Former DUP leader and ex-MP Jeffrey Donaldson has been sentenced at Newry Crown Court for historical sex offences against two women, completing a spectacular fall from grace for a politician once at the heart of the UK establishment. He has also been stripped of his knighthood and removed from the Privy Council.
Donaldson, who represented Lagan Valley at Westminster for 27 years, was arrested at his home in Dromore, Co Down, at 6am on March 28 2024, just two months after leading his party back into Northern Ireland's devolved institutions at Stormont. He had ended a two-year DUP boycott of powersharing after striking a deal with the UK government over post-Brexit trading arrangements.
Political career and early life
Born in Kilkeel, Co Down, Donaldson joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in his late teens. His policeman cousin Samuel Donaldson was murdered by the IRA during the Troubles, an event he often said influenced his decision to enter politics. At 16, he joined the Orange Order, and later followed his father Jim into the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).
In the early 1980s, he worked as personal assistant to former Conservative cabinet minister and UUP MP Enoch Powell. In 1985, aged 22, he became the youngest person elected to a short-lived incarnation of the Northern Ireland Assembly. He became MP for Lagan Valley in 1997, a seat he held until 2024, and also served as an Assembly member for the constituency from 2003 to 2010 and as a Lisburn councillor until 2011.
Peace process and DUP defection
Through the 1990s peace process, Donaldson became an influential UUP figure and was a senior member of the party's negotiating delegation in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement. He famously walked out of the talks hours before the accord was struck, refusing to back a deal that proposed early release of paramilitary prisoners without firm commitments to decommission weapons. He also had concerns about a commission on policing and the possible disbandment of the RUC.
His relationship with then-UUP leader David Trimble crumbled, and in late 2003 he and Arlene Foster quit the party and defected to the DUP. While Donaldson was more experienced and higher profile at the time, Foster would later eclipse him in influence.
Leadership and Brexit gamble
Donaldson was appointed to the Privy Council in 2007 and knighted in the late Queen's 2016 Birthday Honours. In 2009, he was caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal and apologised for claiming pay-to-view films during hotel stays, repaying around £600.
In 2017, as DUP chief whip, he was heavily involved in negotiating the confidence and supply agreement with Theresa May's Conservatives, signing the deal alongside Gavin Williamson. He lost the first DUP leadership race to Edwin Poots in 2021, but took over after Poots resigned 21 days later.
In February 2022, Donaldson pulled DUP First Minister Paul Givan out of the executive, collapsing powersharing in protest at post-Brexit checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. The two-year stand-off ended when he secured concessions from the UK government and led the party back to Stormont in early 2024.
Arrest and conviction
His position seemed secure after the gamble, but everything changed when detectives arrived at his house on March 28 2024. He quit as DUP leader within hours and was suspended from the party. Earlier this year, a jury at Newry Crown Court found him guilty of sex offences against two women when they were children.
The conviction prompted reviews into his behaviour by the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Stormont Assembly and the Northern Ireland Civil Service. Media revelations also emerged about behaviour that was not illegal but at odds with his public positions, including a young woman telling the BBC she was “exploited” by Donaldson and two former senior PSNI officers reporting seeing him enter a gay sauna in London.
Donaldson's sentencing marks the final chapter in a career that spanned four decades, from teenage UUP member to DUP leader and Privy Council member, ending in imprisonment at Maghaberry Prison.
