UUP leader Doug Beattie: Meeting with NI Secretary 'a bit tetchy' after election announcement

​UUP leader Doug Beattie described his meeting with Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris as “at times a little bit tetchy”.

He met with him as part of a wider gathering of the Province’s five main political parties.

“We talked about the protocol,” said Mr Beattie.

"It was the same noises that we’ve heard before in that the negotiations continue, they are good negotiations, there is no deal yet,” he said.

"There are significant gaps still, they’re working away at absolutely no timeframe.”

Mr Beattie had previously come under fire for comments he made in a BBC interview in January, when he said of the Protocol Mr that “my union is not going to be destroyed by this… I don’t think there’s a threat”.

At the same time, fellow top UUP man Mike Nesbitt had said that “I want to downgrade the Protocol from a crisis to a challenge”.

Mr Beattie later clarified his comments to the News Letter, saying: “Yes, it is a threat. But it’s not the immediate threat that we’re going to slide into a united Ireland now.”

Then in Thursday’s edition of the News Letter, ex-UUP leader Steve Aiken put his name to a joint article about Wednesday’s Supreme Court judgement, which said the ruling had “confirmed unequivocally our fears of the damage done by the Protocol… our contentions about the constitutional damage done by the Protocol were correct”.

Alliance leader Naomi Long meanwhile described the Stormont party talks on Thursday with Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris as a “very full and very frank exchange of views”.

She criticised the decision by Mr Heaton-Harris to push back the deadline for calling a fresh Assembly election in Northern Ireland by a year as “kicking the can down the road”.

“Whilst we don’t believe that an immediate election will bring a resolution to the current problems we face, we don’t believe that simply kicking the can down the road at every turn is the answer either,” she said.

“(If) there isn’t going to be an election and there isn’t going to be that kind of incentive for people to get together to form an executive, then a process needs to be created to start to deal with those issues.”