Orange Cameron

I'm not commenting on the politics, but I thought you might be intrigued by the Times' history lesson in its leader of 12 February.

It was in Northern Ireland that the party led by David Cameron found its name. The oldest political party in Britain began its life as the Tory party. After the Great Reform Act it tried, never entirely successfully, to restyle itself the Conservative Party. Then, in 1886, the Unionist wing left the Liberal Party over Gladstone’s mission of Home Rule for Ireland. When the Unionist elements in the two main parties folded into one, the name Conservative and Unionist Party was adopted. To this day, this is the usual official term in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The historical provenance is the key to the negotiations that the Conservatives have been conducting with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to field candidates jointly for the Westminster Parliament, in the 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland. The proposal is simply to restore the status quo ante: until 1974 the Conservatives and the UUP fought elections together.
The Conservatives have been accused of naked electoral calculation and they will not be unaware that as many as ten winnable seats may be available, which could conceivably be decisive in a tight election. But, in truth, this is a mistake made more out of historical romanticism and present naivety than cynical calculation. The Conservative Party has, prematurely as it turns out, acted as if sectarian politics and division was a thing of the past. If the peace process continues in a straight line, the Tories have assumed, then Northern Ireland is made safe for them again. There is no reason why historic associations cannot be exhumed.
This is unacceptably naive. The mistake may have more complex causes than sheer political arithmetic but it is a serious mistake all the same. Owen Paterson, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, has promised a review of the rules for the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The fear — shared, incidentally, by many people in the UUP — is that the UUP and the Democratic Unionist Party might join forces to create a Unionist “block vote”. Reasonable suspicions have been stirred by the revelation that Mr Paterson hosted a meeting last month at Hatfield House, the country home of the Marquess of Salisbury, an ardent Unionist, to which both the UUP and the DUP were invited.
The implications of such an alliance are alarming. Its most immediate effect would be to exclude any possibility that Martin McGuinness might win the post as First Minister. The point here is not to say that Mr McGuinness would be good in the role, or acceptable to the relevant parties, as First Minister. It is that, by seeming to exclude the possibility of his elevation by a political fix, Mr Cameron is jeopardising the neutral status as honest broker which it is important that the British prime minister retains. The likely effect of the move will be to encourage the very partisan passions that the Conservative Party assumed had been decisively defeated. For the sake of a few seats, David Cameron would have diminished the moral authority which is his main negotiating attribute.
The ratio of cost to benefit makes it plain what Mr Cameron needs to do next: he needs to extricate his party from this mess. Progress in selecting candidates has been very slow and the process is not well advanced. There is no great ideological cause at issue, or any great political gain, so Mr Cameron can back out with relative ease. It will look like politics have prevailed over good government if he does not.
Tory history provides an important precedent. Robert Peel, a former Tory prime minister, once earned the nickname Orange Peel because of his opposition to Catholic emancipation. Orange Peel. Orange Cameron. It’s not as good a joke. In fact, it’s not a joke at all