DUP deal will make Tories the nasty party again, says Patten

The former Conservative Party chairman says anger will arise if Northern Ireland is given more cash

‘The DUP is a toxic brand and the Conservative Party has got itself back into the situation where there’s a danger of it looking like the nasty party’

THE Conservative Party risks returning to its reputation as the “nasty party” if it seals a deal with the “toxic” DUP, Lord Patten, the former Tory chairman, has said.

With just four days to go until Parliament votes on the Queen’s Speech, the Conservatives have yet to reach an agreement with the DUP under which the party from Northern Ireland would vote with the Government to give Theresa May a working majority.

The two sides are at loggerheads over the issue of money, with the DUP demanding at least £750 million in extra spending on the province.

Lord Patten suggested “every vote” from the DUP would cost the country money and suggested voters in other parts of the UK would be angry that Ulster was getting special treatment. His comments echoed the words of Sir John Major, the former Conservative prime minister, who said that a deal with the DUP could put the Good Friday Agreement at risk and advised against it.

Lord Patten told ITV’S Peston on Sunday: “The DUP is a toxic brand and the Conservative Party has got itself back into the situation where there’s a danger of it looking like the ‘nasty party’, to borrow from Theresa May.”

Mrs May told the 2002 Conservative Party conference that “some people call us the nasty party” and warned at the time that the party needed to broaden its base.

Lord Patten said he could not see “how that’s improved by ganging up with the DUP”.

In an exchange with the Tory MP Jacob Rees-mogg, who is in favour of the deal, Lord Patten said: “Every vote will cost you. Every vote, you will have to find some way of paying for it and then explain to the Scots and the Welsh and people in the North East why they can’t have the same thing too.”

Last week, Damian Green, Mrs May’s right-hand man, admitted it was now “possible” that no formal deal with the DUP would be reached, but Cabinet ministers remain confident the DUP will vote in favour of the Queen’s Speech on Thursday without one.

In an extraordinary attack on Mrs May’s leadership, Lord Patten suggested the country was in its worst crisis since Suez in 1956, adding that he found it extraordinary that someone who seemed to dislike meeting the public had made it to the top in politics.

“It’s like becoming a doctor and not liking the sight of blood,” he said.

“It’s very odd that people go into politics and, unlike somebody like Bill Clinton, don’t actually like people very much.”

Asked how he compared the country’s current situation with past crises, he said: “Well, the seventies weren’t great, because we wondered whether Britain was still governable, partly because of the abuse of trade union power which the Wilson government, the Callaghan government and then the Conservative government tried to deal with.

“But I think in some ways this is worse. And I think it’s the worst time Jacob Rees-mogg, a Tory MP, with Labour’s Angela Eagle on Peston On Sunday since Suez, though maybe even worse than that because Suez was the end of an era, it was the end of our colonial aspirations, we had the knees cut from under us, the legs cut from under us by the Americans, and this was Europe, the European Union was our replacement for that colonial role.

“And thanks to the calamitous errors of two Conservative prime ministers in a row, who thought that they could manage the unmanageable English nationalist Right-wing of the Conservative Party, we’re in this hell of a mess.”

The Suez crisis, in which Britain, Israel and France failed to secure control of the Suez Canal after Egypt’s President Nasser Hussein had nationalised it, led to the resignation of Anthony Eden as prime minister.

Lord Patten was appointed to lead an independent commission on policing in Northern Ireland by Tony Blair in 1998. Known as the Patten Commission, its recommendations led to the recruitment of equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant officers.