Warm congratulations to our latest prime minister, Liz Truss, now it is time to deliver for Northern Ireland

When the News Letter was launched in 1737, the first ever prime minister was still in Downing Street — Robert Walpole.

We have reported on each premier since then, of which Liz Truss will today become the 56th. We offer our warmest congratulations to her on this appointment.

The Conservative Party has now produced three female leaders and three prime ministers in a mere 43 years — the only female PMs that the UK has ever had in the 300 years of that post.

Ms Truss will return to Downing Street from meeting the Queen today in Scotland. Her in-tray is bursting with immense problems that command her immediate attention.

The war in Ukraine grinds on.

The cost of fuel is at brutal levels, just as weather gets cooler.

Inflation keeps going up, and threatens to bring the UK back to the soaring prices of the 1970s.

Strike actions seem now to be happening everywhere, as the colder weather conjures up memories of the winter of discontent — something that, as Tories have always pointed out, happened under a Labour government.

There are other huge challenges, from health to education to immigration. But one of the gravest is here in NI. Stormont is down because Ms Truss’s predecessor betrayed his own pledge to the DUP in 2018, never to create a border in the Irish Sea. The scale of that internal UK frontier gets ever more apparent with time, and is a grievous breach of the principle of consent in the Belfast Agreement.

Liz Truss staked her leadership campaign on being a tough, patriotic politician who had taken some of the unilateral action needed against this barrier to trade with Great Britain. Yet weeks ago she refused in this paper to commit to full delivery of her own protocol bill (see links below).

Let us hope, at this time of emboldened nationalists in Belfast and Edinburgh, that was a blip, and not a reflection of a lack of will on the part of Ms Truss to deliver on the sort of rhetoric that got her elected.

• Ben Lowry August 20: Threats to the Union were largely ignored by NI Tories

• News Letter front page story Aug 17: Truss delcines to commit to passing NI Protocol Bill in full

• Editorial Aug 17: Rishi Sunak gives stronger answers on Northern Ireland Protocol than Liz Truss does

• Owen Polley Aug 15: Tory hopefuls should be ready to explain their stance on the Union to NI hustings

• Henry McDonald: Unionists should tread carefully over trust in Truss

• Ruth Dudley Edwards: Truth is the weapon to use against the lies of the IRA

• Owen Polley September 5: New PM needs to ignore latest EU threats over NI