Boris prepares to submit Brexit plan
BORIS JOHNSON will know within days whether he can secure a Brexit deal with the European Union.
The Prime Minister’s formal proposals are due to be submitted to Brussels later this week and Mr Johnson said it would soon become apparent if there is “no way of getting it over the line from their point of view”.
Mr Johnson urged leaders in Brussels, Dublin and Berlin to work with him as the “rubber hits the road” on efforts to strike a deal ahead of the October 31 scheduled Brexit date.
His comments came after Dublin rejected proposals for customs posts along both sides of the Irish border to replace the backstop. Irish state broadcaster RTE reported that the suggestion sent to the EU by the UK would lead to the posts being built between five and 10 miles back from the current border.
Deputy Irish premier Simon Coveney said Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland “deserve better”.
But Mr Johnson said those were preliminary ideas that had been floated rather than the formal proposals which are expected to be set out later this week after the Tory conference finishes today.
“They are not talking about the proposals we are going to be tabling, they are talking about stuff that went in previously,” he told the BBC. “But clearly this is the moment when the rubber hits the road.
“This is when the hard yards really are in the course of the negotiations.”
The Irish border question has become the main stumbling block to a Brexit deal.
The backstop – a contingency plan which would keep Northern Ireland closely aligned to Brussels’ customs and regulatory rules if no other method is found of preventing a hard border – is loathed by Brexiteers and Mr Johnson is determined to remove it from the Withdrawal Agreement that predecessor Theresa May negotiated.
“The difficulty really is going to be around the customs union and to what extent Northern Ireland can be retained within EU bodies at all,” Mr Johnson said.
“We’re going to make a very good offer, we are going to be tabling it very soon, but there is a difficulty if you try to keep Northern Ireland in a customs union because one of the basic things about being a country is you have a single customs perimeter and a single customs union.”
Meanwhile, Mr Johnson has suggested that allegations about his private life have been made because of attempts by some people to “frustrate” Brexit.
The Prime Minister said he thought it was “raining down” on the Government because of his vow to take the UK out of the EU on October 31.
The Conservative Party conference has been overshadowed by claims that Mr Johnson squeezed the thigh of journalist Charlotte Edwardes at a private lunch at The Spectator magazine’s HQ shortly after he became editor in 1999.