The last thing Northern Ireland needs now is a weak and naive prime minister

There was an important intervention in the Conservative leadership contest yesterday.

Lord Frost raised alarming concerns about Penny Mordaunt who is a front-runner to be the next Tory leader and prime minister (she has a good chance of making the last two candidates, who will be voted on by party members, and is said to be ahead of Rishi Sunak among that electorate in a theoretical head-to-head).

Lord Frost is a former Brexit minister who helped draw up the disastrous Northern Ireland Protocol with Boris Johnson in 2019, but then did much to redeem himself by leading the charge against it, first within government, then as an influential voice outside it. He points out that the wretched 2019 deal with Leo Varadkar and the EU was agreed under duress.

The shameful nature of the protocol is underlined by the fact that the EU is easing sanctions on the transit of goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad while demanding stringent controls on the movement of goods within the UK to NI.

Lord Frost has now backed Liz Truss for Tory leader.

He said his experience of working with Penny Mordaunt “as my notional deputy on EU issues in 2021, was that she was absent on parade. She did not master the detail in the negotiations, she shied away from delivering tough messages to the EU, and she wasn’t fully accountable for decisions or even always visible. After six months of this, I had to ask the prime minister to ... find someone else to support me ...”

Meanwhile, the writer Lord (Charles) Moore has pointed out that Ms Mordaunt once made the dubious claim that “the EU contributed towards a settled peace in Northern Ireland”. He also pointed out her woke views, criticising – for example – the “nostalgic focus” of popular old war British films.

A weak, ill-informed or naive prime minister would be a very perilous development for NI when there is a stand-off with the EU over the Province, and when a party that wants Northern Ireland to fail topped the recent Stormont election and is seeking to chip away at our place in the UK.