The new policy, championing itself as the voice of a Protestant and Ulster Scots culture, comes under the stewardship of robust newspaper and business man David Montgomery, an adviser to 3I, the investment group that bought the newspaper.
Tipped for the top job is Stephen King, aged 31, an Englishman who has served for many years as political aide to the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. He recently got into hot water with Irish Americans for inferring they were “moronic.”
The News Letter is also launching a competition to devise a new symbol for Northern Ireland (the Red Hand of Ulster is, apparently, being consigned to the dustbin of history).
Montgomery, a scion of the affluent town of Bangor, in North Down, and a former editor of several British tabloids, said he wants the paper to provide unionists with a platform.
“Protestant, unionist, Scots/Irish culture . . . is just as strong and as enduring as the nationalist culture. But Protestants don’t have the same confidence or pride and probably feel a bit battered,” he said.
Montgomery is understood to have been behind an editorial last week that said Protestants had been made to feel like second-class citizens and must “fling off the burden of guilt that they have been required to shoulder over recent years.”
Montgomery said such views are not sectarian but are intended to rebuild Protestant confidence. “It is nothing to do with politics or sectarianism. It is the road to a harmonious society,” he said.
The editorial urged Protestants to reclaim their British heritage, which “helped create a world-class farming community” and “contributed to industrial development.”
But it acknowledged these achievements “depended on the Ulster Protestants and unionists working side-by-side with their Catholic countrymen and showing tolerance and charity,” concluding by asking them “to work in devolved government with all people who share the same peaceful standards.”
The News Letter, founded in 1737 and said to be the world’s oldest English- language morning paper, has been losing circulation since the 1980s. It sells 30,000 copies daily.
The possible elevation of King to editor has been lambasted by the DUP deputy leader, Peter Robinson, who said it was a laughable proposal and would do nothing to save the newspaper’s circulation.
King, he said, “is well known for his pro-agreement, pro-Trimble bias and has over the course of the last number of months used his column in the Belfast Telegraph to attack the DUP.
“King has clearly identified himself as wanting to continue to hark back to the old failed Belfast agreement. He has tirelessly been promoting himself in recent times as the champion of a dwindling band of Trimble-ite Unionists.
“The suggestion that Steven King could reverse the fortunes of the News Letter is preposterous. He represents a viewpoint that is dwindling in support and the fate of the UUP and the News Letter will be the same.” Robinson said.