In December 2008 David Cameron, at that point leader of the opposition, asked: “Why are there great Ulstermen and women on our television screens, in our boardrooms and in our military, but not in our cabinet? The semi-detached status of Northern Ireland politics needs to end. This is not true representative democracy and it has got to change.”
His solution was to agree to the creation of the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force (UCUNF), a pact between the Conservatives and UUP. But like so many other things that Cameron touched, it brought disaster: in this case the 2010 general election and, for the first time in its history, the UUP returning no MPs. The party is still trying to recover, yet 14 years later it has only one MP.
Cameron’s next disaster was the Scottish independence referendum a decade ago, on September 18 2014. It should have been a fairly easy victory for the Better Together campaign, yet Cameron, by now Prime Minister, was sanguine to the point of virtual coma. Most of his contribution to the campaign consisted of a ‘be afraid, be very afraid’ approach, warning just about everyone in Scotland that they would never be strong enough to stand alone. So stupid was this approach that polling indicated some soft remainers were switching to the Scotland........