Beattie was unique in that nationalists, republicans and Alliance voters seemed to like him more than other unionists
It had been an open secret since the general election on July 4th, when the party won its first Westminster seat since 2015 that Beattie was in trouble. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA WireLike so many of these “moments” it wasn’t, in fact, a huge surprise. On July 30th, I sent a message to, citing “irreconcilable differences between myself and party officers combined with the inability to influence and shape the party going forward ...
It was the party’s ongoing failures over that post-1972 period – which included the collapse of Sunningdale, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Downing Street Declaration – that provided the platform for David Trimble’s rise to the leadership in September 1995. He argued that the UUP needed to be bolder in its approach to policy rather than simply reacting to what Westminster was doing.
It’s that hurdle that Beattie failed to clear after he became leader of the party in May 2021. In his pitch for the leadership, he said he would be able to “reach out to all people in Northern Ireland, regardless of what your religion is, or sexual orientation and ethnicity”. In the event he was elected unopposed, meaning the party was led by someone about whom the membership had very little knowledge. It was also being led by someone with a limited understanding of how the party functioned.
None of this would have mattered if Beattie had delivered electoral success; or hadn’t, as Bill White, managing director of the NI-based LucidTalk polling company put it, been “uniquely more popular among nationalists/republicans/Alliance” than other unionists.
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