The Ulster Unionist Party came back to Westminster in 2024 for the first time since 2017. Robin Swann took South Antrim from the DUP with a majority of more than 7,500, beating his DUP rival almost two to one. Swann had run the health department through the pandemic and returned to it briefly in early 2024, resigning the ministry that May to stand for the Commons; Mike Nesbitt took Health in his place. The party now holds one Westminster seat, nine Assembly seats and the health ministry at Stormont. For a party that governed Northern Ireland without interruption from 1921 to 1972, that is the measure of how far it has fallen.
The instability since has been in the leadership more than the vote. Doug Beattie stood down as leader in August 2024 amid a row over candidate selection in North Antrim. Nesbitt replaced him unopposed that month, becoming the first person to lead the UUP twice, having held the job from 2012 to 2017. Nesbitt himself resigned in January 2026, saying a new leader should take the party into the 2027 election. Jon Burrows, a former PSNI officer co-opted as an MLA only in 2025, was ratified unopposed at the end of that month after the deputy leader Robbie Butler stepped aside. That made Burrows the UUP's fifth leader since 2017. Four months later Beattie, the former leader, quit the party altogether, citing a "toxic atmosphere" and a campaign against his reselection in Upper Bann, the seat he had held for a decade; he stayed on as an independent unionist MLA. The party's best-known moderate had left the party he used to lead.
On the union the 2024 manifesto pitched pragmatism rather than confrontation. It accepted the Windsor Framework as a starting point but wanted it reformed, through a veterinary agreement and live data-sharing to soften the Irish Sea border in practice. Two years on the border still operates and the Framework is intact. Labour's partial EU reset in May 2025 moved toward deeper Framework integration, not toward the UUP's specific asks. The pragmatic line has neither stopped the Framework nor won the changes the party wanted from it.
Health was the manifesto's stated first priority, and it is the brief the UUP actually holds. Nesbitt ran the department while leading the party, then stayed on as minister after giving up the leadership. Northern Ireland has some of the worst hospital waiting times in the UK, with among the highest share of its population on a waiting list, and there has been no visible turnaround. The department the party made its flagship is also the one that consumed the leader who ran it.
The economic programme runs into the same wall as everything else the UUP wants from Westminster. The manifesto called for freeports at the main entry points and a 15 per cent rate of corporation tax, both of which need decisions in London, where Labour has kept the rate at 25 per cent. One MP in a House of 650 does not have the leverage to deliver any of it. On welfare, the manifesto opposed the two-child benefit cap; Labour scrapped it in the November 2025 Budget, another headline the party can point to but did not win.
The deeper problem is one of position, and it predates Burrows. The UUP occupies the ground between the DUP's hard defence of the union and Alliance's cross-community centre, and that middle is hard to sell when the voters on either side have sharper choices. Burrows has said he will not take a ministry, wanting instead to rebuild the UUP into the biggest party in Northern Ireland, an ambition that would mean roughly tripling its nine Assembly seats to something near the DUP's or Sinn Féin's totals. The party has not polled at that level since 2003. The 2027 Assembly election is the test of whether there is still a constituency for pragmatic unionism, and whether a party that has changed leader five times since 2017 can hold together long enough to build one.