Sam McBride: How Arlene Foster fell: Even as she dismissed the threat, the knives were being plunged

But whereas when King David lamented the demise in battle of the errant leader Saul and his son Jonathan with the words “how are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished”, Mrs Foster did not go down with a fight.

Instead, her actions this week epitomised the wisdom of another Biblical text familiar to DUP members: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”.

When this newspaper reported on its front page on Tuesday that multiple DUP constituency associations had written to the party to express concern at Mrs Foster’s leadership, it was clear that discontent had moved beyond the by then familiar off the record grumbling to journalists.

Nevertheless, rather than realising her peril, Mrs Foster that afternoon disdainfully dismissed the News Letter’s report. Speaking to journalists on the Shankill Road, she said: “We’ll just deal with it and move on because I’ve bigger things to do”.

That response summarised so much of Mrs Foster’s approach to the DUP leadership; an apparent blindness to how her actions were perceived, and a seeming reliance on spin in the face of uncomfortable truths.

But this week the substance of her colleagues’ manoeuvring defied any attempt to explain it away. Whether or not she knew that by Tuesday afternoon is unclear.

In the short term, Mrs Foster probably felt that her attempts to massage away awkward realities had worked – even if the strategy flopped on multiple occasions, one of which was to my benefit when her threat to sue over Burned drove a spike in sales to those keen to learn what she was seeking to suppress.

But spin can only work effectively in moderation, and alongside strategy. Lacking any coherent plan for the DUP, her leadership had become increasingly reactive to the point where the DUP’s next move was more likely to reflect the policy of Jim Allister than the person nominally in charge in Dundela Avenue.

While the DUP’s decision to defenestrate its leader was influenced by last week’s stance on an Assembly motion on gay conversion therapy and attendance at a north-south ministerial meeting, many in the party were as unnerved by the lurching incoherence of changing stances on those issues as they were by the substantive position at which she eventually arrived.

Most DUP members rose up in exasperation rather than in wrath. They were after all many of the same people who had won their seats as ‘Arlene’s candidates’ in her first election, the stunningly successful 2016 Assembly poll.

And they had been patient. Few other leaders would have been allowed to survive the RHI scandal, or the loss of unionism’s historic majority in Stormont, or the bungling of the party’s powerful Westminster position, or the disaster of the Irish Sea border. Mrs Foster was given a second chance, a third chance, and on and on and on.

By this week it was clear to most DUP MLAs and many others in the party that she was not going to change and was now a serious electoral and strategic liability.

In truth, by the time Mrs Foster dismissed the threat to her leadership on Tuesday afternoon, it was almost certainly too late for her to survive, even if she had been more alert to danger.

The previous evening, MLAs and MPs had been coordinating the letter of no confidence which would topple her.

Although referred to as a letter, and those who supported it were said to have signed, several sources say that there was only one copy of the letter and most of those who ‘signed’ did not see it, but affirmed in text messages and emails their support for its central proposition: The leadership must be overthrown.

Even many of the signatories were surprised that 85% of the DUP Assembly group were prepared to support the move.

With serendipitous timing, as Mrs Foster was on the Shankill, the estranged DUP MLA Jim Wells – banished under Mrs Foster over a dispute with the leadership – was brought back into the Assembly group for the first time in three years.

It was a demonstration of how power had already transferred from Mrs Foster. The mutineers were now in charge.

Around 17 DUP MLAs – one of whom was Edwin Poots – attended that meeting in a Parliament Buildings office. One of those present said that when they walked in and saw everyone from the most liberal DUP MLA, Paula Bradley, to the most conservative, Mr Wells, “I knew she was finished”.

In a second meeting of the DUP Assembly group that day, Mr Wells was presented with a cake to mark his 64th birthday.

As plans to remove Mrs Foster were discussed, most of her colleagues were now supping with a man who would have had no future in the party if she were to stay in charge.

And yet, little of this was inevitable. If Mrs Foster had been closer to her party, she should have seen her impending end.

Five days earlier one of her most loyal ministers, Diane Dodds, had been reduced to tears during what one witness described as a “mauling” by DUP politicians in Upper Bann – the area into which Mrs Foster had parachuted her friend after Mrs Dodds lost her MEP seat last year.

In another demonstration of how insubordination was replacing discipline, a photo with Mrs Foster at Carson’s statue to mark Northern Ireland’s centenary saw only a tiny turnout – one source said five MLAs – while some of those who had consciously snubbed their leader watched from windows high in Parliament Buildings.

There is a preternatural symmetry to what DUP members were this week saying about Mrs Foster and what Mrs Foster said about David Trimble.

In 2007, Mrs Foster told a BBC documentary that as the UUP sank lower and lower in elections she and others were telling Lord Trimble “you’re going to have to change”.

She said that they were told by those around the UUP leader that they were “the harbingers of doom, we were wrong, we would be proved wrong – and the sad thing is that I think David Trimble and some of his lieutenants actually believed that...he couldn’t read what was happening on the ground”.

At 4.15pm on Tuesday, the News Letter broke news of the no confidence letter on our website and 45 minutes later Mrs Foster pulled out of a scheduled meeting with the Secretary of State.

Just three hours after telling the cameras that she was in control, the DUP leader was now publicly panicking.

That evening one of Mrs Foster’s senior lieutenants rang MLAs, attempting to strong-arm them out of ousting the leader. By then he would have known that the rebels – although that word is hardly appropriate for 85% of any parliamentary party – had their sights on him as well.