Arlene ascends – who’d have thunk it?

It’s stunning when you think about it. This evening, Arlene Foster will be officially crowned as the new DUP leader, to succeed Peter Robinson in January. There are several things about Arlene that make her installation amazing.

One is that she’s a woman. Remember, she’s to be the leader of a party which, when members of the Women’s Coalition stood up to speak, liked to make mooing noises and talk about people belonging in the kitchen. There has always been a strong misogynistic streak in the DUP, yet here they are putting Arlene at the top of the party.

Another liability she has is that she’s formerly UUP. It’s just a little over ten years that she joined the DUP. People like Gregory Campbell and Nigel Dodds have been DUP people for decades. They must, like Maggie Thatcher, think politics is a funny old game and the world a funny old place when Arlene leap-frogs over them to the top spot.

Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention but Arlene has done something no other DUP leader – or DUP politician – has done: she’s shaken hands with Martin McGuinness on-camera. That may seem a trifling matter – if you’re working with someone you might as well shake hands with them. But in some of the darker reaches of the DUP, shaking hands with the devil would be only marginally less appealing than shaking hands with the Deputy First Minister. Yet Arlene did it as though it were no big deal.

So with at least three factors that should have given the DUP cause for caution or even another choice, why has Arlene been a shoo-in? The answer probably lies in the same place as the answer to the question “Why did Ian Paisley go into government with Sinn Féin, which he’d vowed to smash?” Because the alternative – joint rule from Westminster and Dublin – was even less appealing.

So too with Arlene as leader – faute de mieux – for lack of a better alternative. Because the DUP is becoming increasingly aware that lurching to the right may be OK for the occasional flexing of not-an-inch muscles around election-time, but the future demands a more rational and open approach. If the DUP were to continue its North Pole temperature towards Sinn Féin and the SDLP, or to make it clear that the DUP was a Protestant party for a Protestant people, it would be signing ultimately its own death certificate. Next time out, the DUP vote will be down. The demographics and a refreshed UUP suggest that will continue over the next ten years. If the DUP doesn’t position itself nearer the centre by then, and pull in at least some Catholic and garden centre Prod votes, it’s doomed.

The DUP is painfully aware of that, as is the present leader of the UUP.  And so this evening Arlene Isabel Foster will become DUP party leader, not because her fellow party members all love her, but because the alternatives were unthinkable.