Foster to resign if Poots changes ministerial team

Arlene Foster has said she will resign as NI first minister on Tuesday, instead of the end of June, if Edwin Poots changes his ministerial team.

She said she worked closely with her team and "if Edwin decides to change that then I have to go as well".

"I can't stay with a new ministerial team over which I have no authority - that would be wrong," she said.

However, the new Democratic Unionist Party leader insisted he was not "pushing Arlene out" of the party.

"That's my position and that remains my position," said Mr Poots.

"I'm not going to be rushed into doing anything or pushed into doing anything. Nor am I going to be denied doing something that I'm ready to do.

"So we will look at all of these issues and take a decision at a time that's appropriate for us."

On Thursday, Mr Poots denied the party is divided after tensions flared at a meeting to ratify his leadership.

The party endorsed an earlier vote by MLAs and MPs to make Mr Poots leader, but it came amid anger from some quarters about how Arlene Foster was ousted as leader last month.

Mr Poots' rival for the leadership, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, said that one of his team had been threatened by someone from loyalist paramilitary group the UDA.

It is believed the threat was made online during the leadership campaign.

Police said they had "received a complaint that a number of members of a political party had been threatened during a recent leadership campaign".

"The full circumstances of the incident are still being established and enquiries are continuing at this time."

Mr Poots said that "no member of my team engaged in any activities of intimidation or bullying".

On a visit to Banbridge Academy on Friday, Mrs Foster, who had been due to resign as first minister at the end of June, also confirmed she intends to leave the DUP after she steps down as first minister.

She added that the new DUP leadership had shown its "direction of travel" and it was time for her to "move on".

She told reporters on Friday that while she wished Mr Poots well as the new DUP leader, he must realise there is "work to do in terms of healing the divisions in the party".

On Thursday, Mrs Foster told BBC Newscast her departure was "even by DUP standards, pretty brutal".

In his speech to members after the party endorsed his leadership on Thursday night, Mr Poots paid tribute to Mrs Foster as "one of the foremost women in unionist and British politics".

Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson - who ran against Mr Poots for the leadership - Lord Dodds, Economy Minister Diane Dodds and East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson did not wait to hear Mr Poots' speech - they left the building.

A very well-known figure in the DUP told BBC News NI it was the "worst meeting he had attended in over 40 years as a DUP member".

After the ratification, Paul Bell, the former chairman of the Fermanagh and South Tyrone association of the DUP, resigned from the party.

Speaking on the BBC's Evening Extra programme on Friday, Strangford MP Jim Shannon said he had not attended the meeting but had spoken to party colleagues who were there.

He said there had been "firm and robust exchanges" of views.

He denied party members left in protest before Mr Poots' speech.

"They have told me clearly that there was no walk-out last night, that the meeting ended at about 10:15," he said.

"They had been sitting on their backsides for two and a half hours and we (they) were going home.

"People got up to leave to go home and that was the fact of the matter."

Mrs Foster has already changed her Twitter handle from @DUPLeader to @ArleneFosterUK, taking all 96,000 followers with her.

The twitter handle @DUPLeader was quickly taken by someone else on the social media platform and is now being used as a parody account.

In his speech to members, Mr Poots said history will "ultimately be kind" to Mrs Foster and he wished her well.

He said the party had a leadership contest and will now "move forward in a united way".

The new DUP leader said preparations for the next election to the Northern Ireland Assembly - due in May 2022 - have now begun. He announced that he will be appointing a director of elections "quickly".

He said all strands of the party needed to come together.

Speaking of his relationship with the Irish government, Mr Poots said it was "really, really bad" as a consequence of how issues were dealt with relating to the Irish border during the Brexit talks.

He accused it of attempting to "starve Northern Ireland people of medicines no less, cancer drugs and other materials, such as the food that's on our table" and took particular aim at Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney, the Republic of Ireland's Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and foreign affairs minister.

The new DUP leader said it was "quite frankly disgraceful" that the pair "took photographs of blown up border posts to impose upon Northern Ireland people the harshest form of customs and an internal market that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world".

However, Mr Poots said he had "respect" for Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin.

Also speaking outside the meeting, North Antrim MP Ian Paisley said "leadership transfer hurts".

"If anyone in this party can talk about difficulty, it's me. I saw what happened to my dad, it killed my father," he told BBC's The View.

Mr Paisley's late father, Ian, the party founder, had accused his successor, Peter Robinson, and Nigel Dodds of giving him an ultimatum to leave his post.

In a statement, the Fermanagh and South Tyrone association of the DUP said the removal of Mrs Foster was "not done in our name" and it would support her if she remained as an MLA.

It said its members "met this week to voice their disgust at the manner" in which Mrs Foster had "been treated over recent weeks".

After Mr Poots was ratified, Paul Bell, former chairman of the association and member for 20 years, resigned from the party.

He said it will shed tens of thousands of votes under Edwin Poots and he was "disgusted" by the treatment of Mrs Foster.

Mr Bell told the BBC's The View programme on Thursday night that Mrs Foster had been "stabbed in the back".

"If the DUP cannot have respect for their own people, I don't know how they're going to have respect for people who don't agree with them," he said.

In an interview with BBC Newscast earlier on Thursday, Mrs Foster said the move against her and the manner in which it was carried out was "not particularly pleasant".

"I think that I said a couple of days after what had happened that politics is brutal, but even by DUP standards it was pretty brutal, in terms of what happened," she said.