The EU is leaving the door open for an NI protocol compromise – what will the UK do?

How to solve a problem like the Northern Ireland protocol? It is a question that we are no closer to finding an answer to, although the EU’s Brexit chief, Maros Sefcovic, is the latest to add to the back-and-forth between the bloc and the UK government.

Sefcovic has said he is open to the idea of reducing physical customs checks across the Irish Sea to potentially just “a couple of lorries a day” in a bid to break the impasse. He added, in an interview with the Financial Times, that there was almost no difference between the UK’s demand for “no checks” and the EU’s offer of “minimum checks, done in an invisible manner”.

According to respected Brexit analyst Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, senior UK officials believe that the offer “doesn’t go far enough” and “isn’t particularly new”. But Sefcovic’s remarks have revealed the kind of practical changes that Brussels envisages from a possible compromise deal.

So what can we expect from a UK response, with the ball now back in the government’s court? Certainly little this week, as preparations are made for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

However, the minister for foreign affairs in the Irish government, Simon Coveney, offered up some words over the weekend on his former counterpart, Liz Truss, which gave a sense of where we stand.

“The approach that she decided to take as foreign secretary towards the protocol was, in my view, very unhelpful,” he told RTE’s radio programme This Week. “It was an approach that I challenged with her personally, and that meant we had some difficult conversations. But that’s politics.”

However, Coveney also suggested that Truss’s elevation represents an opportunity that needs to be grasped. “She’s prime minister now, of course, which puts her in a different place in terms of responsibility, but certainly the Irish government, the taoiseach, myself, the tanaiste, and the European Commission look on the change in leadership in the British government as an opportunity to try and reset relationships,” he said.

He continued: “I hope that in the weeks ahead, when the funeral arrangements and the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth II ends, that there will be an opportunity to have an honest and direct discussion between the British government and the EU, and obviously Ireland will be very much involved in that discussion, to try and settle some of the outstanding issues that continue to cause polarisation and political tension linked to Brexit and the NI protocol.”

The fact that Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, both former chairs of the Brexiteer European Research Group (ERG), have been appointed by Truss to the Northern Ireland Office suggests that there might not be much of a softening of approach. Although, as some have suggested, there is always the chance that if a compromise is to be hammered out, Truss would want such hardliners to be involved in it.

Calls between the new Truss administration and Irish officials are said to have been conducted cordially, but we will have to wait and see what comes next.