IN an interview after the DUP’s annual conference, Gavin Robinson talked about his willingness to pursue cooperation with the UUP and TUV.

He said: “We agree on an awful lot. We disagree on little things and sometimes there’s an inherent willingness to poke each other in the eye in the hope that it makes a difference one way or the other.

“The DUP is the largest unionist party and the largest unionist vehicle in Northern Ireland. We have a strength and a depth and a breadth across Northern Ireland that no other party can replicate.

“Indeed, no other party is interested in even standing enough candidates to change the fact that we are the largest party. But people want us engaging together in strengthening the overall unionist cause.”

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Cooperation at election time is common for unionism. Sometimes it’s about not standing too many candidates in tight constituencies; or fielding where you have no chance of winning; or remembering to vote all the way down the ballot paper for the unionist candidates, even if you sometimes differ with the party – as, for example, the DUP and TUV differ on the approach to resolving the Protocol/Framework problem.

All that aside, though, this is a particularly........

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