What the commentators said

The DUP deal leaves May with some explaining to do, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. The governments of Scotland and Wales will want to know why the people of Northern Ireland – already receiving a disproportionate share of the public purse – should enjoy an extra dollop of taxpayer cash at a time of supposed austerity. During the election campaign, the Tories spoke derisively of Labour’s “magic money tree”. Now it seems that the Prime Minister has one “growing in her back garden”. What makes the deal so absurd is that the unionists’ support was already in the bag, said Jason Beattie in the Daily Mirror. Given their loathing for Jeremy Corbyn, they were never going to risk toppling the Government by voting down the Queen’s Speech. May has sapped the Conservatives’ reputation for economic prudence and “stoked resentment” in other parts of the country – and all for no purpose.

But there are good practical reasons for tying the DUP to a written agreement, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. What the Conservative whips badly wanted to avoid was “a hand-tomouth” existence, struggling to raise a majority for each vote amid constant speculation about the Government’s likely collapse. In the long run, it could also prove cheaper than any vote-by-vote arrangement, said Tim Bale in The Daily Telegraph. Locking the DUP into a formal “confidence and supply” deal should discourage it from “further attempts at blackmail” down the line. And less wailing please, about the threat this deal poses to peace in Northern Ireland, said Ruth Dudley Edwards in The Times. What it has done is put Sinn Féin on the back foot. Thanks to Gerry Adam’s lofty refusal to let his MPS take their seats in the Commons, Sinn Féin has no leverage in Westminster, whereas the DUP “has secured a big bag of money which they insist is for all the people of Northern Ireland”. Sinn Féin’s desire to have some say over how that money is now spent suddenly makes the idea of reviving the executive “very attractive”.