Boris Johnson news: Ireland government says it ‘cannot possibly’ accept PM's Brexit plan, as he faces fresh Jennifer Arcuri claims

The DUP must not be given an effective veto over the desires of the majority in Northern Ireland when it comes to Brexit, Leo Varadkar has said.

The Irish PM said no single political party on the island should be able to wield that power over the structure of post-Brexit cross-border arrangements.

Boris Johnson wants to give the non-functioning Northern Ireland Assembly a vote, both on whether to opt into a mooted all-island regulatory system, and whether to stay in it after its first four years.

A controversial Stormont voting mechanism, called the petition of concern, means a bloc of assembly members from either the unionist or nationalist communities can veto certain decisions, even if a majority of members back them.

Mr Varadkar said the mechanism must not be a factor in Brexit arrangements.

"Our view is that any consent mechanism, were it to exist, would have to be reflective of the view of the whole of the population of Northern Ireland and not give any one party or any denomination a veto," he said.

"No one party - not my party, not Sinn Fein, not the DUP - should be in a position to veto what would be the will of the majority in Northern Ireland or Ireland."

Collusion by three pharmaceutical firms has resulted in eye-watering price rises for a life-saving drug purchased by the National Health Service, according to provisional findings by the competition watchdog, writes Olesya Dmitracova.

In 2016, pharmaceutical giant Aspen made a deal with two other firms to keep them out of the UK market for fludrocortisone, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday. Thousands of patients rely on the medicine to treat what is known as Addison’s disease – an insufficient production of certain hormones.

“This alleged illegal agreement protected Aspen’s UK monopoly in relation to the supply of the drug to the NHS and gave the firm the opportunity to increase prices by up to 1,800 per cent,” the CMA said.

The DUP's Arlene Foster has lashed out at Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, over the Irish government's rejection of Boris Johnson's Brexit border plan.

Remarks made by Mr Coveney have been "deeply unhelpful, obstructionist and intransigent", Ms Foster said.

"Mr Coveney's rejection of a reasonable offer is paving the way for a no-deal exit because unionism will not allow Northern Ireland to be trapped at the whim of Dublin or the EU," she said. "The consent of the people of Northern Ireland for specific solutions has been key."

But the Irish government believes that, given Brexit was the UK's decision, it falls to the UK to come up with a workable solution.

Mr Coveney addressed the Dail parliament earlier on Thursday about Boris Johnson's plan to give Stormont a vote on his border scheme, and its attendant hurdle known as the "petition of concern".

He said: "We cannot support any proposal that essentially suggests that a minority can determine what the majority have to live with, it's just not going to work.

"And if that is the proposal, I believe it would be very, very difficult to get an Executive up and running. Why would other parties buy into an Executive if they believe that Executive could essentially prevent solutions linked to Brexit?"

Mr Coveney was making the same point as his boss, Leo Varadkar, has also made about the effective "veto". (See 4.35pm post.)

Scotland has become the first part of the UK to ban the smacking of children, after MSPs at Holyrood passed a Member's Bill brought forward by Green MSP John Finnie.

"We're in an awful mess" when it comes to Brexit and Northern Ireland, Peter Hain has said.

He told Sky News he believed Boris Johnson's border plan would "undermine the Good Friday Agreement".

The easiest way to understand the real-world implications of Boris Johnson’s proposed Brexit deal is through the medium of chicken. In fact, an inexpensive chlorinated chicken, of the type that may be imported to Britain under a future US-UK free trade deal, writes Sean O'Grady.

Under the single market (which harmonises and mutually recognises different nations’ qualifications, rules and regulations), and customs union (which sets a common external trade policy), chlorinated chickens are not allowed to be processed or imported into the EU, including Britain and Ireland.

The Speaker of the House of Commons croaked out the words “Statement from the Prime Minister” and up the prime minister got, writes Tom Peck.

The rolling spectacle of Britain’s slow motion self-immolation has been the world’s most popular surrealist comedy drama for quite a few years now, and all credit really must go to the scriptwriters for finding new motifs through which to elevate the same fundamental plot structure, season after season after season.

At this, the most recent moment of high farce, it was an ingenious touch to have a speaker that can’t speak. John Bercow has completely lost his voice.

Boris Johnson could use emergency powers to force through a no-deal Brexit, Vince Cable has claimed.

But he appeared to suggest he believed that the prime minister was capable of instigating what conspiracy theorists call a "false flag" incident.

The former Lib Dem leader told Politico: "My worry at the moment is that the government might try to fabricate an emergency situation as a pretext for pushing through changes around a no-deal Brexit that they otherwise cannot secure in parliament.

“There is a risk that we get an agent provocateur ... which the government uses as a pretext to obtaining emergency powers.”

Jean-Claude Juncker spoke to Leo Varadkar about Boris Johnson's latest Brexit proposals on Thursday, and a European Commission statement later reiterated the line we heard yesterday - thanks for this, but it needs work (by you).

"The Withdrawal Agreement must have a legally operational solution now, and cannot be based on untried arrangements that would be left to negotiation during the transition period," the statement added.

Boris Johnson has not ruled out keeping the backstop in his new withdrawal agreement, as long as the EU puts a strict time limit on it, according to a report.

Bloomberg, citing "two people familiar with the matter", reported that the backstop remained Mr Johnson's "plan B" if his current proposals don't meet with approval.

Our political editor, Andrew Woodcock, has provided this analysis:

A time limit would make the backstop more palatable to the Conservatives and their DUP allies, by ensuring that the UK was not indefinitely trapped in the EU’s customs union, preventing it from striking trade deals elsewhere in the world.

But it is unlikely to win favour in Brussels, which argues that a limit on the application of the backstop would destroy its value as insurance against the possibility that no alternative arrangements are found for keeping the Irish border open.