Can Rishi Sunak solve the Northern Ireland trade puzzle?

Rishi Sunak says he is “determined” to break the deadlock over power-sharing in Northern Ireland, as he becomes the first prime minister to attend a meeting of the British-Irish Council since 2007.

The echo of Tony Blair, who stood down as prime minister that year, is unmistakeable and deliberate. Once again, it seems that Northern Ireland’s status could be resolved if only the British prime minister were prepared to devote the necessary time and focus to the negotiations.

Blair did it in 1998, producing the Good Friday Agreement, which secured peace and paved the way for devolved government; he did it again in 2007 when he finally brought the DUP and Sinn Fein together to make a Stormont executive work.

Boris Johnson did it differently in 2019, when he struck a deal with Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister at the time, to make it possible for the UK to leave the EU while protecting the interests of Northern Ireland. The problem is that Johnson’s deal didn’t work out as Johnson and David Frost, his chief negotiator, expected – although it is unclear whether they expected it to have to be renegotiated once we had actually left the EU.

And the more serious problem was that the DUP didn’t like the deal – which was designed to keep an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – and brought down the devolved government in Stormont.

As so often in the history of Northern Ireland, the outline of the next deal is discernible. Just as the Good Friday Agreement was described as “Sunningdale for slow learners” (referring to an earlier attempt to create a power-sharing government in 1973), so the way forward for the Northern Ireland protocol has been fairly clear from the moment the UK and EU sides began talks on how it should be implemented.

Johnson’s boosterish interpretation of the treaty he signed was always that it would mean minimal checks on goods going across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK, and only if they were “at risk” of onward passage to the Republic of Ireland. But as Alexander Horne, a former parliamentary lawyer, says: “The truth is that it is a badly drafted agreement. It tries to face in two directions. The generalised provisions can be read one way, whereas all the detail favours the EU position.”

But the principles of the Johnson view of how the protocol should work could shape a renegotiated deal, especially now that Johnson himself, and Frost, who took an increasingly confrontational approach, have both removed themselves from the picture. The EU side is prepared to compromise, as long as it knows that Johnson cannot make some Brexity triumphalism out of it. Johnson was regarded with suspicion not just by the EU, but by the US president – and by the DUP, which thinks, rightly, that he betrayed the party.

The difficult question is whether any deal can satisfy the DUP. Its rhetoric is of getting rid of the protocol altogether. As Sammy Wilson, the DUP MP, said in the Commons yesterday, “we cannot improve on that [the protocol] and we have to remove it”. Yet there can be no question of going back to the compromise negotiated by Theresa May – a deal that the DUP also rejected – which was to put the border on the island of Ireland but, by keeping the UK in the EU customs union, required the enforcement of border checks away from the physical border.

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Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, told Wilson: “I think there is a negotiated path where we can completely change how we deal with the protocol.” That is the test for Sunak, who seems to be serious about trying to get a deal – not least by showing respect to the British-Irish Council, which has been treated by other prime ministers as a low-grade talking-shop, and by focusing on his relationship with Micheal Martin, the Irish prime minister.

A deal can be done, and Sunak would deserve high praise if he were to secure it. The political reward for him would probably be small. The finer points of the rules on selling sausages in Northern Irish supermarkets are of little interest to most voters in Great Britain, who are worried about the cost of living, the NHS and immigration.

But Sunak may be prime minister for only two years, and if he can reach a deal to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol and restore devolved government at Stormont, he will at least earn a sentence in the history books.

The danger for him is that, if he doesn’t secure agreement soon, EU negotiators may decide that they should stall for time and wait for a Labour government to negotiate with instead.