Strung up on her own petard, the world has come crashing down round Ulster’s scourge of the gays, Iris Robinson. With every passing day fresh revelations paint an increasingly sordid image of her sexual liaisons. Abusing the trust placed in her by Kirk McCambley’s father, she embarked on an affair with his son, forty year her junior.

These days an affair alone is not enough to finish a career, even in our supposedly frigid puritanical climate of Northern Ireland. However Mrs Robinson has raised herself up on the pedestal as the guardian of morality, judging gays to be the vilest of the vile. Yet now she stands before us a serial adulteress, stripped of the excuse that it was a brief moment of emotional weakness, whose string of affairs included Kirk’s father, Billy McCambley. Iris must be down on her knees, thankful other legislators in the land do not see it as their duty to uphold God’s law.

Snatching Kirk from the funeral she wooed him with promises that his future would be bright if only he stayed under her wing. Securing two loans of £25,000 each to aid the young entrepreneur things turned nasty when she demanded a cut of £5000, motivated by what can only be presumed as greed from a woman enjoying three lucrative salaries from the public purse. Mrs Robinson’s shoddy treatment of Kirk continued after she terminated the affair, demanding the immediate repayment of the £45,000, money he could ill afford. Iris’s behaviour in this respect raises more questions about whether she was fit to hold public office than her failure to declare these loans.

So where does this leave Peter? He appeared before us, a broken man to bare his heart. The media storm around him has been furious, yet on the face of it he appears to have acted in as proper a manner he could, considering the circumstances. While not declaring knowledge of the loans, he insisted they were immediately repaid and put an end to Iris’s ambitions to appear the philanthropist with another’s money. Would we have respected him more if he had no sense of loyalty to his wife, or do we expect him to have volunteered for the public humiliation the details of Iris’s affairs have caused?

His conduct in this regard however has no bearing on the political calculations for the DUP. With Allister’s tanks ripping up the lawn in North Antrim and UCUNF snapping at their heels can the party afford to keep Robinson as leader? A successor would need to be elected to the post of First Minister, requiring support from Sinn Fein, which will hardly be forthcoming lest a date for devolving policing and justice is agreed. This would leave the party vulnerable to the TUV in the run up to the general election. In the absence of an agreement to replace the First Minister a fresh poll for the Assembly would conducted, held under the less favourable auspices of STV enabling the TUV to carve deep into the DUP’s Assembly caucus.

So Robinson will survive, for now. He makes a useful scapegoat for the Westminster results and may serve some purpose in negotiating the tricky obstacle of policing and justice. Once Peter leads the DUP over this Rubicon his successor shall wash his hands, as if Pontus Pilate, of the whole sorry story.