Look who's talking as TUV retraction underlines more unpredictable politics

Sinn Féin's former publicity director Danny Morrison once came up with one of the most memorable slogans of the Troubles when he described the party's electoral strategy as operating "with an Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other". This week he was back in the news - this time for something he didn't say. And all thanks, unlikely as it may seem, to the TUV leader Jim Allister, a man as politically disparate from Morrison as it is possible to be. Confused? Welcome to the world of Northern Irish politics where things are unrelentingly predictable until they're not. In some ways, it is all the fault of Stormont's new Irish language commissioner Pól Deeds and this correspondent, who asked him for an interview after an event celebrating Irish Language Week in Stormont's Great Hall. Now if Deeds was sensitive to controversy, it's probably a job he would not have accepted in the first place. But he probably did not expect the interview would result in his position being described as "untenable". And all because of his choice of language when he told unionists that hostility towards the Irish language wasn't doing them "any favours". He said "every word spoken against the Ir