That June Theresa May lost her majority and ten DUP MPs suddenly held the balance of power at Westminster. They sold their votes in a confidence and supply deal for £1 billion, and for a while the bible bashing creationists were the most powerful men and women in British politics.
Paisley junior seemed drunk on hubris. In January 2019, days before the Commons voted on May's withdrawal deal, a BBC Newsnight reporter asked him if he would be offering the Prime Minister any sympathy after a difficult day. "I will be asking her for milk and no sugar," he said. It was meant as a joke. It reads now like an epitaph.
To understand what came next you have to understand what the DUP was actually trying to do. Unionism knew it could not win the long demographic game. The Protestant majority the Northern state was built to guarantee was gone, and the trend lines only run one way.
Brexit offered a way out of that arithmetic. Whatever they said in public, their opposition to May's backstop only made sense if the border went back where partition had put it, on the land, in Ireland. Reassert the border, harden the Union, and effectively rip up the Good Friday Agreement in the process. So days after Paisley's quip they helped vote May's deal down by 230 votes, the heaviest defeat a British government had suffered in the Commons in modern times, and they voted it down twice more.
The plan backfired in the most spectacular way. In October 2019 Boris Johnson, the man they had cheered at their own party conference the year before, agreed a deal that put the border down the Irish Sea. In December he won his landslide against Corbyn's Labour, an 80 seat majority, and unlike May he did not need the DUP. Nigel Dodds lost North Belfast and Emma Little-Pengelly lost South Belfast the same night. It was outrageous to think the blackmail they exerted on May's government would not be revisited with a vengeance once the DUP's support was no longer needed, and it was.
The sea border was more than a betrayal. It was the British state placing part of what it claims as its own national territory under a body of law in whose making it has no vote, setting the North outside its own sovereign decision making process. A government that believed a future majority in the North would vote to stay in the Union would be highly unlikely to make that call over the sovereignty of part of what it deems its national territory. It reads instead as a long, slow disengagement, preparation for withdrawal when demographics make the North's continued existence untenable.
The material consequences are already visible. With the North left inside the EU single market for goods, its economy has begun to turn on an all-island axis. North-South trade in goods stagnated at between €2 billion and €3 billion a year from 2001 to the 2016 referendum; it has set new records since, with northern firms selling €5.5 billion into the South last year. The sea border is quietly laying the foundations of an economic united Ireland within the EU. The DUP, of all parties, were to the fore in bringing about these conditions.
Like Icarus the DUP had flown too close to the sun, and the rot was in the wings before the Brexit gamble. The Renewable Heat Incentive, set up under Arlene Foster's watch, paid claimants more to burn fuel than the fuel cost them, and much of the money flowed to poultry sheds and rural businesses in the DUP's own heartlands. Whatever the intent, it was a transfer of public money into the party's own social base. When it blew up, Martin McGuinness resigned in January 2017 and Stormont went dark for three years, while Foster's answer to the demand for an Irish Language Act was that you don't feed a crocodile.
Then came Paisley himself. In 2018 he was suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days, the longest ban on record, for failing to declare two luxury family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government, and for lobbying on that government's behalf. A recall petition in North Antrim fell just short, at 9.4% against the 10% needed. The DUP quietly readmitted him the day before it closed. The party closed ranks, and the voters remembered.
By 2021 the Irish Sea border was biting and the party turned on itself. Foster had survived RHI, but she could not survive her own MLAs. In April at least 22 of them and four MPs signed a letter of no confidence, angry at her handling of the Protocol and at her decision to abstain on a vote to ban gay conversion therapy.
The internecine feuding that followed was something to behold. Edwin Poots won the leadership, but it had a short shelf life. He lasted 21 days before a mutiny removed him, and Jeffrey Donaldson was waved through unopposed. Jamie Bryson even live-tweeted a key internal meeting as it happened. Three leaders in two months, and the worst was still to come.
Under Donaldson the party pulled down the Executive in February 2022 in protest at the Protocol. Three months later Sinn Féin topped the poll in the Assembly election for the first time. The boycott ran for two years, and when the DUP came back in February 2024 on the back of "Safeguarding the Union", it was to watch Michelle O'Neill take the First Minister's chair. Every move made to protect the Union had delivered the very thing they feared.
Weeks later Donaldson was charged and walked out of the leadership. In June 2026 a unanimous jury at Newry Crown Court convicted him of 18 historical child sex offences against two girls, including rape, and in October he was jailed for 15 years. The judge called it a catastrophic descent into disgrace. Edwin Poots has since said that quite a number of people within the DUP knew about concerns a woman had raised about Donaldson's behaviour. Who knew what, and when, now hangs over the party hierarchy like the sword of Damocles.
The voters had already passed judgement. In the July 2024 Westminster election the DUP fell from eight seats to five. They lost Lagan Valley to Alliance, South Antrim to the Ulster Unionists, and North Antrim, held by a Paisley since 1970, to Jim Allister of the TUV.
When a political class loses the material argument, it retreats into culture. This autumn Drumcree was resurrected, and the leadership of Unionism was deferred to Jamie Bryson, an unelected loyalist acting as legal adviser to the Portadown Orangemen. He was candid about the strategy: everyone would come to the table, he said, once they had fought each other to exhaustion in a culture war. "Either the Portadown District goes down (the Garvaghy Road) or the Executive goes down," he told Orangemen. Carla Lockhart, DUP MP for Upper Bann, stood beside him on Drumcree hill and warned of "profound consequences" if the parade did not get through.
It was a zero sum contest of their own choosing, and they lost it. The residents of the Garvaghy Road held their ground, the march was blocked and then banned, and the Executive did not go down either. Gavin Robinson would not pull Emma Little-Pengelly out of office. He settled for what he called a graduated response, which meant boycotting joint engagements with O'Neill.
Lockhart resigned as a party officer on 22 October. On 2 November she left the party altogether, saying the response had fallen far short of the profound consequences promised. She now sits as an independent unionist, with Jim Allister holding the door open, and talks of building a grassroots movement within Unionism. Her departure leaves the DUP with four MPs, its fewest at Westminster in 25 years.
The desertion has not stopped at Upper Bann. In Dungannon, Clement Cuthbertson, a party member since 1996 and a councillor since 2014, quit to sit as an Independent Unionist on Mid Ulster council, citing a loss of confidence in the direction the DUP has taken. There are reports of a party split three ways, with one faction said to want Paul Givan in Robinson's place. It is a poor platform from which to fight an Assembly election in May.
Look at where the train wreck has left them. Unionism now sends five separate strands to Westminster: the DUP, the Ulster Unionists, the TUV, and two independents in Lockhart and Alex Easton. The DUP, the UUP and the TUV are jostling within a few points of each other in the polls, three parties fighting over ground that has room for two. A fractured Unionism is not a temporary crisis of leadership; it is the political expression of a social base that is shrinking and an economy that is quietly reorienting south.
Meanwhile nationalism emerges from Drumcree galvanised and resurgent. Sinn Féin's support had been drifting, its base apathetic at how little its ineptitude at Stormont, and the sectarian carve-up there, had delivered for families and communities. In July a LucidTalk poll had the party on 22%, down from the 29% it won in 2022. Like Foster's crocodile moment, Drumcree handed it a confrontation with the old enemy and a much needed distraction from its own failures. By late October More in Common had Sinn Féin up five points in three months, from 25% to 30%, and named it the main political beneficiary of the Drumcree fallout, with an Assembly election due in 2027.
Every confrontation the DUP picked over these nine years, it lost, and every red line it drew was crossed. In 2017 it held a British government in the palm of its hand. In 2026 it cannot hold on to its own MP in Upper Bann.
The party that set out to save the Union by hardening the border has instead hastened the material conditions for ending it. The Northern state was already on borrowed time; the DUP has shortened the loan. Those who once asked a British prime minister for milk and no sugar are left in disarray and desertion, and no one is putting the kettle on.
Sources
• News Letter: Paisley "milk and no sugar"
• RTÉ: Paisley survives recall petition
• Irish News: Paisley readmitted a day before petition closed
• Irish Times: Foster bows out as First Minister
• Irish Times: why cross-border trade has leapt since Brexit
• Irish News: cross-border trade at record levels in 2025
• Irish Times: Donaldson sentenced to 15 years
• PA: Number in DUP knew about claim over Donaldson behaviour, Poots
• Irish Times: Who is Jamie Bryson?
• Irish Times: Jamie Bryson, unionists "must go on the offensive"
• RTÉ: Carla Lockhart resigns from DUP
• Irish Times: Unionism splinters again
• Irish Times, Newton Emerson: serious talk about the end of the DUP
• Clanrye News: three factions report
• Poliwave: LucidTalk poll, July 2026
• Irish Times: More in Common Drumcree poll, October 2026
• Irish News: polling confirms Sinn Féin surge on back of Drumcree
• TPQ, Packy Carty: On Borrowed Time
• News Letter: DUP councillor resigns after 20 years with the party
• Slugger O'Toole: Carla Lockhart quits the DUP
Paisley junior seemed drunk on hubris. In January 2019, days before the Commons voted on May's withdrawal deal, a BBC Newsnight reporter asked him if he would be offering the Prime Minister any sympathy after a difficult day. "I will be asking her for milk and no sugar," he said. It was meant as a joke. It reads now like an epitaph.
To understand what came next you have to understand what the DUP was actually trying to do. Unionism knew it could not win the long demographic game. The Protestant majority the Northern state was built to guarantee was gone, and the trend lines only run one way.
Brexit offered a way out of that arithmetic. Whatever they said in public, their opposition to May's backstop only made sense if the border went back where partition had put it, on the land, in Ireland. Reassert the border, harden the Union, and effectively rip up the Good Friday Agreement in the process. So days after Paisley's quip they helped vote May's deal down by 230 votes, the heaviest defeat a British government had suffered in the Commons in modern times, and they voted it down twice more.
The plan backfired in the most spectacular way. In October 2019 Boris Johnson, the man they had cheered at their own party conference the year before, agreed a deal that put the border down the Irish Sea. In December he won his landslide against Corbyn's Labour, an 80 seat majority, and unlike May he did not need the DUP. Nigel Dodds lost North Belfast and Emma Little-Pengelly lost South Belfast the same night. It was outrageous to think the blackmail they exerted on May's government would not be revisited with a vengeance once the DUP's support was no longer needed, and it was.
The sea border was more than a betrayal. It was the British state placing part of what it claims as its own national territory under a body of law in whose making it has no vote, setting the North outside its own sovereign decision making process. A government that believed a future majority in the North would vote to stay in the Union would be highly unlikely to make that call over the sovereignty of part of what it deems its national territory. It reads instead as a long, slow disengagement, preparation for withdrawal when demographics make the North's continued existence untenable.
The material consequences are already visible. With the North left inside the EU single market for goods, its economy has begun to turn on an all-island axis. North-South trade in goods stagnated at between €2 billion and €3 billion a year from 2001 to the 2016 referendum; it has set new records since, with northern firms selling €5.5 billion into the South last year. The sea border is quietly laying the foundations of an economic united Ireland within the EU. The DUP, of all parties, were to the fore in bringing about these conditions.
Like Icarus the DUP had flown too close to the sun, and the rot was in the wings before the Brexit gamble. The Renewable Heat Incentive, set up under Arlene Foster's watch, paid claimants more to burn fuel than the fuel cost them, and much of the money flowed to poultry sheds and rural businesses in the DUP's own heartlands. Whatever the intent, it was a transfer of public money into the party's own social base. When it blew up, Martin McGuinness resigned in January 2017 and Stormont went dark for three years, while Foster's answer to the demand for an Irish Language Act was that you don't feed a crocodile.
Then came Paisley himself. In 2018 he was suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days, the longest ban on record, for failing to declare two luxury family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government, and for lobbying on that government's behalf. A recall petition in North Antrim fell just short, at 9.4% against the 10% needed. The DUP quietly readmitted him the day before it closed. The party closed ranks, and the voters remembered.
By 2021 the Irish Sea border was biting and the party turned on itself. Foster had survived RHI, but she could not survive her own MLAs. In April at least 22 of them and four MPs signed a letter of no confidence, angry at her handling of the Protocol and at her decision to abstain on a vote to ban gay conversion therapy.
The internecine feuding that followed was something to behold. Edwin Poots won the leadership, but it had a short shelf life. He lasted 21 days before a mutiny removed him, and Jeffrey Donaldson was waved through unopposed. Jamie Bryson even live-tweeted a key internal meeting as it happened. Three leaders in two months, and the worst was still to come.
Under Donaldson the party pulled down the Executive in February 2022 in protest at the Protocol. Three months later Sinn Féin topped the poll in the Assembly election for the first time. The boycott ran for two years, and when the DUP came back in February 2024 on the back of "Safeguarding the Union", it was to watch Michelle O'Neill take the First Minister's chair. Every move made to protect the Union had delivered the very thing they feared.
Weeks later Donaldson was charged and walked out of the leadership. In June 2026 a unanimous jury at Newry Crown Court convicted him of 18 historical child sex offences against two girls, including rape, and in October he was jailed for 15 years. The judge called it a catastrophic descent into disgrace. Edwin Poots has since said that quite a number of people within the DUP knew about concerns a woman had raised about Donaldson's behaviour. Who knew what, and when, now hangs over the party hierarchy like the sword of Damocles.
The voters had already passed judgement. In the July 2024 Westminster election the DUP fell from eight seats to five. They lost Lagan Valley to Alliance, South Antrim to the Ulster Unionists, and North Antrim, held by a Paisley since 1970, to Jim Allister of the TUV.
When a political class loses the material argument, it retreats into culture. This autumn Drumcree was resurrected, and the leadership of Unionism was deferred to Jamie Bryson, an unelected loyalist acting as legal adviser to the Portadown Orangemen. He was candid about the strategy: everyone would come to the table, he said, once they had fought each other to exhaustion in a culture war. "Either the Portadown District goes down (the Garvaghy Road) or the Executive goes down," he told Orangemen. Carla Lockhart, DUP MP for Upper Bann, stood beside him on Drumcree hill and warned of "profound consequences" if the parade did not get through.
It was a zero sum contest of their own choosing, and they lost it. The residents of the Garvaghy Road held their ground, the march was blocked and then banned, and the Executive did not go down either. Gavin Robinson would not pull Emma Little-Pengelly out of office. He settled for what he called a graduated response, which meant boycotting joint engagements with O'Neill.
Lockhart resigned as a party officer on 22 October. On 2 November she left the party altogether, saying the response had fallen far short of the profound consequences promised. She now sits as an independent unionist, with Jim Allister holding the door open, and talks of building a grassroots movement within Unionism. Her departure leaves the DUP with four MPs, its fewest at Westminster in 25 years.
The desertion has not stopped at Upper Bann. In Dungannon, Clement Cuthbertson, a party member since 1996 and a councillor since 2014, quit to sit as an Independent Unionist on Mid Ulster council, citing a loss of confidence in the direction the DUP has taken. There are reports of a party split three ways, with one faction said to want Paul Givan in Robinson's place. It is a poor platform from which to fight an Assembly election in May.
Look at where the train wreck has left them. Unionism now sends five separate strands to Westminster: the DUP, the Ulster Unionists, the TUV, and two independents in Lockhart and Alex Easton. The DUP, the UUP and the TUV are jostling within a few points of each other in the polls, three parties fighting over ground that has room for two. A fractured Unionism is not a temporary crisis of leadership; it is the political expression of a social base that is shrinking and an economy that is quietly reorienting south.
Meanwhile nationalism emerges from Drumcree galvanised and resurgent. Sinn Féin's support had been drifting, its base apathetic at how little its ineptitude at Stormont, and the sectarian carve-up there, had delivered for families and communities. In July a LucidTalk poll had the party on 22%, down from the 29% it won in 2022. Like Foster's crocodile moment, Drumcree handed it a confrontation with the old enemy and a much needed distraction from its own failures. By late October More in Common had Sinn Féin up five points in three months, from 25% to 30%, and named it the main political beneficiary of the Drumcree fallout, with an Assembly election due in 2027.
Every confrontation the DUP picked over these nine years, it lost, and every red line it drew was crossed. In 2017 it held a British government in the palm of its hand. In 2026 it cannot hold on to its own MP in Upper Bann.
The party that set out to save the Union by hardening the border has instead hastened the material conditions for ending it. The Northern state was already on borrowed time; the DUP has shortened the loan. Those who once asked a British prime minister for milk and no sugar are left in disarray and desertion, and no one is putting the kettle on.
Sources
• News Letter: Paisley "milk and no sugar"
• RTÉ: Paisley survives recall petition
• Irish News: Paisley readmitted a day before petition closed
• Irish Times: Foster bows out as First Minister
• Irish Times: why cross-border trade has leapt since Brexit
• Irish News: cross-border trade at record levels in 2025
• Irish Times: Donaldson sentenced to 15 years
• PA: Number in DUP knew about claim over Donaldson behaviour, Poots
• Irish Times: Who is Jamie Bryson?
• Irish Times: Jamie Bryson, unionists "must go on the offensive"
• RTÉ: Carla Lockhart resigns from DUP
• Irish Times: Unionism splinters again
• Irish Times, Newton Emerson: serious talk about the end of the DUP
• Clanrye News: three factions report
• Poliwave: LucidTalk poll, July 2026
• Irish Times: More in Common Drumcree poll, October 2026
• Irish News: polling confirms Sinn Féin surge on back of Drumcree
• TPQ, Packy Carty: On Borrowed Time
• News Letter: DUP councillor resigns after 20 years with the party
• Slugger O'Toole: Carla Lockhart quits the DUP
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