May’s push for deal ends in chaos
Prime Minister left with 10 days to salvage EU talks after DUP refuses to back strategy for Irish border
THERESA MAY’S attempt to reach a Brexit deal on the Irish border fell apart yesterday after a damaging public row with the DUP over Northern Ireland’s future.
On an extraordinary day in Brussels, EU leaders raised expectations that a deal on the terms of the UK’S withdrawal was about to be reached, only for Mrs May to return empty-handed following a serious miscalculation over the DUP’S response to a key negotiating point.
It leaves the Prime Minister with just 10 days to salvage a deal before the European Council meets next week to discuss whether trade talks can start. She is now likely to face demands from MPS to address the Commons today to explain exactly what went wrong.
Mrs May was forced to leave a lunch with Jean-claude Juncker, the European Commission president, to telephone Arlene Foster after the DUP leader made clear in a televised statement that she would not stand for what was being proposed.
Mrs Foster, on whose support Mrs May relies for her parliamentary majority, laid down the law to the Prime Minister, saying she would not agree to a proposal that Northern Ireland would maintain “regulatory alignment” with the Republic of Ireland after Brexit.
Sammy Wilson, a DUP MP, said regulatory alignment was “simply Eu-speak for keeping Northern Ireland inside the customs union and inside the single market”. He added: “It’s a Unionist nightmare.”
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, and Carwyn Jones, the Welsh First Minister, seized on the phrase to insist that if Ulster could have special treatment, Scotland and Wales should have their own deals too, as an air of chaos descended over the talks.
Downing Street insisted that Mrs May had never agreed to the contested phrase, which was leaked to the Irish media in an apparent attempt to force the Prime Minister’s hand.
But the leak caused such concern for the DUP that Mrs Foster felt she had “no choice” but to pull the plug after reassuring her supporters that she would not stand for anything that meant Northern Ireland left the EU on different terms from mainland Britain.
It means Mrs May must return to Brussels tomorrow to carry on with the talks after the EU agreed to extend a deadline that expired yesterday for an agreement to be reached.
Both Mrs May and Mr Juncker said they remained “confident” that Britain could satisfy the EU’S definition of “satisfactory progress” being made on the Irish border, citizens’ rights and the “divorce bill” in time for trade talks to be approved at next week’s European Council meeting. But Donald Tusk, the
‘Northern Ireland must leave the EU on exactly the same terms as the rest of the UK’
‘It is simply Eu-speak for keeping Northern Ireland inside the customs union and the single market. It’s a Unionist nightmare’
president of the European Council, said the timing was “getting very tight”.
Downing Street insisted Mrs May had never expected a deal to be reached yesterday, having consistently said the meetings with Mr Juncker and Mr Tusk were just a “staging post”.
However, she had become so confident of a deal being agreed that she had booked several hours of parliamentary time today to set out the terms of the agreement in the Commons. Mr Tusk, meanwhile, said he had been “ready to present draft EU27 guidelines tomorrow for Brexit talks on transition and future” only for the UK and the Commission to ask for more time.
A DUP source said: “We have always said Northern Ireland must leave the EU on exactly the same terms as the rest of the UK. You shouldn’t cobble something together just to announce a deal, because it will fall apart further down the line.”
The Daily Telegraph understands that a deal on the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will allow it to adjudicate on the rights of EU citizens in the UK through a process of “voluntary referral” via an ombudsman. It would enable ministers to claim the ECJ does not have any guaranteed sovereign powers over British courts. Sources also suggested the final “divorce bill” will be less than the £50billion ceiling reportedly agreed by Cabinet.
immutable logic took over, and inexorably over the course of the next few hours began to unravel the deal.
Mrs Foster was emphatic that Northern Ireland must not be treated differently from any other part of the United Kingdom. The North, she said, could not become a regulatory exclave of the Republic, or the EU itself.
But how then to square her demand for equality, with the idea that Northern Ireland was apparently being granted a soft Brexit that seemed to make it part of the EU’S single market and customs union in all but name?
Either Northern Ireland was being treated differently, which would imply an east-west border to monitor mainland Britain’s divergent trade policy after Brexit, or, contrary to everything we have been told by Mrs May, the UK was not diverging at all? It could not be both.
In trying to placate the DUP, Downing Street signalled that Mrs May was signing up to “regulatory alignment” for the whole of the UK but only in those areas that impacted the Irish border question, principally agriculture and electricity.
But there lies the rub. If that is the case – and there are some 140 areas that have reportedly been identified as crucial for north-south cooperation in Ireland – how free, really, would the UK be to diverge with Liam Fox’s muchvaunted independent trade policy?
EU officials are privately very clear that the “fudge” on Ireland leaves little room for manoeuvre. The level of regulatory convergence required to avoid a hard border – and the east-west border that implies – is inescapable.
So either Mrs May was signing up the UK to vast swathes of convergence with the EU, something Boris Johnson and free-trading Brexiteers have explicitly ruled out, or she was selling her DUP partners down the river with false promises.
Clearly Mrs May hoped the reality of these conflicting positions could survive unnoticed at least until the EU had granted “sufficient progress” at the European Council in 10 days’ time, and she could claim a pre-christmas victory at the end of a disastrous year. In the event, her gambit did not survive the afternoon.
Such are the political horizons of a prime minister whose cabinet has not even held a substantive discussion on the shape of the UK’S future relationship with the EU. On today’s showing it is not difficult to see why.