Unionist leaders in Northern Ireland will lose the support of their own voters if they keep telling them they can trust nobody, a leading former Ulster unionist official has warned.Former UUP communication head and now political commentator, Alex Kane, said unionist leaders have for years warned that their community is beleaguered.However, that strategy could mean voters get behind a united Ireland: “Let’s be 20 per cent in a united Ireland, rather than 2 per cent in the United Kingdom,” Kane told The Irish Times’ Inside Politics podcast.Every time unionism pushed Westminster during Brexit to make a choice between what it wanted and what Westminster needed to accept to make a deal with Brussels, unionism lost, he said.The then Conservative government “chose to anger unionism” every time, “when it had a choice between doing something they knew would make unionism happy and doing something they knew would anger unionism.“It’s not its own policies. It’s not its own strategies. It’s not its own leaders. It’s not what Sinn Féin does, the SDLP or anyone else does,” said Kane.How the duplicitous double life of Jeffrey Donaldson threatens the future of unionism Listen | 38:39Instead, he said unionism faces big choices: “Their clash is between what they want and what the long-term intentions of a British government may be.” On the jailing of former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson, he said the party’s supporters “would have fallen off their chairs when they heard” stories of Donaldson frequenting gay saunas in London.“He’s always made a very big thing of his belief in Christianity. All of that is central and core to who Jeffery Donaldson was. People took that at face value.“I’ve known him for 40 years. I’ve never seen him drunk. I knew he took the odd glass of wine. I just accepted that because there’s nothing in theology that says you can’t have the odd glass of wine,” he said.However, reports that he was seen in the House of Commons “holding two bottles of wine, while swigging from one of them” was ... almost like it was being made up.“Maybe there’s a circle inside the DUP who were aware of the other side of him when he was away from Northern Ireland.” He said “for the rest of us”, the “99 per cent of people in Northern Ireland, it was a shock”. Clearly, some people in Westminster knew about his lifestyle but operated by the old adage that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, where people are away from the curbs of their constituency, he said. “You live a different life. It’s a different lifestyle,” he went on. “You’re still there till maybe 10, 11, 12 at night and bars are kept open to keep you going and food’s kept going.”During Kane’s Westminster experience, he said it had not been unusual to see people who are “to put it mildly, not entirely sober” as they waited for late-night votes, but he had witnessed reckless conduct. However, Donaldson’s conduct was on “a different level”, especially because it happened when he was the DUP’s chief whip and when the party’s votes were crucially needed by the Conservatives.Such behaviour would have come to the attention of the security services, the government chief whip and the prime minister’s office, and “yet, for some reason, nobody stepped in. Nobody went to Arlene Foster, who was then leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and said, ‘It might be advisable to have a word with your chief whip’.”He added: “Nobody seems to have thought this was necessary, which in turn fuelled this argument that he was being used by the intelligence services to fuel the government.” He said Donaldson is “easily” in the “top six most influential political figures in Northern Ireland in his generation and most people thought they had a handle on him. They may not have necessarily liked him. They may have thought he was this or that, but there was no sense that this was a hypocrite they were dealing with.” His use of his faith has “offended” many, especially Presbyterians, because he is “deliberately using that faith, that evangelical call[ing] card to protect himself, to say, ’None of this is my doing’.”Even late in his trial, Donaldson carried the Bible with him; “that somehow, even in this huge mess, that he was going to be lifted and saved by God”.Since Donaldson’s conviction, many in the party had told him of their hurt because, as one party member put it, “he is using my God to try and find excuses for the evil he knows he has done”.