Does Rishi Sunak feel the hand of history on his shoulder?

For a moment I thought we might be in for another “hand of history” moment when on Thursday, Downing Street announced that the prime minister was on his way to Belfast.

This happened a day after Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform and one of the sharpest observers of EU-UK relations, said he was “getting more optimistic about the chances of a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol”. Could Sunak’s visit be like that time, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when Tony Blair arrived in Belfast, saying that “a day like today is not a day for soundbites” before declaring “I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder with respect to this, I really do”?

Well, not yet. That Blair soundbite was at the start of a few days’ intensive negotiations, which produced the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement. We are not at that stage of the cycle yet. It turned out that Sunak’s visit was a lower-key preparatory one, sounding out the party leaders in Northern Ireland with a view to the deadline talked up by the British government of reaching a deal by the 25th anniversary of the original settlement at Easter next year.

To be fair to Grant, what he actually said was that he was more optimistic about the chances of a deal before Easter. But how realistic is a deal – one that could make the protocol work better and allow the devolved government of Northern Ireland to be restored?

The first part of that looks easier than the second. The EU side keeps making reasonable-sounding proposals that suggest it would be happy with a system of border checks that would be so unobtrusive it would be as though they weren’t there. But so far these have failed to satisfy the Democratic Unionist Party, which, with some justification, points out that you either have a trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK or you don’t. And if the DUP doesn’t sign up to the deal, it won’t allow the Northern Ireland assembly to resume its business.

Grant suggests that Sunak would be prepared to go ahead without the DUP, and that as long as he has the European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative MPs behind a deal, it could be made to work. If Steve Baker, the former chair of the ERG and now a Northern Ireland minister, backs a deal, the Tory back benches shouldn’t be a problem, but it is not obvious how a deal could work without the DUP. As the largest party of the unionist bloc in Northern Ireland, the DUP can veto the restoration of devolved government.

But a deal didn’t seem possible in 1998, either, so let us hope that the hand of history is indeed about to repeat itself.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator