Like so many of these “moments” it wasn’t, in fact, a huge surprise. On July 30th, I sent a message to Doug Beattie asking him for an off-the-record response to a story I had heard that the Ulster Unionist Party’s officer team was prepared to accept his resignation immediately. His reply: “Not accurate Alex.” Yet on Monday morning he announced his resignation, citing “irreconcilable differences between myself and party officers combined with the inability to influence and shape the party going forward ...”

It had been an open secret since the general election on July 4th, when the party won its first Westminster seat since 2015 (below its own expectations) that Beattie was in trouble. In the early hours of July 5th, before counting was complete, a party officer told me the result “probably” wouldn’t be enough to save his leadership; while a senior member added, “If we couldn’t make traction when the DUP was at a very low ebb, then when will we ever make it?”

In 1968 Terence O’Neill talked about “Ulster at the Crossroads”. Just about every leader of the UUP since then has had what might be described as his “UUP at the crossroads” crisis. Because since 1968, and more particularly since the Northern Ireland Parliament was prorogued in 1972, the UUP has faced crisis after crisis: a process that culminated in elections in 2003 and 2005 when, for the first time in over 80 years, the UUP lost its position as the dominant party of unionism.

It........

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