Political Correspondent Noel McAdam detects concerns among Ulster Unionists about cuddling up to the Conservatives

It is a relative rarity for a political party to map out its future through the past.

Yet in terms of ties with the Tories, Ulster Unionists have already been there and done that.

Indeed as a legal entity the Conservative and Unionist Party still technically exists.

Thus the joint candidates coming out of the closer ties being forged between the two parties are likely to be called Conservative and Ulster Unionist.

And if one of the aims is to attract disaffected Alliance, SDLP or stay-away voters that one word could make a sizeable difference.

While apparently overwhelmingly endorsed by the party Executive, David Cameron and Sir Reg Empey still have a huge selling job to do in terms of the wider UU party and support base. There are said to be considerable misgivings among the UU Assembly party with at least one MLA threatening to resign.

Yet Ulster Unionists gather tomorrow in considerably better form than for some time. This year’s by-elections in Dromore and, to a lesser extent, Enniskillen demonstrated the once almost unthinkable, that some voters are willing to transfer from Jim Allister’s hardline Traditional Unionist Voice to the UUP.

A raft of internal reforms has streamlined organisation and centralised authority in the leadership and Executive, rather than the dissipated grassroots stranglehold of the past.

But the party still has some way to go to recover from the electoral body-blows of the last Assembly and Westminster elections and, as the original pro-Agreement champions, has had difficulty in establishing clear red, white and blue water from its main DUP rivals.

The fact that the DUP is nervous about the Conservative tie-up (an internal memo advising MLAs to use the more negative term ‘Tory’ and includes suggestions such as ’Tory boy, Tory toff and Tory sleaze’) may act as a spur for some doubters within UU ranks.

One of the dangers, however, must be that the Ulster Unionist ‘brand’ becomes subsumed within Conservative ideology. In any event both Ulster Unionism and Conservatism are considerably changed, and to some extent still developing, since the two parties went their seperate ways in the years after Stormont was prorogued in 1972. Some, and they are (at least for now) hard to quantify, have serious concerns that the project could prove more of a millstone than a milestone.