DAN KEENANreviews The Fall of the House of PaisleyBy David Gordon Gill Macmillan 255pp €14.99

SHORTLY BEFORE last June’s European election, Irish News political cartoonist Ian Knox penned an image that simply and effectively exposed the contradictions of the post-devolution DUP.

It featured Nigel Dodds, the DUP deputy leader and Diane Dodds, the party’s candidate for Brussels chatting over breakfast of their diaries for the day ahead.

Nigel announces he is going to “discuss financial matters with [Sinn Féin’s] Mitchel McLaughlin”. His candidate wife declares she is heading out on the hustings to “smash Sinn Féin”.

It was an unfunny joke in the heartlands of the DUP, and the image came to tell the story of that election in surprisingly few words well before the votes were cast.

Having topped the poll at each European election since 1979, the party won its seat, but only after limping home in third place and under the quota.

The DUP found it could not realistically claim to work against the rise of Sinn Féin on the doorsteps, having opted to share power with them in the Executive at Stormont.

The decision to do this followed one of the most striking policy changes by Ian Paisley – the principal subject of Gordon’s incisive and lively narrative.

The Fall of the House of Paisley begins on what was one of many momentous days at Stormont in 2007, the day when Paisley and Gerry Adams together with senior colleagues announced they had done a deal to restore devolution in Northern Ireland.

The resulting double act of Ian Paisley and the man he once described as “vile”, former IRA big hitter Martin McGuinness, quickly became known as the Chuckle Brothers.

Known for beaming broadly when, as joint heads of the new Executive, they were seen together in public, they were the oddest of political couples. But, as Gordon colourfully explains, not everyone was laughing.

It is with some skill that the acclaimed investigations correspondent at the Belfast Telegraph teases apart the strands of the story to explain how the Paisley dynasty crashed after barely a year.

Paisley’s problems were threefold: the son, the church and the party.

All were formed in Paisley’s own image, but within months of the Chuckle Brothers act, the first was made to resign and he lost control of the other two.

The fate of Ian Paisley jnr, Gordon concedes, is uncertain. Forced out of ministerial office over his dealing and lobbying, he lost his place at his father’s side.

He may yet rise again, but the prominence of the Paisley name and political brand could scarcely stand as proud again.

But there is much more to this book than the plotting of a downfall and its retrospective explanations. The faults that floored Paisley resonate in the party he created, as the European elections showed, despite being led now by Peter Robinson, the man who served as faithful deputy leader for nearly 30 years.

Tensions remain over the undeclared knowledge within the DUP, as Gordon cites, that the party finds itself in government with republicans thanks to the Robinson game plan. It was his scheme and he remains the party’s “master tactician”.

But it was Paisley senior who ultimately paid the price for the U-turn so soon after reaching the pinnacle of his tumultuous political career.

If Gordon’s work is to be seen as incomplete, it is in his lack of precision over the manner of Paisley’s decision to go as party leader and First Minister. Like so many reporters, he failed to breach the party’s mafia-style code of silence and the book misses a fuller account. To concentrate on this would be a disservice to the considerable forensic work carried out by the author, but he surely knows where his next task lies.

Dan Keenan is Northern News Editor of The Irish Times