesbitt was elected the new Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader over farmer John McCallister by a margin of 407 votes out of a total of 665: 536 to 129. That computes to roughly 80 percent to 20 percent, a larger margin than most had predicted. Nesbitt had neutralized his opponent's call for the party to go into opposition by calling for a committee to investigate the issue to be chaired by McCallister.  But the real thing that Nesbitt had going for himself was name recognition--probably the most crucial factor in politics. As a former news anchor/presenter he was well known to party members where McCallister was not, particularly east of the Bann River. Nesbitt's first challenge will be to stop the rot by deciding on a clear course of action for the party and an identity that the party has lacked since the rival Democratic Unionists stole the UUP's policies in 2006.

In the two-week leadership campaign he emphasized repair to the party rather than alliances with other political parties whether the Conservatives or the Democratic Unionists.  He will have to soon implement this before a skeptical media decides that the honeymoon period is over and starts sniping at him.   This means that he will have to avoid the type of "own goal" errors that his predecessor, Tom Elliott, made. As a media-savvy person Nesbitt should not find this too difficult.

Of some 2,000 party members eligible to vote in the election, which was held at the Ramada Hotel in Belfast during the party's annual general meeting, only 665--or less than a third--ended up attending the meeting and voting. This is a significant drop since the last election in 2010 when Elliott was elected with 939 votes cast. It may mean that the party's base is starting to abandon the party--either for other parties or simply joining the  ranks of the apathetic middle class in the province. This will have to be reversed if the party is to have a future.

There are two obstacles to the opposition option. First, there is no allowance in the Good Friday Agreement for a political opposition and hence no funding. Second, the UUP's natural partner in the opposition, the nationalist SDLP, is opposed to the opposition option. Before opposition can be seriously contemplated answers to both these problems must be found.

The UUP Leadership Contest

It is official--there are three candidates to fill Tom Elliott's shoes as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in Northern Ireland. They are: Deputy Party Leader John McCallister; Rural Development Minister and MLA David Kennedy; and MLA Mike Nesbitt, a former UTV anchor/presenter.  McCallister leads the liberal wing of the party and is being supported by his friend Basil McCrea who lost to Elliott in the previous leadership election in September 2010. The election will be at the end of the month.

Traditionally liberal candidates have not done well in UUP leadership elections. The last closest thing to a liberal was Terence O'Neill who resigned as prime minister in April 1969 at the start of The Troubles. Typically the right wing reactionaries also do not prevail in the UUP, although Lord Brookeborough who was prime minister for twenty years from 1943 to 1963 would fit that category. Bill Craig, the leader of the Vanguard paramilitary movement and faction within the UUP failed to win the election to succeed O'Neill in 1969 and the election to succeed the successor, Robin Chichester--O'Neill's cousin, in 1971.

Normally it is the centrists who can employ the correct language to appeal to the reactionaries who win. In 1995 David Trimble was the candidate of the right--he had been photographed participating in a triumphant jig after an Orange Order had been forced down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown during the Drumcree I crisis. In a five-way race that included John Taylor, the former interior minister in the last Stormont government before direct rule, and Ken Maginnis, the security spokesman of the party as the leader of the liberals, Trimble won.  Both Trimble and his supporter and successor, Reg Empey, were followers of Bill Craig who quit the party to follow Craig into the political wilderness in 1973.  But Trimble surprised everyone including both his former supporters and his critics by adopting policies advocated by Maginnis and governing following the Good Friday Agreement to the left of John Taylor as first minister . 

Until Trimble led a group of young professionals into the upper ranks of the UUP it had always been the party of the Big House--the landed gentry of the sort who ran the Conservative Party in Britain until the 1950s and 1960s. Northern Ireland in this regard as in so many others was about a generation behind England. Now the party is being run by small-town lawyers and professional farmers who would not look out of place in the Republican Party in the American Midwest or South or in Fine Gael in Ireland. 

McCallister has called for the party to leave the Executive and become the opposition, a role that is sorely needed in Northern Ireland. Mr. Kennedy is quite comfortable serving in the Executive. Nesbitt's vision for the future of the party is not really known at this time. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that McCallister defies the party's history, but if I were betting I would bet on one of the other two. Kennedy can brag about his skills as a minister and Nesbitt about his skills as a media-savvy personality. It would seem that the majority of the party is more interested in muddling through than in taking a bold course.  But as is now occurring in the Republican Party primaries in the United States with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum splitting the conservative base and allowing the weak Mitt Romney to win with the support of the moderate minority, Kennedy and Nesbitt could split the centrist-conservative base and allow McCallister to prevail with a slim majority. This is unlikely, however, because the leadership election precedes in rounds with the weakest candidate being eliminated before the next round. Thus, with only three candidates it will take only two rounds at most to elect the new leader. If McCallister does not win a majority in the first round the supporters of the other two candidates are likely to team up and defeat him in the second round.

The Ulster Unionist Party's Leadership Problems

Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader Tom Elliott announced Thursday evening that he would be stepping down at the end of the month as party leader. Elliott was elected after the general election in mid-2010 after the resignation of former leader Reg Empey, who had been leader for five years. Empey resigned because the merger with the mainland Conservative Party under the label of Ulster Conservatives and Unionists--New Force  cost the UUP its only remaining MP, Sylvia Hermon, who identified more with the British Labour Party than with the Tories. The party lost a number of its voters either because they didn't like the Tories, or because faced with a new party name they opted for the more familiar label of the rival Democratic Unionists (DUP).  The same thing had occurred in South Africa in the mid-1970s when the venerable United Party gave up its familiar name after merging with a paper party. Many voters in Natal, its heartland, defected to the rival ruling National Party. The New Republic Party lasted for less than eleven years before it went out of business.

After the failure of the merger with the Tories, who have very little following in Northern Ireland, the UUP had three logical courses of action. First, it could have negotiated a merger with the DUP--either keeping that name or coming up with a new name.  Such a merger would largely have been on the DUP's terms as the best time for the UUP to have merged would have been in 2001 or 2002 after three MLAs/MPs defected to the party. After the disastrous election of 2005, which left the UUP with only a single MP at Westminster, the party had little to bring as a dowry to the marriage.  The second course would have been to leave the Executive and operate as an opposition party either with or without the cooperation of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).  But to a party used to ruling the province from 1922 to 1972 and again from 1999 to 2002 under a return to devolution, this looked like a fate worse than death. So Elliott opted for the third course of muddling through. 

The press has already speculated on possible candidates for the leadership. Three have been named:  David Kennedy, the party's only minister in the Executive; Basil McCrea, the Lagan Valley MLA who was runner-up for the leadership against Elliott in 2010; and Mike Nesbitt, a former BBC news anchor/announcer in the province and the MLA for Strangford. Kennedy appears reluctant to risk his seat on the Executive, which he enjoys filling. Nesbitt is a relatively fresh face in the party with media skills. If he could come to an agreement with McCrea on policy direction the leadership would probably be his for the taking. McCrea would seem to be more inclined towards the opposition option as he ran as the liberal candidate in 2010. If the party attempts to continue to pursue the third option of muddling through under a new leader his tenure in office is likely to be no longer than Mr. Elliott's and the likely outcome will be a hostile takeover of the party's electorate by the DUP rather than a negotiated merger.

The leadership contest and the ultimate fate of the UUP should be of intense interest to three parties. First, it will be of interest to the DUP which is seeking to end up in the UUP's pre-1969 position as the sole unionist party. The DUP made most of its political errors in its first two decades of existence while former leader Ian Paisley and current leader Peter Robinson were learning the political ropes. Robinson was Paisley's third protege. The DUP no longer makes major political errors, although as a human enterprise it is subject to scandals as that which befell Robinson's wife and political partner Iris in 2010. Second, if the UUP opts for opposition it may throw a lifeline to the ailing SDLP. And if it does not and dies a "natural" political death it serves as the canary in the mineshaft for the SDLP letting it know that there is no longer enough political oxygen for an opposition party in either ethnic community in the North. Third, it will serve the same function for the Israeli Labor Party, which is suffering from the same rejection by the electorate because it appeared too soft in dealing with the opposition liberation movement cum terrorist organization. If the UUP can't recover against the DUP, what chance will there be for the Labor Party against the Likud and the Israeli Right?

See this article for a critical treatment of Elliott's tenure as UUP leader.