Peter Robinson
Willie McCrea and Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson is STILL on the run from rebels within his own Party ranks.
And it’s not just down to this week’s shock sacking of Stormont Health Minister Edwin Poots – one of the main men rumoured to behind a plot to replace under-pressure Peter both as DUP boss and Stormont First MInister.
Two other top DUP men – both loyalists to late the Reverend Ian Paisley – are also alleged to be firmly in the frame for ‘fixing up’ an attempted coup on Robinson.
They are Lord Maurice Morrow, now Peer of the Realm in the House of Lords at Westminster, and the Rev. Willie McCrea, the Bible-bashing pulpit crooning Free P pastor who is said to have taken the way Ian Paisley was axed as both Party leader and church Moderator both ‘personally and politically’.
Lord Maurice Morrow
It is still unclear whether either of that couple of political veterans were at the behind closed doors crunch meeting at Stormont where Peter Robinson went head-to-head with Edwin Poots earlier this week.
But what is clear, and is now a matter of record, is that Robinson sacked Poots from his Health Minister’s portfolio the next day.
Today, the Sunday World – which originally broke the Robinson rebel coup story way back on July 13 last – not only names the main DUP men allegedly behind the plot to remove Robbo as both Party leader and First Minister at Stormont.
We reveal that it was a Bakers’ Dozen of disgruntled DUP politicians who cooked up the storm now raging around Robinson.
Our sources say that no less than THIRTEEN of those gathered for the secret show
down, and who rallied around Poots, also had a poke at Robinson’s leadership.
The ‘official’ Party line played out immediately to the daily Press was that the rift was over off-the-record plans made between Robinson and Ulster Secretary of State Teresa Villiers to patch together a new peace pact over parades, flags and emblems – and especially the volatile Orange Order stand-off over the Ardoyne flashpoint.
But way back on July 13 last, the Sunday World ran a front page story revealing an internal DUP plot to oust Peter Robinson both as Party leader and First Minister.
DUP PR apparatchiks – and Westminster MP Sammy Wilson – tried to spike that story.
Sammy Wilson even went on the record the next day, issuing a statement through Party headquarters, which stated:
“The story in the Sunday World is nothing but ill-informed tabloid nonsense.”
But after the bust-up and continuing barneys and back-biting which has erupted after the bile and bitterness this week, we now invite Mr Wilson to eat his words issued on July 14 last.
For we have been proved RIGHT.
And Sammy has been proved WRONG.
The events of the past week prove that.
We also said that a hard core of DUP politicians, both at Westminster and back in Belfast at Stormont, were trying to get rid of Robbo.
Just hours after being axed as a Minister as a consequence, Edwin Poots went on the Nolan Show and said that the Party leader would be standing down within months.
He said it was ‘general knowledge’ that Mr Robinson would quit ‘within months’.
Little wonder – the Sunday World had put the coup bid, and the consequences of that, in the public domain way back on July 13 last, and in a follow-up story the following week.
But the fact remains that the DUP dissidents trying to stage a coup d’etat on Robinson – just the same way he and his ‘suits’ in the Party Judassed Ian Paisley before the ‘Big Man’ passed away – have sparked another blistering war of words, blatantly exposing the barbed-wire-in-the-blood bitterness now pulsing through Ulster’s biggest political party.
Peter Robinson has berated those plotting against him as ‘lemmings’, pillorying them as people ‘puffed up by their own importance’.
Edwin Poots says Robbo will be on the run within a matter of weeks.
But the Sunday World can reveal that the DUP hierarchy, who tried to ‘rubbish’ our exclusive stories of a coup bid way back in July last, are in for another shock today.
For those same sources who told us of a rebellion in the Robinson ranks are now telling us that of the 13 who stormed the barricades to barrack Robinson at that behind closed doors head-to-head earlier this week ‘four or five of them’ are considering defecting to the original rebel in DUP ranks, Jim Allister, who now runs the rival Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party.
If that happens, and no matter what Sammy Wilson or others loyal to Robinson rant about ‘ill-informed tabloid nonsense’, the Sunday World sources inside the DUP will be proved RIGHT once again.