03/11/2026
With DUP losing its sole female — and most popular — MP, three quarters of its MPs are now men in their 70s
Carla Lockhart’s resignation isn’t just about Drumcree, but about years of the party hierarchy taking for granted its greatest vote-winner
Sam McBride�Northern Ireland Editor�03 Nov 2026 6:00 AM
Losing Carla Lockhart is a far graver blow to the DUP than it might seem even to many of those who follow politics closely.
The Upper Bann MP was never a big beast of the party, was given restricted opportunities to do major media interviews, and had no leadership ambitions, meaning that she was often in the background.
Yet she was the party’s most popular MP. Her vote has risen in every election she has contested. In the last Westminster election, every one of her colleagues’ votes fell while hers rose.
For a decade, since first entering Stormont and then moving to Westminster, Lockhart has topped the poll in every election she has fought.
Having entered elected politics as a councillor and becoming mayor of Craigavon, Lockhart pulled in the most votes when she first stood for Stormont in 2016 — and repeated that a year later in the DUP’s otherwise disastrous 2017 Assembly election fought after the RHI scandal.
Her time in Stormont was short, because it collapsed, but she was quickly topping the poll in the Westminster election after David Simpson left politics amid personal scandal.
Given the mess the DUP has been in over that period, her electoral record represents a considerable feat that cannot simply be attributed to the party brand.
In 2024, she pulled in more than 45pc of the vote. Not since David Trimble took 59pc of the vote in 1992 has any Upper Bann MP received such an endorsement from the constituency’s voters.
And that was a very different contest in which the DUP did not challenge for the seat, effectively leaving Trimble as the unionist unity candidate — a token Conservative challenger notwithstanding.
Yet, for years, Lockhart is said to have felt that the party hierarchy and headquarters team didn’t treat her with the respect she deserved. Her past loyalty to the party likely fuelled this sense that she could be taken for granted.
For most of her DUP career, Lockhart was a party loyalist. For much of that time, she was firmly on message, regurgitating agreed lines and vocally backing party positions.
That’s what makes her defection so damaging. She was a very different figure to people like Jim Allister or Jim Wells.
Just 10 days ago, the DUP was dismissive of the growing crisis involving its most popular MP.
When Lockhart quit as a party officer almost a fortnight ago over her dissatisfaction at what she saw as the DUP’s weak position on Drumcree, fellow MP Sammy Wilson saw little significance in the move.
In comments splashed across the front page of the News Letter, he described her move as a “token gesture” to try to satisfy hardline elements in her constituency.
By the time the party top brass realised the magnitude of their problem, it was too late.
Over recent days, Lockhart is said to have been put under “massive pressure” to stay in the party. It made no difference.
Lockhart’s disillusionment didn’t begin with Drumcree; that was the catalyst but not the sole cause of her departure.
She was dismayed by the party’s dishonesty on the Irish Sea border when Jeffrey Donaldson led the DUP back into Stormont in 2024.
That festering sore was alluded to in her statement a fortnight ago, when she said that while the DUP was misleading its voters by claiming it had got rid of the sea border, “to my shame, I publicly, for the most part, said nothing and went along with it. But I am not prepared to do it anymore”.
Unusually for a senior politician, Lockhart never had the slightest interest in being DUP leader. Even when the deputy leadership was suggested to her privately, it was dismissed.
She knew her abilities were not suited to leadership.
Politics is replete with those deluded as to their own capabilities, many of whom come to regret climbing a rung above where they are suited, but Lockhart was never among their number.
Those briefing otherwise over recent days merely confirmed how little they understood their party colleague.
Strikingly, this afternoon’s resignation came in a statement. There was no press conference.
While Lockhart has a reputation for working hard, she had faced limited top-level scrutiny until recent weeks, rarely doing the toughest broadcast media interviews.
That meant others took most of the direct heat around the DUP’s incessant crises over the last decade.
Nevertheless, the scale of her popularity within the constituency means that this really hurts the DUP.
Not every MP needs to be a political heavyweight; every party involves a range of individuals who complement each other. But all of them need to get elected; she was the only DUP MP all but guaranteed to keep her seat in the next general election.
When Simpson defeated Trimble in 2005 after years of rancorous battles, he never succeeded in collapsing the Ulster Unionist vote. That only happened after Lockhart replaced him.
By 2024, despite the DUP’s woes, the UUP candidate took just 3,662 votes to Lockhart’s 21,642.
As the DUP attempts to distract from its calamity, the party is once again beating the unionist unity drum.
But what has happened here makes that an awkward, tired routine. If the party can’t even unite its own members, its credibility on the issue is weak.
As recently as nine years ago, the DUP had more than half of Northern Ireland’s MPs; now it has less than a quarter of them. Unionists are turning against the party that once dominated unionist politics.
The next general election could make that even worse. In 2024, Gregory Campbell scraped in by the skin of his teeth.
Wilson is under pressure in East Antrim, and may not stand again. Gavin Robinson is potentially coming back to Stormont, which would mean an East Belfast by-election.
Having lost its sole female MP, the DUP is now represented at Westminster by four men, three of whom are in their 70s.
Lockhart’s resignation message to her constituents talks about wanting to “help build a movement” among grassroots unionists. She also makes clear she intends to stand again in the next general election, making it difficult for the DUP to stand against her when it has no chance of winning and is trumpeting unionist unity.
This is a more amicable political break-up than it might have been, leaving open the possibility that Lockhart might one day rejoin the DUP under a new leader or a new policy.
Yet all of this is disastrous for a party slumping in the polls and floundering in Stormont.
What’s especially awkward for the DUP is that Lockhart is saying now what it once said. There are strong moderate unionist arguments against pulling the deputy First Minister out of Stormont, but the DUP has never been a moderate unionist party.
Given her popularity, Lockhart is likely to become like Lady Hermon in North Down — a popular independent who can get re-elected without a party label.
There is no immediate prospect of a challenge to Robinson’s leadership, although that could come after next May’s Stormont election.
But two and a half years into that leadership, it’s still not clear how he’s different to his predecessors — beyond numbers which keep slumping.
The DUP is a party running out of time, and running out of politicians.
