With British mainland opinion polls predicting a ballot box massacre for the Conservative Party in next year’s expected Westminster General Election, Tories’ minds will be focused on retaining supposedly safe seats in the English Shires rather than what’s happening devolution-wise in one of the far flung regions of the Kingdom.
As if DUP boss Sir Jeffrey Donaldson does not have enough challenges keeping the hardliners in his party in check in his bid to secure and sell a deal, he also has to contend with a Tory administration which appears to be only paying lip service to Northern Ireland.
If the opinion polls are accurate, gone are the days when the Tories under Boris Johnson can return to the Commons with an 80-seat plus majority.
Indeed, could we see a repeat of the former Prime Minister Theresa May’s administration where she had to rely on DUP MPs under a confidence and supply agreement to keep her government in power?
Could current Tory PM Rishi Sunak give away sufficient tax cuts between now and the next Westminster election to guarantee his party returns with even a wafer-thin majority; a majority which ironically requires DUP MPs (if enough are returned!) to keep the Tories in power?
Likewise, gone seemingly are the days when top Tories like Boris Johnson were lauded and paraded like wartime heroes at DUP conferences.
It would be the irony of all political ironies if after the next General Election, either Sunak or his Labour counterpart Sir Keir Starmer needed a handful of DUP MPs to guarantee the keys to 10 Downing Street.
Unionists should not forget that since the early Seventies, it has been a Tory administration which has stabbed them in the political back the hardest.
In 1972, it was Tory PM Ted Heath who prorogued the original majority rule Stormont Parliament which had governed Northern Ireland for around half a century.
In 1985, it was Tory PM Maggie Thatcher who signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement which gave Dublin its first major say in the running of Northern Ireland since partition in the 1920s.
In 1993, it was Tory PM John Major who oversaw the Downing Street Declaration which effectively pulled the rug from under Unionism in terms of policing and security.
And in 2016, it was Europhile and Tory PM David Cameron (now as Lord Cameron has come back as Foreign Secretary) who practically abandoned Northern Ireland after he lost the Brexit referendum.
Now Unionism has to contend with the Protocol and Windsor Framework - both lumped on Northern Ireland by a Tory Government. Put bluntly, how many fans does Unionism now have even within the vehemently anti-EU group of Tory MPs in the hardline European Research Group (ERG)?
I even recall a former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, the late Jim Molyneaux, virtually in tears at my parents’ home in the days after Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Accord.
Molyneaux had always put faith in his personal political relationship with Thatcher and her signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985 he regarded as a total betrayal of that friendship.
According to Molyneaux, Thatcher did not even have the courtesy to drop a hint to him that she was going to sign the agreement.
Unionists have to swallow the bitter political medicine that Tory pontifications about keeping Northern Ireland in the Union as an integral and equal nation of the United Kingdom are meaningless rhetoric and to be taken with an extra large dose of political salt.
At least with a Labour administration, Unionism knows where it stands with the Westminster establishment. Irish Unity will be further up the political agenda under Labour rather than it be subtly hidden under the Conservatives.
Both Labour and the Tories will want to ensure the same situation which is plaguing other parts of Europe - namely the rise in influence of the Far Right - does not, like a bad dose of bird flu, emerge in Great Britain.
The Far Right is already electorally strong in Germany, France, Italy and Holland. Even the Gardai’s boss, former RUC man Drew Harris, pointed the accusing finger at elements of the Far Right as being behind the recent Dublin riots.
Whilst Northern Ireland has seen its fair share of rioting over past decades, it has not witnessed racially-motivated violence on a scale that was unleashed in Dublin recently.
Groups like the National Front, British National Party and British People’s Party have made failed attempts to gain electoral footholds in Northern Ireland in past years.
Compared to areas of GB and Dublin that are facing racial tensions, Northern Ireland has remained relatively free.
Could maintaining this racial harmony in Northern Ireland provide the DUP with an additional bargaining chip in these supposedly ‘final, final’ stages of the negotiations to restore Stormont?
But that key question still remains - can Unionism still trust a Tory administration to deliver a Stormont breakthrough if the DUP was to play the contentious race card?
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.... all of which makes you wonder: what's the point of unionism?
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