Until now, Butler has probably been best known by some for twice considering running for the leadership of his party, only to withdraw from it at the last minute.<\/p>\n
His name was being flouted as a possible successor as soon as Nesbitt resigned on Tuesday night, and on this occasion he has chosen to take up the call.<\/p>\n
As a former firefighter-turned-politician he may have experience in putting out fires, but doing so in one of the most difficult Stormont departments will be new territory for him.<\/p>\n
While he’s been an MLA since 2016, he has never held a ministerial job before.<\/p>\n
As an effective caretaker minister in the seven months left of the assembly term before the next election, he will have to quickly get to grips with a massive in-tray.<\/p>\n
He will also face questions about how he intends to manage relations with the party leader Burrows, given the events of this week.<\/p>\n
One Ulster Unionist source said while the job was only for a matter of months, other parties could “set a target on his back” and make life difficult for him.<\/p>\n
His decision to step into the job may help further boost his Lagan Valley profile in the run-up to next May’s assembly poll, which is shaping up to be an interesting constituency battle.<\/p>\n
But being health minister is hard enough when you have experience of the brief and a budget to work with.<\/p>\n
Butler, at the moment, has neither of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until now, Butler has probably been best known by some for twice considering running for the leadership of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-744666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}