Irony: Owen P and the DUP just don’t get it.

If you haven’t already switched on your irony detector, please do so now, as there’s a good chance you may need it before the end of this article.

Here’s Owen Paterson, former British Secretary of State to NEI, speaking at the Tory Party conference in October 2011:

“I don’t believe anybody can be a full-time MP and a full-time Assembly Member, and so I will give you this commitment today – by agreement if possible, but by law if necessary – we will end double-jobbing.”

And the irony thing? Well, you’ll remember Owen Patterson was found last year to have broken the rules about lobbying while an MP. He was facing suspension from the Commons when up stepped his old chum Boris Johnson, who said this Paterson thing would have to wait, because he’d just discovered an urgent need to overhaul the MPs’ standards watchdog which had found Paterson wanting.

There was a furious and immediate backlash, even among Tory MPs, at this blatant attempt by Johnson to get his old pal off the hook. And so,  after a period of sitting on a very hard place and having his front showered by rocks, Patterson packed in  politics, declaring it “a brutal business”. Johnson said it was a sad day when a man couldn’t change the rules so they favoured a friend…Well no, he didn’t actually say that, but he did say that Paterson was a “friend and colleague” who’d had a “distinguished career” and was “a voice for freedom.”

Some 24-carat irony material there indeed, Virginia. In trying to save Paterson from suspension, Johnson intervened and ended up cutting his chum’s political throat.

But remember that bold declaration Paterson made when he was still in possession of his political life? How he’d end this ridiculous double-jobbing thing? Well, it’s back.  An NEI Office spokesman said the decision to resume double-jobbing had “followed a proposal by Lib Dem peer Lord Alderdice, which could have allowed dual mandates to have been allowed indefinitely.”  In a letter from Northern Ireland Office junior minister Lord Caine to members of the House of Lords, it was proposed that dual mandates/double-jobbing would apply only until the next UK general election in 2024.

The Alliance Party has two reasons at least for tearing its hair and grinding its  teeth. Had Jeffrey Donaldson been as good as his word and given up his Lagan Valley MP seat in order to take his place in the Stormont Assembly, the by-election in Lagan Valley could well have been won by the Alliance Party. The proposed return of double-jobbing will keep Lagan Valley in the DUP’s bony grasp until at least 2024. Sorry, Alliance.

Irony alert: the Lord Alderdice mentioned above was once plain John Alderdice and was the leader of the Alliance Party here.

Add to that the fact that the peer, Lord Caine moves in interesting circles. According to Wikipedia, not only is Lorde Caine the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for NEI, he is also a supporter of Yorkshire County Cricket Club (yep, the one that was found recently to be a wee bit racist), he was Theresa Villiers’s right-hand man, he worked for Tom King, Peter Brooke, Patrick Mayhew, Owen Patterson and the late James Brokenshire. Oh, and he’s a long-standing friend of David Trimble.

Between Alderdice and Caine,  the DUP bacon may have been saved but the outrage of the Alliance Party, the SDLP, the Ulster Unionist party and Sinn Féin is approaching storm force nine.

This is the Paterson case redux. An MP has a big  problem To resolve it, you need to give your MP a dig-out. In Paterson’s case, it ended up turning him into a political corpse. In the DUP’s case it’ll stop Lagan Valley turning yellow – at least for now.

But won’t voters be screaming red murder at this political stroke by the Brits to save Jeffrey’s skin?  If Johnson couldn’t save Paterson,  there’s every chance that  the good Lord Caine will, in his attempt to support the DUP, have guaranteed that Jeffrey’s party will get their pocket picked at the May election.