Soft Irish border plan could be changed

Theresa May’s plan to maintain a soft Irish border after Brexit could be changed to accommodate European Union concerns, her deputy said amid signals that Brussels could reject it.

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington, the Prime Minister’s de facto number two, said her high-profile Friday speech was an “ambitious opening bid” for negotiations on trade.

And after Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, suggested the EU could block her plans to maintain a soft Irish border while leaving the customs union, Mr Lidington accepted it could be changed to accommodate concerns.

But he rejected suggestions that the UK would have to accept the fallback option of keeping Northern Ireland in an effective customs union with the EU.

Mr Lidington backed Mrs May’s plan to avoid a hard border through technological solutions and placing no new restrictions on the 80 per cent of cross-frontier trade carried out by smaller firms while suggesting it could be tweaked.

Asked if the backstop option was inevitable, Mr Lidington told ITV’S Peston on Sunday: “I’m much less pessimistic than you are, clearly we are at the start of a negotiating period and will want to sit down with our EU partners and work through where their concerns, whether legal or technical, are and see how we might together address this.”

But Irish Tanaiste Simon Coveney told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show he was “not sure that the European Union will be able to support” the plan, as it would be worried about protecting the integrity of the single market.

“While of course we will explore and look at all of the proposed British solutions, they are essentially a starting-point in negotiations as opposed to an end point,” he said.

Mr Coveney said if agreement cannot be reached during tripartite talks between the UK, Ireland and the EU Commission, the backstop plan of full British alignment with customs union and single market rules that Mrs May “committed clearly” to in December’s conclusion of withdrawal negotiations would have to be put in place.

Mrs May said she was pleased that Irish PM Leo Varadkar had agreed to form the three-way talks to look at her proposals. And she declined to defend Boris Johnson’s comparison of the border to crossing between London congestion zones in Camden and Islington.