Pharisees in the Democratic Unionist Party

And Apparently everyone knew.

The man stood at the lectern in the Northern Ireland Assembly, voice steady with the calm certainty of one who has read the relevant verses and found them unambiguous. Homosexual practice, he explained, was sinful according to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike. It was a sincerely held view, shared by people of all faiths. This was 2006. In the same year, two senior detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland watched him enter Chariots, a London sauna marketed explicitly as a place for gay men to meet. They were, by their own later account, shocked. The DUP, after all, had built a political identity on opposition to what it called the normalisation of sin. Bigotry toward the gay community was afterall part of the Democratic Unionist Party’s DNA: No Taigs, No Gays.

Jeffrey Donaldson, the former Member of Parliament and knight of the realm no less, is now a convicted child rapist. On Monday, a jury at Newry Crown Court found him guilty on all eighteen counts: one of rape, thirteen of indecent assault, and four of gross indecency, committed against two girls when they were children. The offences stretched across decades. He showed no emotion as the verdicts were delivered. The judge told him a lengthy prison sentence was inevitable. He has since asked to be stripped of his knighthood and has resigned from the Privy Council. As if the king of England would take advice from a depraved pervert from prison. Donaldson’s wife, through the peculiar legal mechanism of a “trial of the facts,” was found to have committed the no less evil acts of aiding and abetting Donaldson’s crimes.

When Eleanor Donaldson was asked by the husband of one of Donaldson’s victims why she stayed with him, she replied: “If I was to leave Jeffrey, what would the neighbours think?”

What could be more delinquently depraved than Eleanor Donaldson’s reply, this tiny, quavering invocation of the neighbours’ opinion as the final, unanswerable tribunal before which even the rape of children must be weighed and found wanting? Here is the moral universe reduced to its most squalid suburban essence: a life in which the real horror is not the violation of a child’s body but the prospect of a curtain twitching across the street, not the stench of what has been done in one’s own house but the faint risk that someone might whisper about it over the garden fence or after the Sunday service. She could not leave him because of what the neighbours might think; she could not tear the mask from her own complicity because the mask, once dropped, would leave her exposed to the judgment of people whose only claim to moral authority was that they lived nearby and had nothing better to do than monitor the respectable facades of others. It is the ultimate triumph of the moralistic Christian soul, in which social death is more terrifying than any actual death, in which the preservation of a tidy house and an unblemished reputation outweighs any obligation to the living victims suffering. The statement does not even rise to the level of cowardice; it is something smaller and more obscene, the automatic reflex of a mind that has long since decided that the only real sin is being talked about. If I were to leave Jeffrey, what would the neighbours think? A statement so exquisitely, repellently ornate in its moral inversion that it deserves to be carved in marble above the gates of every respectable hell.

In the sulphurous year of 2006, two senior PSNI detectives, custodians of order in a province still marinated in its own sectarian brine, found themselves watching as Jeffrey Donaldson slunk into a sauna that openly advertised itself as a humid flesh-market for men who preferred their encounters without the tedious sanction of Unionist wedding vows or biblical footnotes. One pictures the scene in all its steam-drenched banality: the future DUP stalwart, knight of the realm, defender of Unionist rectitude and Presbyterian propriety, shedding the carapace of public piety at the door and stepping, pale and furtive, into that warm, dripping labyrinth of anonymous grunting and slippery limbs. Why, precisely, were two senior detectives stalking him in the first place? What shadows were they already following through the back alleys of Northern Irish power? What quiet dossier of indiscretions, what web of informants, what institutional instinct for the rot beneath the starched collar had set them on his scent years before the child-rape convictions? Here, in the fetid gloop of it all, the respectable mask slips just enough to reveal the familiar spectacle: the moralist who polices everyone else’s bedroom while keeping his own vices tucked neatly behind the sauna’s frosted glass, the politician whose public hatred of “perversion” is merely the flip side of a private hunger he cannot name without bringing the whole edifice of neighbourly judgment crashing down. The detectives saw, they noted, and the questions, like so much unsavoury condensation, continue to drip.

There is a particular Christian quality to the depravity of the respectable man. It is not the flamboyant wickedness of the obvious monster, the one who leers from the shadows. It is the depravity that wears a suit to church, that quotes scripture while arranging its criminally depraved desires, that builds a public career on the condemnation of other people’s sexual peccadillos while nursing its own in tiled rooms where the steam hides faces. Donaldson’s case offers the full grotesque diorama. The public sermon against the sin of homosexuality; the private visit to the place where that sin, in the narrow definition he and his party understood it, could be practised or at least contemplated without the encumbrance of wives, children, or political consequence. And then, beneath both, the far worse thing: the systematic sexual abuse of children. One wants, in these moments, to reach for the old theological language, because it fits the architecture of similar scandals so precisely. The Pharisee who cleans the outside of the cup while the inside remains full of extortion and self-indulgence. The man who can parse the difference between the sin of sodomy and the sin of raping a child, and conclude that only the former requires loud public denunciation. The steam room becomes a kind of anti-chapel, a place where the body’s heat and the body’s shame can be managed in parallel. The detectives who saw him enter did not, apparently, follow him inside. They simply registered the fact and filed it away in whatever compartment the state keeps for the inconvenient contradictions of its more prominent Christian citizens.

The hypocrisy is almost too neat to be believed, which is why it must be believed. A politician whose party treated the question of gay marriage as an existential threat to civilisation, whose public Christianity was not a private piety but a political instrument, steps into a facility whose entire purpose is the facilitation of the acts he has spent years framing as an abomination. The future DUP stalwart, knight of the realm, defender of Unionist rectitude and Presbyterian propriety, shedding the carapace of public piety at the door and stepping, pale and furtive, into that warm, dripping labyrinth of anonymous grunting and slippery limbs. One imagines the compartments in his mind: the public self that thunders against the decay of morals; the private self that seeks relief in steam and anonymous souls; the criminal self that preys on the defenceless. These are not, in the end, separate people. They are the same organism, sustained by the same talent for compartmentalisation that allows a man to stand in court and hear himself described as a rapist of children while maintaining the posture of the wronged parliamentarian. The depravity is not merely the acts themselves, though those are monstrous enough, but the sustained performance of virtue that made the acts possible for so long. The children could be abused because the abuser had already constructed a world in which his desires, however degenerate, were secondary to his public role as a moral hypocrite.

Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland have a particular talent for producing these figures. The province’s political culture has long rewarded those who can speak of sin with authority while arranging their private lives around its more practical demands. Donaldson is not an aberration so much as an intensification. The same man who could lecture an assembly on the theological consensus against homosexuality could, in the same calendar year, seek out a place where that consensus was, for a few hours at least, suspended. The conviction for child rape does not erase the earlier hypocrisy; it completes it. The man who policed other people’s bedrooms turned out to have no compunction about destroying children’s lives.

In the grimness of the unmasking. The jury believed the victims. The court did its work. Donaldson will be sentenced in September and will, one assumes, spend a considerable portion of whatever remains of his life in prison. The knighthood is gone or going. The political career is ash. Yet the deeper scandal is not that such men exist, but that the structures around them - parties, churches, police files, the quiet accommodations of power - allowed the double life to continue for decades. The detectives saw him enter the sauna in 2006 and did nothing that appears to have altered his trajectory. Senior figures in the Democratic Unionist Party received warnings about a young woman and chose, it seems, to look elsewhere. The public performance of Christian rectitude continued uninterrupted until the criminal evidence became overwhelming.

There is a peculiar obscenity in the spectacle of respectable men learning, one by one, that the man in their midst was a predator, and deciding, collectively, that the information was best filed under “delicate matter” or “the wishes of the young woman” or simply “not our problem to solve today.” The party, in its own recent statement, now speaks of being “deeply concerned” by indications that some may have had knowledge of inappropriate behaviour but never reported it to the proper officers. An independent review has been announced. The language is careful, bureaucratic, and too late. Donaldson’s conviction does not end the story. The brave victims have had their day in court and, one hopes, some measure of vindication. But the wider scandal is the demonstration that a man could move through the highest levels of Northern Irish unionist politics while carrying, apparently openly enough for senior figures to be briefed, a reputation for predatory behaviour. The steam in the sauna, the closed doors of the leadership contest, the careful language of “observing wishes” and “not reporting to officers”: these are the small, ordinary gestures by which a community protects its monsters until the monsters can no longer be protected. The crime was his. The decision to look away, or to look and then look elsewhere, belonged to everyone else who was told and did not act. What we will see played out in the coming weeks will be the usual rituals of belated political accountability.

There is a special circle reserved, one suspects, for those who knew and said nothing, or who knew and wrote nothing, or who knew and filed the knowledge under “not for publication at this time.” Yet the BBC Spotlight programme has performed a second, quieter unmasking. It turns out that Donaldson’s behaviour was never the closely guarded secret of a lone deviant. It was an open secret, circulating in the steam rooms of political gossip, the bars of delegation hotels, the whispered exchanges of the Belfast political bubble. Public drunkenness. Forcing himself on a female MLA. Projectile vomiting over a dignitary. These were not rumours from the fringes; they were stories told by people who had been in the room. And the local press, the self-appointed watchman of Northern Irish democracy, appears to have spent years polishing its spectacles and looking resolutely elsewhere. One pictures them now, the journalists of the province, moving through the same receptions and press conferences as the man they were notionally there to scrutinise. The clink of glasses, the murmured pleasantries, the shared understanding that certain things were simply “how it was.” Donaldson, by all accounts, could drink to the point of spectacle on overseas trips, falling over, being held upright by aides, decorating the mayor of Beijing with the contents of his stomach, while maintaining, in public, the teetotal rectitude expected of a certain strain of unionist Protestantism. He could, on another occasion, seat himself on the lap of a female MLA and attempt to kiss her in a Georgetown bar. These were not hidden vices conducted in absolute darkness. They were performed, or at least enabled, in the presence of witnesses who have belatedly spoken with the clarity that hindsight and a safe distance from power can provide. The question is not whether the press should have known. The question is whether they wanted to know.

Donaldson will be sentenced in September and, one assumes, will die in prison or very near it. That is the crime. What has emerged in its wake, in the days since the verdict and in the BBC Spotlight investigation that followed, is something adjacent but not identical: the long chain of people who appear to have known enough, or been told enough, and did nothing that might have interrupted the chain.

In the end, the story is not really about depravity at all, except as the particular idiom in which Donaldson’s hypocrisy chose to express itself. It is about the ancient and reliable mechanism by which men of authority convert their private appetites into public virtue and their public virtue into cover for private crimes. The sauna, the sermon, the courtroom: three rooms in the same house. The steam rises, the words are spoken, the sentence is passed, the children’s testimony still echoes. The respectable man has been found out. The only remaining question is how many others like him are still moving through the steam, unseen.