DECISION DAY FOR PARLIAMENT
Against all the odds, the Prime Minister turned around years of in-fighting and interminable impasse to achieve his deal
THE OUTLOOK could scarcely have been more bleak: with fewer than 10 days to go before EU leaders were due in Brussels for a crunch Brexit summit, Downing Street officials pronounced that a deal was “essentially impossible”.
Boris Johnson had just put the phone down after a 40-minute call with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to try to break the impasse, but had come away utterly disheartened. It was, a Downing Street source added, a “clarifying moment” that a deal couldn’t be done. It was Oct 8.
Donald Tusk, an emotional Polish politician who cut his teeth in the shipyards of Gdansk and for whom Brexit was an inexplicable rejection of progress, vented his frustration.
“What’s at stake is not winning some stupid blame game,” he said. “At stake is the future of Europe and the UK as well as the security and interests of our people. You don’t want a deal, you don’t want an extension, you don’t want to revoke, quo vadis?”
Quo vadis? Where are you heading? At that precise moment there was “zero-confidence” among EU and UK officials that this week’s summit would end in a deal.
At the time, UK and EU officials and diplomats were discussing only how the Prime Minister would manage failure and yet another Brexit extension.
What no one foresaw was that nine days later Mr Johnson would be pictured in backslapping bonhomie with EU leaders, sharing tales of his Brussels school days and a mutual desire to pass a new Brexit agreement.
As it turned out, the Merkel call was merely the end of the first pugilistic phase of Mr Johnson’s negotiation and the start of nine tumultuous days that sealed a deal that for a long time no one thought possible, including quite possibly Mr Johnson himself.
“Merkel was straightforward, very calm but she was also brutally frank,” said a source. “She explained very clearly why there could not be a solution to the Irish border that involved customs checks on the island of Ireland, and that neither she, nor the EU, would force Dublin’s hand on this point.”
That appeared to be the moment that, as one official put it, “the penny dropped” that the technology-based solutions that Mr Johnson’s negotiating team had pinned all their hopes on for solving the Irish border were not going to be accepted.
“All the leaders were saying the same thing – they all had the same lines – but perhaps Johnson really had to hear it from Merkel,” said an EU diplomat.
The seeds of what happened next – and crystallised into the eventual solution to the Irish issue that had bedevilled the Brexit process for nearly three years – were actually sown before Mr Johnson had even taken office.
As the Tory leadership campaigns took shape, briefings on possible options were provided on the deserted fourth floor of Dexeu’s headquarters.
“When you plugged in all the red lines of each side – including Northern Ireland remaining in the UK’S customs territory – only one answer popped out every time: the Northern Ireland hybrid, delivered through a red/green channels system,” said a source familiar with the discussions.
It was a scheme that had been proposed by the Northern Ireland civil service back in March 2018, which noted that since there were already checks on many things entering Northern Ireland, such as live animals, the Brexit proposal would be a “pragmatic extension of a present reality” and “infinitely preferable to a return to the border of the past”.
The proposals, among others including time-limiting the backstop, were sent to David Frost, a former diplomat and special adviser to Mr Johnson at the Foreign Office who had come back out of the private sector to take over the role vacated by Olly Robbins as the PM’S Europe adviser.
The ideas were rejected. Mr Frost had been touring the London thinktank circuit arguing that technical border solutions, known collectively as “alternative arrangements”, could work if enough pressure was brought to bear by the threat of a no deal, while at the same time Mr Johnson’s own rhetoric against the backstop on the leadership campaign trail was narrowing options.
Seeing the direction of travel, several key figures in the previous negotiations team resigned, including Mr Robbins and Mrs May’s former special adviser on Europe, Raoul Ruparel.
What emerged from this period was an uncompromising first statement to the Commons from Mr Johnson on July 25 in which he demanded the “abolition” of the Irish backstop and kicked away the other compromises that were being quietly mooted by EU diplomats, including “time-limiting” the Northern Irish arrangements.
The hardline approach set alarm bells ringing in EU capitals that had worked hard to reach out to Mr Frost and others in Team Johnson in a concerted effort not “to slam shut any doors”. But slam they did. The 10 weeks between Mr Johnson’s statement and the Oct 8 Merkel phone call were a story of constant reversals for the Johnson juggernaut as it ploughed on with its “do or die” strategy of abolishing the Irish backstop or leaving with no deal.
Confidence that Team Johnson was serious about a deal waned further amid reports that Dominic Cummings had described the talks in Brussels as a “sham”. And when Amber Rudd quit as work and pensions secretary on Sept 7 she said: “I no longer believe leaving with a deal is the Government’s main objective.”
But the more profound setbacks came with the passage of the Benn Act on Sept 3, and with it the loss of 21 rebel Tory MPS. On top of that the Labour Party would not grant Mr Johnson a general election.
“That was when the strategic thinking about a no deal actually started to change,” says a source familiar with Whitehall thinking. “When it was clear to everyone involved that the PM had completely boxed himself in.”
On Sept 18, Mr Johnson went to Luxembourg to try to stimulate interest in talks, but found himself with Michel Barnier’s negotiating team being “schooled” on why his customs plans couldn’t work.
Even Jean-claude Juncker, the European Commission president with whom Mr Johnson is said to have struck up a rapport – and privately credits for helping make the deal happen – took a very tough line.
That message was rammed home at the UN General Assembly on Sept 23 when Mrs Merkel, the French president Emmanuel Macron and the Dutch PM Mark Rutte all told Mr Johnson his plans would not work.
“He replied with words to the effect that ‘you’ll blink in the end’,” said a source.
Things got worse when Mr Johnson was forced to rush home as the Supreme Court declared that his decision to shut Parliament for five weeks was unlawful.
EU diplomats privately spoke about “judicial hooliganism” and wondered whether the new British Prime Minister was creating a Trumpian mess on their doorstep.
Yet out of all the chaos the first kernels of political possibility began to emerge. In his summer visit to Europe, Mr Johnson had left Mrs Merkel convinced that he did want a deal – officials present said he was “serious and across the brief ” and later at the G7 on Aug 25 he was careful not to side with Donald Trump against the EU on key issues like China trade and climate change.
During a visit to Dublin on Sept 10, the Irish Taoiseach was firm but the tone was respectful and, despite no hint of compromise on customs, officials say an unlikely chemistry
‘All the EU leaders were saying the same thing … but perhaps Johnson had to hear it from Merkel’
emerged between the two men.
Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, and Julian Smith, the Northern Ireland Secretary were also forging strong relations that would prove critical in retaining sufficient trust to do the deal. And at the UN General Assembly, Mr Johnson suggested to Leo Varadkar that “we should meet somewhere neutral in a couple of weeks”.
The political shifts in London were also creating conditions for progress, not least the sacking of the 21 rebels which had the perverse effect of reducing the importance of the DUP, given the Johnson majority was now shot to pieces.
A senior EU source close to the talks said: “It actually created space, as did the Benn Act which gave the EU the ability to come to the table confident that if they walked away, they would get an extension, not a no deal.”
There was also a quiet recognition – in Dublin, Berlin and parts of Brussels – that the British complaints that the original Northern Irish backstop was “fundamentally undemocratic” had undeniable merit.
In Dublin there were similar echoes: there could never be customs checks in Ireland but on the question of how Northern Ireland parties consented to any new arrangements there was a discussion to be had.
The British concession on Sept 3 that Northern Ireland could be part of an all-ireland food zone crossed with the Irish and EU understanding that the backstop had legitimacy issues proved the intellectual fulcrum around which the deal would turn.
‘Mr Johnson replied with words to the effect that “you’ll blink in the end”’
With hindsight, there were clues of the British pivot that was to come in the formal proposals which were tabled on Oct 3. At the Tory party conference on Oct 1, Mr Johnson still dismissed the customs issue as an “essentially technical” discussion, but the subsequent proposal made another big concession that Northern Ireland would stay in both EU’S regulatory zones for “all” goods.
The Northern Irish political parties were to be given the right to consent to the new regime in a vote before the end of transition on whether the new arrangement would ever kick in, and then every four years thereafter.
The UK proposal, scathingly dubbed “two borders for four years”, was cautiously received in Brussels and EU capitals, where the acceptance of EU regulations for all goods was recognised as a significant move.
“It was clearly mad to have two sets of controls and checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland for regulation, and then North-south for customs,” said a source inside the talks. “If you have conceded regulation checks in the Irish Sea, the logic for customs too was inexorable.”
On Oct 9, Mr Ruparel published an article outlining the “red/green” channel solution and a dual-tariff “customs partnership” for Northern Ireland that had been proposed back in July. The piece gained traction in Brussels, where EU diplomats who might once have derided the idea didn’t. “If the Irish can live with it, then it’s the kind of cut-price ‘all-ireland economy’ we can chug along with, too,” said one.
Ideas were also emerging on the consent question – could a rolling four-year democratic vote on the new deal, in effect, create the “exit mechanism” Mr Johnson had derided, and which the Irish government had said it would never grant?
When Mr Johnson and Mr Varadkar met in the Wirral on Oct 10 – just two days after the call with Mrs Merkel
– the outlines of a grand bargain were there to be struck. Mr Johnson said he would be satisfied if Northern Ireland remained in the UK’S customs territory only technically speaking.
Mr Varadkar is understood to have opened the door to the notion that the new arrangements for Northern Ireland should be subject to the agreement of Stormont – a democratic process, though not one that amounted to a veto for either side.
When Mr Varadkar said he could see “a pathway to a possible deal”, it took time for the seriousness of what had happened to register.
What followed was essentially a race to rebuild the 2018 Northern Irelandonly “backstop’ as a “frontstop” – a new reality that would be “operable” from the day the UK exited the transition period on Dec 31, 2020.
Northern Ireland was spared a hard border, the EU single market was
protected and Britain could leave able to strike trade deals. “We could have done this deal in November 2017,” said one EU diplomat. “But we had a prime minister who didn’t know what she wanted and British negotiators who kept asking us what to do.”
And yet, like all great stories, this saga has a bitter twist: the DUP said it could not support a deal that it feels consigns its part of the United Kingdom to a different reality. The deal leaves Northern Ireland much closer to the orbit of the EU and, by extension, the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP still smarts from what it sees as the “betrayal” of the UK’S 1985 deal that gave the Irish government an advisory role in Northern Ireland. “This is the economic equivalent of the Anglo-irish Agreement,” said one DUP party adviser bitterly. “What Thatcher did politically in 1985, Johnson has done economically.”
If Mr Johnson’s deal fails in the Commons today, it may be a bitterness that he comes to regret.