The election of a new prime minister is not the only deadline on Friday.
As the UK waits to find out who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party, Northern Ireland is facing its own countdown.
There has been no government at Stormont since the last Assembly election in May; if it is not restored by October 28th, the Northern Secretary has said repeatedly in recent weeks, he will be legally required to call an election.
This notwithstanding the fact that, until this week, nobody in Northern Ireland really believed he would carry through with this course of action.
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‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
True, there was no real expectation that the Assembly would be back up and running by then either, given that the DUP – which walked out in protest over the Northern Ireland protocol – has consistently made clear it will not go back in until the protocol is resolved to its satisfaction.
The general consensus was that deadline would be missed or extended – a scenario for which there is plenty of precedent.
On a practical level no political party wants an election, especially at Christmas, and not one which would serve only to reinforce the current positions and hand the DUP a strengthened mandate for staying out.
Only when the Northern Secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on Tuesday that he would call an election “if we do not get a reformed Executive by one minute past midnight on the 28th of October” did the penny begin to drop; subsequent diary inquiries from the DUP MP Ian Paisley elucidated that the likely date for a poll would be December 15th.
It was suddenly starting to look a lot like a Christmas election.
Yet this was before the tumultuous sequence of events which led, on Thursday, to Liz Truss’s resignation as prime minister.
The response from the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) was to reiterate the existing position: “Legislation is clear that if an Executive is not formed by 28 October the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will come under a legal duty to call further elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly.”
Yet the reality is the situation is far from clear, not least because Mr Heaton-Harris may no longer be the Northern Secretary by one minute past midnight on the 28th.
Under the terms of this high-speed Tory leadership contest, the process is due to conclude on the 28th, though the new prime minister could be in place sooner.
A tight turnaround, and even if the new administration is minded to continue with its predecessors’ course of action rather than simply legislate to extend the deadline, it is reasonable to assume the North will not be at the top of its in-tray.
There is enough time, just about, to call an election next week and still make the December 15th vote; any longer, and it would presumably have to be postponed until the new year.
This still leaves the question of the protocol, also in that hefty pile in the prime ministerial in-tray, where efforts to find a negotiated solution will have been further hampered by this week’s chaos; for the DUP – betrayed by Boris and distrusting of Truss’s talk of negotiation – the fear will be of further treachery to come.
For the meantime, it will wait and see; in these unprecedented times, there is little else to do.
The assumption underlying all of these eventualities is that the Conservatives can elect a new leader who will steady the ship and, above all, avoid a general election, yet what recent events have surely shown is to take nothing for granted.
There is still a long way to go between now and Friday.
