A Dark Knight

Those demanding that Jeffrey Donaldson be stripped of his knighthood and removed from the Privy Council know perfectly well that those censures would have been applied without their interventions.

But Donaldson was a protégé of Enoch Powell and Jim Molyneaux, embodying the underremarked migration of integrationists from the UUP to the DUP. He was elected to the old Northern Ireland Assembly as long ago as 1985, when he was only 22, although even then he was already three years into being Powell’s constituency agent.

Donaldson’s proclivities must have been an open secret for 40 years. The question is why his protection was removed when it was.