Liz Truss ‘saying more of the right things’ on NI Protocol: TUV leader Jim Allister

The race to be the next leader of the Conservative Party arrives in Northern Ireland tomorrow for one of several hustings events that have been taking place across the UK.

Mr Allister, speaking to the News Letter, said it will be the actions of whoever wins the race to replace Boris Johnson that is important when it comes to the protocol, but admitted to more “suspicion” around whether Rishi Sunak will “robustly stand up to the EU”.

This comes after Tory ministers Kwasi Kwarteng and Simon Clarke both revealed that they had always found Mr Sunak to be “backward-leaning” on legislation to deal with the protocol.

“It’s not their words, it’s their actions that matter,” Mr Allister said.

“We will bank their words and see how they match up to their actions. I know what they need to do and anything short of that won’t be satisfactory.

“They need to remove the burden of the protocol from us, and they need to restore total UK sovereignty and rid us of ill-gotten EU sovereignty. That means we need to be treated as a full and equal part of the United Kingdom and none of that is possible under the protocol.

“Measuring by words only, Truss has said more of the right things than Sunak has. I think that one would be very suspicious that Mr Sunak is not somebody who is going to robustly stand up to the EU. It is going to take all the vigour that the leader can command to stand up and undo what the previous leader did in putting the protocol upon us.”

Asked for his thoughts on the outcome of the contest, he said: “All of the informed speculation seems to say it will be Truss. Her policies would seem to be more in line with what is now the Tory mainstream, but who knows.”

Meanwhile, the TUV MLA also praised the efforts of the current Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi to ensure a £400 energy bill subsidy makes its way to households in Northern Ireland, saying: “I do appreciate the fact that the chancellor has been making moves to ensure that as a part of the United Kingdom we get our fair share of the assistance that is coming to deal with the fuel crisis.

“There would have been a temptation for some, I think, to have exploited the need for assistance on that front to try and coerce the re-establishment of the Executive. The fact that the government has had the good sense not to do that is a positive.”