Jon Burrows becomes Ulster Unionist Party leader

Jon Burrows will call for a "line in the sand reset" as he officially becomes the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader later.

He will tell party members this is "not just a leadership change" but is a move aimed at "transforming the party into a winning machine".

Burrows is a former police officer who was unopposed for the post, which is regarded as one of the toughest in Northern Ireland politics.

A year ago he wasn't even a member of the party.

Like his running mate, the party's new deputy leader Diana Armstrong, he has never put his name before the electorate for a seat in the assembly, having been co-opted to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of another MLA.

But since becoming an MLA for North Antrim last summer he's been a man in a hurry, which appears to have impressed the wider membership - although there is no way of proving it since he becomes leader without a contest.

He will be the fifth Ulster Unionist leader in a row to take the position without a challenge since Mike Nesbitt beat John McCallister in 2012.

Burrows publicly called for a contest but the one potential challenger, outgoing deputy leader Robbie Butler, decided against standing.

Burrows is expected to tell a behind-closed doors meeting that he will lead a confident party offering "strategic unionism, playing the long game, avoiding short term own goals that we've seen over the last 20 years like Brexit, assembly seat cuts, local government reform and Stormont collapses that damaged devolution and unionism".

But well-placed sources say that possibly the majority of the party's nine MLAs have deep-seated misgivings about Burrows as leader or are openly hostile.

It will be interesting to see if they all turn up at the party's Extraordinary General Meeting on Saturday, or if they do how many will be prepared to give public endorsements.

One source said: "I think it would be foolish to attempt a group photo let's put it like that."

The media is barred from the meeting, which is accessible to party members only.

Burrows and Armstrong will speak afterwards and take questions.

One question has already been answered.

He intends to keep the party inside the executive, for now anyway, and retain his predecessor Nesbitt as health minister.

Analysis: The latest new beginning

No-one under the age of 40 is likely to believe this but there was a time when the UUP was interesting.

Too interesting for its own good.

It was a godsend for journalists for whom watching the once mighty behemoth rip itself apart in public was a full-time job.

Whether it was its former HQ Cunningham House, the Ramada Hotel or the Ulster Hall, meetings of the UUP's ruling council were the gift that kept on giving to the party's great detriment.

It's survival - or more specifically David Trimble's survival as the leader of Unionism - was regarded as so crucial to the peace process that Tony Blair once postponed an assembly election he feared it would lose.

But he couldn't avoid the inevitable.

The Democratic Unionist Party won the subsequent poll, eventually taking the spoils by going into government with Sinn Fein.

And the UUP? It became an also-ran and there it remains until now.

Jon Burrows is the latest new beginning and arguably one of the most interesting.

He's from a non-political background and seems prepared to take on all-comers no matter how unpopular that might make him with the party's old guard.

But that old guard has failed to return the party to anything like its previous lofty position.

Now Burrows intends to try doing it his way.

At the very least it should be fun to watch.