EAST DERRY Assembly member and the Stormont deputy speaker David McClarty is quitting the Ulster Unionists.
De-selected by his constituency colleagues and blaming a personal campaign against him, Mr McClarty is considering standing in next May’s election as an Independent or under the banner of another party.
He said he would take two to three weeks to consider his next move and was “ruling nothing in and nothing out”.
He told the BBC: “It was not an easy decision and I still am very sad that it has come to this, but in many ways those two or three individuals who have brought this about have forced me away from the party.
“The party has left me rather than me the party.”
Mr McClarty was the only Ulster Unionist Assembly member in Co Derry including Derry city.
He was first elected to Stormont in the Assembly elections following the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
He will keep his seat until the Assembly is dissolved in March ahead of the May election.
His is the latest in a series of damaging resignations from the Ulster Unionist Party in less than a year. Last month Castlereagh deputy mayor David Drysdale quit the party for the DUP claiming his former party was without direction and had become “a loose confederation of warring factions”.
In his resignation letter, he said only the DUP was working to move Northern Ireland forward.
“I got involved in politics to help people and make the area I represent a better place,” Mr Drysdale added. “The UUP hasn’t the strategy, either in Castlereagh or anywhere else in Northern Ireland, to deliver such change.”
He singled out UUP support for water charges, resisted by the DUP, and for the close association with the British Conservatives.
The party’s sole MP, Lady (Sylvia) Hermon quit the party in advance of last May’s Westminster election and was returned with an increased majority.
She was followed by her close colleague Alan McFarland who now sits in the Assembly as an Independent.
Trevor Ringland, the former Irish rugby international, left the party following comments by the new UUP leader Tom Elliott about the GAA in September.
Westminster election candidates Harry Hamilton and Paula Bradshaw have also quit, with Ms Bradshaw joining the Alliance Party.