Thanks to a couple of the new prospective Cabinet Ministers writing on twitter we now know that they believe that our next Prime Minister has a clear or even great mandate to unite the country. The reality is that within the upper echelons of the political party that these two people and Boris are part of, there is huge disunity. The resignations from the Cabinet currently include David Gauke, Philip Hammond, Anne Milton, Rory Stewart and Alan Duncan. Then if Boris is going to pay attention to Nigel Farage he will be forced to sack all of the other Ministers who are in favour of us remaining in the EU. Now of course Nigel and Farage may not agree with one another on that matter but it helps to demonstrate that we have a great deal of disunity within the 311 MPs who are part of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. Add to that the 46,656 members who voted for Hunt and there is quite a bit of work for Boris to focus on before he looks more widely at the rest of the 66m or so people. Indeed to call the 92,153 votes a great or clear mandate is very questionable. However like those voters for his selection some of the 66m people across our nation will be big fans of Boris or committed enough to the party that they will support his new role. After all in 2017 13,636,684 people voted for the party. Another way of looking at unity would be the even more historic 17,410,742 people who voted to Leave which was a campaign that Boris played a significant role in. The fact is that uniting the country demands a great deal more than trying to satisfy these numbers of people who are broadly on the side of the Tories and the Leavers. To do so demands an ability to do the very thing that Theresa May chose not to do despite all of her fine words which was to reach out to the millions of people who voted to remain or indeed who do not support her party. Such activities are of course counter to the performance of many politicians, but when one compares this to the predecessors in their role, they had the luxury of claiming to support the whole nation in their role which in one sense has become much more difficult as a result of the natue  of the referendum result. Thus Boris and indeed Theresa before him were placed under pressure to reach out to those of us who voted to remain if they were to unite the nation. So far nothing has happened along this approach from either of them.

Of course one element of the role of Prime Minister which is not mentioned above is the need for them to represent our nation to other nations. It was very clear on Radio 4, 24 hours ago that even Fraser Nelson admits that Boris is incompetent when it comes to building links to other nations. So even assuming he is capable of creating internal unity, the much bigger challenge is for him to find a way of improving his international capabilities, particularly as we prepare to leave the EU and start fending for ourselves!