One place where Hugh Orde has made his mark in his first 100 days is at public meetings of the Policing Board, the most revealing political forum in the north.
No other arena illustrates so clearly the political ineptitude of unionists. You can see their jalopy in full glory, wheels spinning, throwing muck everywhere. They still haven't copped on that exclusive ownership of the police has been taken from their hands for they talk as if the Chief Constable is at their beck and call. They don't realise how foolish they sound, puffed up with their own importance, yet everyone but them knows they're completely powerless without the support of a majority of the board.
It's difficult to tell which of them is the funniest or most preposterous. The DUP-UUP rivalry adds spice of course: they all feel they need to say something, no matter how inane, for public consumption. Probably the best value is the great windbag of unionist politics, Lord Kilclooney, known in former vapourings as John Taylor. He tried to patronise the new Chief Constable, warning him that in Norn Irn political comment by a police officer is "a very dangerous thing indeed".
Hugh Orde deserves a medal for being able to keep a straight face while he coolly dismissed the condescension.
Here was a former member of the tin-pot junta which the British government had to abolish for being unfit to run a political slum with a population smaller than Liverpool, pontificating about the role of police.
With a background like that you'd think his lordship would crawl into a corner and cover his head. But he takes none of it himself: those pre-1972 years were wonderful. What was Lord Kilclooney's complaint? Hugh Orde had appealed for Sinn Féin to nominate members to the Policing Board: a political comment?
Very revealing. It was okay for policemen of all ranks over the last 35 years to appeal at every opportunity for Roman Ketholicks to support the RUC, for the SDLP to support the RUC, for the whole community to support the RUC. It was okay to ask them when the police was a completely sectarian organisation in membership, symbols and allegiance created to defend an exclusively British political entity. Nothing political about that eh?
The truth of the matter is of course that the unionists on the board don't want Sinn Féin on it. They're afraid Hugh Orde will succeed in making the PSNI acceptable to Sinn Féin in conjunction with amendments to the Police Act and further reform of the Special Branch. It's gonna happen and there's nothing unionists can do about it. Any more than they can do anything about the retirement of Mr Lowry, their latest gripe.
If Lord Kilclooney takes the biscuit for windbaggery, then Ian Og, his da's glove puppet, stands out as the board's resident political twerp, always ready with a piece of important sounding nonsense.
Naturally Ian Og called for a public inquiry in the sure and certain knowledge there's as much chance of getting one as there is of him becoming hereditary leader of the DUP. Isn't it delightful that in his own political persona Ian Og provides the best evidence for the deficiency of the monarchical concept in which his father sets so much store?
The posturings of unionists towards the gallery at board meetings and their surly reaction to non-political policing structures have had consequences. The most recent figures published by the British administration here show that Protestant confidence in the Policing Board helping police do a good job has fallen from 67 per cent to 66 per cent while Catholics' confidence has risen to 75 per cent.
Watching unionists making such a poor fist of it in public sessions of the board has depressed Protestants and encouraged Catholics who now have more confidence in the board than they have in the PSNI. Unionist behaviour is at least consistent. They have worked from the moment the Good Friday Agreement was signed to rubbish all its institutions, the executive, all-Ireland bodies, the Policing Board and now the Chief Constable whom they view as an instrument of the agreement: and that's just the pro-agreement unionists.
Given that sort of leadership, why does anyone imagine the response of the unionist electorate to the same institutions will be anything other than hostile?
