As Winnie said, this isn’t the end, not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning
Winston Churchill has long been a hero of the current incumbent in No 10 Downing Street. Boris Johnson even penned a ridiculously sentimental biography of the British Bulldog, which is more hagiography than history.
And, as Mr Johnson announced on Thursday that he had cut a Brexit deal with the European Union, he must surely have been thinking of Churchill’s famous maxim: “This is not the end: it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The Prime Minister’s relief was clear when he tweeted: “We’ve got a great new deal that takes back control — now Parliament should get Brexit done on Saturday so we can move on to other priorities, like the cost of living, the NHS, violent crime and our environment.”
But even Boris knows it’s not as simple as that. A withdrawal deal is only the first phase in a long process that will see Britain and the EU interlinked for years to come.
Negotiators from both sides will still be seeing a lot of each other over the next number of years, but they deserve a wellearned rest to bask in the glory of doing a deal that many people thought impossible.
The deal protects the Good Friday Agreement and the hardwon peace. Notwithstanding the fact that the democratic institutions are not meeting in Northern Ireland, it’s a sign of the huge progress that has been made that many people take the peace — imperfect as it is — for granted.
But we cannot afford to be complacent. Brexit has substantially destabilised and strained the three-strands of the peace accord: relations between the people of Northern Ireland, the north-south dimension and the relationship between Britain and Ireland. Nefarious elements will continue to seek to exploit that.
The appearance of a shadowy masked figure on Channel 4 News, representing the so-called New IRA, should remind us all of the horrors of the past.
This is why everyone needs to stand together and show dinosaurs who would pull us back to the rancour of the past that they have no place in society. Officials in Dublin, London and Brussels surely breathed a sigh of relief, but we’re not over the line yet. Boris Johnson still has to pull the parliamentary arithmetic together and the DUP appears to remain bitterly opposed to the deal. Arlene Foster is playing a dangerous game and is substantially out of step with the people of Northern Ireland, who voted to Remain.
While we have long associated the DUP with the ‘No Surrender’ camp, its late leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, eventually came to a space where the line was more ‘No, but’.
Whether Ms Foster has the creativity to carry this line remains to be seen. Brexit has always had an emotional element in Ireland that many of the gungho Tories have failed to understand.
Border communities have looked on in exasperation as people like Jacob Rees-Mogg have dismissed concerns about a return to a hard border as project fear.
Any infrastructure on the border would have represented a depressing return to past divisions.
Even with Stormont closed, the real peace dividend is in communities on both sides of the border coming together to work in harmony.
Brexit drove a horse and cart right through that. Communities that had learned to trust one another suddenly were forced to ask questions about what exactly a shared future means in the context of an exit from the EU.
If Boris can deliver the House of Commons today, this deal will represent a new beginning for Northern Ireland and for the entire island of Ireland. But it is not the end of the road.
Northern Ireland’s current generation of politicians need to prove that they can face the challenges overcome by their predecessors, who created the peace process.
Brexit will continue to strain relations, but the gap can be bridged — if the goodwill is there.