The resignation of the chancellor of the exchequer has had a purely coincidental benefit for the prime minister: his simultaneous sacking of the Northern Ireland secretary, Julian Smith, has evaded almost all attention. But not in the province itself. The Democratic Unionist Party declared itself furious: “If effectiveness was the measurement then he would still be in place. He had the measure of Dublin and all the Northern Irish parties.”

It hardly helped the (never exactly sunny) mood of the dominant unionist party of the north that a few days earlier Sinn Fein, the former political arm of the terrorist IRA, had taken the most first-choice votes in the Irish elections. Its candidates even outpolled the leaders of the two traditional parties, Fine Gael and