Unopposed Aiken to be UUP leader

Steve Aiken will take over from the current leader, Robin Swann, on November 9 after nominations closed and the only other likely candidate, Doug Beattie, did not submit his name for consideration.

Mr Aiken, a former commander of a Royal Navy nuclear submarine, is still new to politics, having first been elected to any political post when he entered the Assembly as an MLA just three-and-a-half years ago.

The South Antrim MLA, whose father was a trade union official, is on the liberal wing of the party and is also more left-wing than many other UUP members.

In an interview with the News Letter in December 2015 after the Ulster Unionists announced that he had joined, Mr Aiken said that “like most ex-military people” he had little interest in politics until recently.

But he said that while serving in the Navy he had voted for several parties, including the UUP, DUP, Alliance Party – and even the Liberal Democrats while living in England for a period.

He said that his post-naval career in business had shown him the importance of politics and that earlier the then UUP leader Mike Nesbitt had told him “if you can make a difference, you should”.

The last Ulster Unionist to have unsuccessfully stood for the leadership, former UUP deputy leader John McCallister, said that he had “never been a fan of uncontested leaderships”.

Mr McCallister, who left the UUP in 2012, said that while the DUP and Sinn Fein had not had leadership contests, “they could easily argue that they were managed succession plans”.

However, in the UUP’s case he said that “there’s been no debate here about the crisis that the party’s in, the direction to take – tighter to DUP, what would it do if the Executive was reformed in terms of opting for opposition or being in government ... there has just been no debate about that.”