Once upon a time, a young unionist politician marched out of a talks process. Recalling the incident later, he said: ‘I asked myself the question, could I walk out of here and go down to my constituency, the people of Lisburn, look them in the eye and say this is a good deal. I could not do that in all conscience.’

That politician was Sir Jeffrey Donaldson speaking about Good Friday 1998, unable to support his then Ulster Unionist party leader David Trimble as he prepared to sign the Belfast Agreement. Donaldson then devoted his energies to championing the irascible anti-Agreement wing of unionism, monstering Trimble and chipping away at the Ulster Unionists before he defected in 2003 to the DUP.

The sum of Donaldson and his party’s achievement is the definition of thin gruel

The irony of Donaldson now facing a similar conundrum to Trimble is not lost on those who remember the chicanery of those days. It has been reported by Stephen Nolan of BBC Radio Ulster that Donaldson has convened a meeting today of the DUP’s officers to decide whether they should back a deal to return to power-sharing at Stormont.

The DUP have long said that any return was contingent on a deal which addressed the fundamental concerns the party has with the Windsor Framework. Its ‘seven tests’ – an article of faith Donaldson clings to in any interview – demands that the government must ‘avoid any diversion of trade’ and that any trade border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain is expunged.

Instead, the sum of Donaldson and his party’s achievement is the definition of thin gruel. Apparently, the government has condescended to rename the Windsor Framework’s green lane the ‘UK internal market lane’.

An official in the Northern Ireland Office clearly believes that by sticking some red, white and blue bunting on this particular pig, unionists will lap it up. It will not surprise many people to discover that Julian Smith, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, has been a prominent figure behind the scenes in pushing this deal. The pressure on Donaldson and the DUP to take a deal, any deal, was ratcheted up in the past 24 hours by 150,000 striking workers from Northern Ireland’s public sector taking part in the largest industrial action to take place there since the 1970s.

As part of the government’s attempts to corral the DUP into returning to power-sharing, the Northern Ireland Secretary made any rise in public sector pay contingent on Stormont’s restoration. The DUP being portrayed as the villain of the piece will no doubt have spooked Donaldson and a few others around him. Perhaps history will record that it was the placards of Northern Ireland’s cosseted and bloated public sector and Donaldson’s tendency towards being a weathervane which won the day for the resumption of Stormont.

However, it is down to the whim of eight men and four women who constitute the DUP’s party officers whether any of this comes to pass. This body does, after all, contain the likes of Nigel Dodds and Sammy Wilson, who have been prominent advocates for leaving Stormont dormant until the government blink and fundamentally alter the Framework.

With none of their seven tests being met, it is nigh on impossible for Jeffrey Donaldson to sell this as a win. For unionists of a maximalist bent, this deal would constitute a more profound defeat than anything David Trimble ever signed up to.

In many ways, it is the ultimate intellectual capitulation to the dominant strain of thought in parts of the civil service, embodied by the Northern Ireland Office, which would be content to leave Northern Ireland in some sort of constitutional annex and ideally sell it off to Dublin at the first opportunity. What is the point of a unionist party if it does not push back against that? Many will begin to ask what is the point of the DUP if it proceeds with this deal.