‘I hadn’t planned on being a politician. I genuinely didn’t. I always wanted to write’

Tucked away behind Guy’s Hospital in London, The Miller pub has a tiny stage in an L shaped room that hosted Matthew O’Toole’s debut comedy improv performance.

Actor and comedian Luke Sorba – now a Labour Party councillor for Lewisham – taught him in workshops: “I do remember Matthew because he worked in George Osborne’s office when he was chancellor of the Exchequer in the run-up to the 2015 general election, and we discussed politics.

“He was almost unique in turning up for class in a suit, having obviously come straight from the office. To be fair he did take his tie off. Alas, I don’t remember his comedy performances.”

O’Toole, who grew up in Downpatrick, Co. Down, later because a Downing Street spokesman, but is now to be the leader of the Opposition in Stormont following the SDLP’s decision to stand aside from Executive membership.

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Pubs have played a role in his life. In Downpatrick, he worked part-time at a nearby rural pub owned by his uncle Hugh. On the night of Ireland’s World Cup opener against Italy in 1994, UVF gunmen opened fire at the Heights Bar in Loughinisland and killed six Catholic men as they watched the game. It was among the worst atrocities of the Troubles.

The 39-year-old is reluctant to speak about the massacre and the impact on his family. He believes, however, that politics is conditioned by “how you grew up, where you grew up and the values imparted to you”.

“There definitely was something about the place where I grew up; it had relatively good, strong community relations at a difficult time and a culture focused on reconciliation,” he tells The Irish Times.

“I’m always very cautious about claiming myself as a direct victim of Loughinisland… I wasn’t but I’ll never forget it.

“It was significant in that my father was one of the first people on the scene. I can remember watching the match with my cousin who was staying over and my dad having to suddenly leave the house. My uncle was away at the time in Romania as part of a charity project.

“I latterly worked in the pub for a while after that. So you are aware of how it was deeply traumatic and remains a huge wound on that community.

“Obviously, the revelations of the investigation and pretty incontrovertible evidence of collusive behaviour has only made that more shocking subsequently.”

No surprise

O’Toole’s nomination this week as leader of the Opposition at Stormont for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) has come as no surprise to party veterans or political rivals.

Despite being co-opted only two years ago on to an Assembly seat in south Belfast and having spent most of his working life in Westminster, his intellect and Whitehall experience – he co-ordinated Downing St communications and policy prior to the 2016 Brexit Referendum – quickly established him as a rising star in a party crying out for new blood.

Quitting the civil service in 2017, he also became one of the UK’s most assured media pundits and leading writers on the negative impact of Brexit on Ireland.

“I think he’s an incredibly bright individual, and socially he’s great company,” says political commentator Tom Kelly, who masterminded successful SDLP election campaigns in the 1980s.

‘I was watching him at some of the Stormont finance committee meetings and was amazed at how the unionists had a real deference towards him’

“There’s an intensity to him. That’s a Durkan thing [his uncle is former SDLP deputy first minister Mark Durkan] and his questions tend to be very long, but that’s because he knows so much.

“I was watching him at some of the Stormont finance committee meetings and was amazed at how the unionists had a real deference towards him. That’s because of his time at the Treasury: he knows probably more than any other MLA about how government and the civil service work.

“He’s future leader material definitely. It’s interesting that he wasn’t comfortable electioneering. It’s very hard to ask people to vote for you. But he does have a likeable manner.

“There’s a brutal honesty to him. He didn’t deny he took the Assembly election results badly. He wasn’t running away from that.”

Humiliating defeat

Once commanding majority support within nationalism, the SDLP suffered a humiliating defeat in May’s Assembly polls with its seats reduced to just eight, down four from 2017, and relegating it to fifth place among the Stormont line-up.

The disappointing result meant the party lost its right to nominate a minister to the Executive.

Fighting his first election in the liberal south Belfast constituency, O’Toole won his seat – the last announced at the end of the first night of a tense count in the city’s Titanic Centre.

Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) MLA Jim Allister served alongside him in Stormont’s finance scrutiny committee, and concedes the SDLP “probably have more intellectual talent on their benches” than any other party. “For them, sadly that didn’t mean anything in the election,” he adds.

Asked about O’Toole’s suitability for leading an official Opposition – O’Toole has encouraged other parties to join to oppose the “division and deadlock infecting Stormont” – Allister responds: “Matthew is very able but he is very ponderous, that’s his biggest weakness. You listen to him sometimes and think: ‘You could have made that point in 30 seconds instead of two minutes.’ He does make a bit of meal out of issues. You can see his brain operating where he’s saying something and he’s thinking, ‘I have to close off this cul-de-sac and that cul-de-sac to make this point.’”

The sole TUV Assembly member is fiercely opposed to the mandatory powersharing coalition and has repeatedly called for an Opposition.

The North is without a functioning Assembly over the DUP’s refusal to elect a speaker over its ongoing protest over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Allister adds: “My one reservation is that Matthew and the SDLP are so ideologically wedded to the system; I wonder will that hold them back in terms applying the rigour and vigour that they need to apply. But there’s no doubt he’s able and picks up relevant points. I’m sure he’ll do it all right.”

Despite his family’s strong association with the party – another Durkan, SDLP Foyle MLA Mark H Durkan, is a first cousin – O’Toole insists he had no desire to enter politics.

He was born in Belfast and his father, a solicitor originally from Loughinisland, moved the family back to South Down when Matthew was a toddler during the mid 1980s.

After graduating from St Andrew’s University in Scotland, he went to London to pursue a career in journalism and worked for a company publishing political magazines while joining the Labour Party.

“I hadn’t planned on being a politician. I genuinely didn’t. I always wanted to write,” O’Toole says. “But someone from my background becoming a press officer in Whitehall – it gave you an insight into how big government departments work, having the experience of being inside the government machine…and I don’t mean this in a malign way, but realising in an everyday sort of way how little focus there is on Northern Ireland.

“We just aren’t a high priority in terms of the machinery of government in Whitehall. More often than not, I was disagreeing with the policies of the government I was working for – I started when it was still a Labour government under Gordon Brown.”

SDLP South Belfast MP Claire Hanna, who O’Toole replaced as an MLA following her landslide Westminster victory in 2019, was instrumental in securing his Stormont Assembly appointment. She attests to his claim there was “no big plan” behind the move: “I only met him three times before he was co-opted. He was literally in the right place at the right time.

“There was someone else lined up for the job, but who had a breakthrough in her own career. We were over in Westminster and trying to figure it all out after I became MP. I had corresponded with Matthew over Brexit and had lunch with him the first day he was in. I realised he was really clever and really personable.

“I asked Colm (Eastwood, SDLP party leader) to meet us for a drink. We kicked the tyre and that evening realised, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy.’ We were impressed with his writing on Brexit. But it was really random. It was not as if he was sniffing around to be an MLA.

‘He’s very much part of the intellectual core of the party at the moment. He’s got really solid judgment and is easy to work with’

“I remember whenever he was appointed, The New Statesman did an article on him. It was unusual for a British political magazine to cover co-options but everyone knew how bright he was. At no point in the last two years have I ever regretted the decision to bring him on board, in fact I routinely pat myself on the back for it.

“He’s very much part of the intellectual core of the party at the moment. He’s got really solid judgment and is easy to work with. But he’s also really good at slagging people.

“People enjoy his craic and will say to you privately that ‘Matthew’s sound’ as opposed to ‘Matthew’s got a large brain.’ Some are surprised that he is such good company and wears his learning quite lightly.”

Prior to May’s election, O’Toole became embroiled in a heated on-air debate with the BBC’s Stephen Nolan when he challenged him about the level of airtime given to a “small section of hardline voices” on the presenter’s daily phone-in show on BBC Radio Ulster.

Nolan, the fifth highest paid BBC presenter, hit back, saying critics were trying to “censor” certain voices. “Matthew was the first politician to make that challenge, others wouldn’t have dared,” Hanna notes.

Having just returned from paternity leave, O’Toole guards his privacy fiercely, though quipped on social media that “another redhead” has been “unleashed on the world” before thanking NHS staff for looking after his family following the birth of his baby boy.

“I’m married and we have two sons but I don’t do the whole Instagram thing, it’s not me,” he says.

Former Ulster Unionist leader Steve Aiken is more than happy to take a call about what he points out is the “interim” Opposition leader – until the Assembly is re-formed there “can be no Opposition” – while pushing his new born granddaughter around a park in Leicestershire.

“Matthew’s a very able politician and brings a wealth of experience about how government should be done in the Assembly if we get up and running,” says Aiken, who also served on the finance committee.

“Despite his rather peculiar views on the Protocol and the fact he wants a United Ireland, we get on very well and I think we’re similar in our outlook.”

However, Aiken – who once worked in Whitehall – believes O’Toole’s future does not lie in the Assembly.

“He would have been a natural Labour Party MP, which is probably where he’d be better off than here. His politics are a bit like mine, left of centre, He’s more in the Connor McGinn mode [McGinn is a Northern Ireland-born Labour Party MP] than any SDLP types.

“No matter what happens when we get the Assembly back, it’s going to be an uphill struggle for the SDLP. All parties in the centre, including our own, are being squeezed. So given his background, I wouldn’t be surprised in five to 10 years to see him as a Labour MP somewhere in middle England.”