When President Joe Biden was isolating with Covid in the White House last summer, atop the stack of books on his desk was a 320-page paperback: “JFK in Ireland.”
The last Irish Catholic president visited his ancestral homeland in 1963, five months before his assassination. He told his aides afterwards it was the “best four days of my life.”
Sixty years later, the current Irish Catholic president (Secret Service codename: Celtic) departs Tuesday for his own visit bound to make a similar impression – first to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and then onto Ireland from Wednesday through Saturday.
Part homecoming, part statecraft and part politics, this week’s trip amounts to a timely intersection of Biden’s deeply felt personal history with his ingrained view of American foreign policy as a force for enduring good.
Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described his goal as “making sure the Irish accords and the Windsor Agreement stay in place – keep the peace.”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” he told reporters before boarding Air Force One.
The visit is timed to commemorate the 1998 signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. The agreement came about with significant American investment, particularly from Democrats like Bill Clinton and Sen. George Mitchell, a legacy Biden is eager to highlight when he stops in Belfast starting Tuesday.
But it will be his personal engagements in the Republic of Ireland later in the week, including stops in County Louth and County Mayo to explore his family roots, that will best capture what Biden himself has described as perhaps his single most defining trait.
“As many of you know, I, like all of you, take pride in my Irish ancestry,” he said during a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon last month. “And as long as I can remember, it’s been sort of part of my soul.”
Described by Ireland’s prime minister last month as “unmistakably a son of Ireland,” Biden has at various moments ascribed his temper, his nostalgic streak, his politics and his humor all to his Irish roots. He quotes poets like William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney freely; the most famous passage from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” has appeared no fewer than 12 times in Biden’s public remarks since he took office.
“They think I do it because I’m Irish,” Biden said recently. “I do it because they’re the best poets.”
Ahead of the trip, the White House distributed an extensive family genealogy stretching as far back as 1803, to the shoemakers and civil engineers and union overseers who would eventually leave Ireland on ships bound for America. Most left during the Irish famine of the 1840s and 1850s on what Biden has called the “coffin ships” because so many of their passengers didn’t survive the passage.
His ancestors’ experiences have left indelible impressions on Biden, whose persona is defined by eternal optimism despite his own experience of profound loss.
“One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: ‘To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life,’” he wrote in his 2017 memoir.
Returning to Ireland as president has long been in the cards for Biden, who is also planning to meet with Irish leaders, address Parliament and deliver a nighttime speech in front of St. Muredach’s Cathedral, in the northwest of Ireland, before returning to Washington on Saturday. The White House said Biden’s great-great-great grandfather Edward Blewitt sold 28,000 bricks to the cathedral in 1828 to construct its pillars.
He’ll be joined members of his family for the journey, including his son Hunter and sister Valerie. When he visited as vice president in 2016, he spent six days crisscrossing the island with several grandchildren and his sister, a newly generated family-tree in hand.
By coincidence, Biden was on that visit to Ireland the same day a majority of British voters elected to leave the European Union, a decision he opposed and which posed thorny questions for Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.
As aides set to work planning his visit as president, Brexit’s legacy continued to loom. A dispute over trade rules between the UK and the European Union, to which the Republic of Ireland belongs, tested the Good Friday agreement and its fragile peace.
It was a matter Biden took outsized interest in upon taking office. He warned successive British prime ministers to resolve the dispute before the anniversary – tacitly hinging his entire trip on it. After months of negotiations, the current PM Rishi Sunak struck a deal resolving the dispute in February, though Northern Ireland’s main unionist political party has yet to sign on. Still, the arrangement paved the way for Biden’s visit this month.
Sunak is expected to meet Biden when he arrives, and the two will meet for talks in Belfast on Wednesday.
Biden hopes to use his trip as a reminder of what sustained diplomacy can yield at a moment America’s role abroad is being debated. An isolationist strain among Republicans has led to questions about the durability of Washington’s global leadership. The Good Friday Agreement, brokered by the United States, stands as one of the most lasting examples of US diplomacy from the end of the 20th century.
“President Biden has been talking about liberal internationalism as something that can return, he talks about democracy versus autocracy, all of this kind of stuff. So within that, I think that he wants to see good examples of the rule of law in US foreign policy. And this is a great example of that. This was an achievement,” said Liam Kennedy, director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at the University College Dublin.
“The Good Friday Agreement is certainly one of those things where you can get real bipartisan buy-in in Washington,” Kennedy said. “Believe me, that’s a pretty unusual thing.”
The bloody tensions between Protestant Unionists, who support remaining part of the United Kingdom, and Catholic Irish Nationalists, who support reunification with the Republic, have mostly been left in another era. The Troubles led to more than 3,500 deaths, most of them civilians, and even more casualties.
As a senator, Biden was outspoken in favor of American peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. He also opposed extraditing IRA suspects from the US to Britain, arguing the justice system that existed in Northern Ireland at the time wasn’t fair.
In 1988, he told the Irish America magazine in a cover story (headline: “Fiery Joe Biden: White House bound?”) that as president he’d be active in trying to reach a peace.
“If we have a moral obligation in other parts of the world, why in God’s name don’t we have a moral obligation to Ireland? It’s part of our blood. It’s the blood of my blood, bone of my bone,” he said.
A decade later, three-way talks between the US, Ireland and Britain yielded the Good Friday Agreement, which sought to end the bloodshed through a power sharing government between the unionists and nationalists.
Yet that government has functioned only sporadically in the quarter-century since the accord was signed and has been frozen for more than a year after the Democratic Unionists withdrew because of the Brexit trade dispute.
John Finucane, a member of the British Parliament from Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, said Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland this week would be a “huge help” toward resolving some of the lingering differences.
A lawyer whose own father was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with UK state forces in 1989, Finucane said Biden’s visit was a reminder of the American role in brokering peace.
“It’s no secret that I don’t think we would have had a peace process or certainly a Good Friday Agreement without the involvement of the American administration, and successive American administrations in implementing our peace,” he said. “Joe Biden himself has a very strong track record in supporting our peace process. So I think it is very fitting that he will be coming here next week.”
Still, the threat of violence has never entirely disappeared, a reality made evident when British intelligence services raised the terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland from “substantial” to “severe” in late March.
An operation called “Operation Rondoletto” taking place over Easter weekend ahead of Biden’s visit was set to cost around $8.7 million (£7 million), the police service said, and include motorcycle escort officers, firearms specialists and search specialists.
Asked last month whether the heightened terror level would dissuade him from visiting, however, Biden hardly sounded concerned.
“No, they can’t keep me out,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Cori Conlon grew up thinking Protestants were “the bad guys.”
They went to different schools, played different sports, had different flags, and sang different songs. She said she was oblivious to the complexities of Northern Irish politics, but knew only one thing: to stay away from the Protestant children living at the bottom of the street.
Raised in a predominantly Catholic area in west Belfast, she spoke Irish, sang Irish ballads and attended Irish Catholic school. Her routine was punctuated by “peace walls,” the towering metal barricades built during the conflict that separate communities into Catholic and Protestant. .
Her views were shaped by the folklore of her family, tales that her “Great Granny Kitty” would tell of the violence between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists, or the British Army, known as the Troubles, that racked daily life for 30 years and left more than 3,600 people dead.
In 1971, her grandparents provided a safe-haven to neighbors after the British army shot and killed 10 people in their district, a series of incidents known as the Ballymurphy massacre, she said. That and other stories left their mark on her.
She didn’t meet a Protestant until she was 11.
Conlon is one of Northern Ireland’s “peace babies,” those born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1997, ending decades of violence and raising hopes of a brighter future for the next generation. But 25 years on, young people like Conlon are still exposed to the trauma of the Troubles, as clashes over identity and constitutional issues continue to dictate political discourse.
The anniversary of the agreement comes as the power-sharing system of government it created, designed to end decades of violence, is failing. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed the government in protest against the Brexit settlement, which it says drives a wedge between Northern Ireland and Britain. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein, a political party dedicated to Irish reunification, is now the most popular across the island of Ireland.
Caught in the middle of this constitutional tug of war are young people, whose minds are preoccupied with pressing social issues: a largely segregated education and housing system, poor health care and high levels of poverty. CNN spoke with three “peace babies” living in Belfast, who dream of living in a future free from sectarianism, and say that political discord is stifling their futures.
“I grew up in a segregated society, in my own community. I went to an Irish primary school and an Irish Catholic secondary school. I thought Protestants were the bad guys – because that’s what you were told – through history, parents and the murals you see in your area,” Conlon, 22, an Irish-language campaigner who works in theater, told CNN.
But Cori’s perception of Protestants began to change when she joined a cross-community performing arts project, learning to act and sing with young people from the other side of Belfast.
“If it wasn’t for the Rainbow Factory, I wouldn’t have met a Protestant until I was an adult. Now as an adult, because of the Rainbow Factory, I have a lot of friends from all communities, but still anytime I go to east Belfast my parents are traumatized,” she said. “The older generations have not healed, and that’s why it keeps getting passed on to the younger generation.”
Like many others in her generation, Conlon emigrated from Northern Ireland, moving away to study drama in England. But unlike the 88% of young people who never return home – she moved back to Belfast.
Now, she works for YouthAction Northern Ireland, teaching theater to children from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds at the Rainbow Factory, the same performing arts school that she said opened her eyes to the fissures within Northern Ireland’s society. An advocate for better peace and reconciliation, she is adamant that another generation is not condemned to the same fate of sectarianism.
Joel Keys, a 21-year-old loyalist activist from east Belfast, lives on the other side of the peace walls, where many curbs are still painted in the colors of the British Union Jack flag – red, white and blue – to mark out unionist territory.
Many of the loyalist murals in the area were painted by his father. One pays homage to the east Belfast Protestant Boys Flute Band, who march through the streets of the city every year on July 12, celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when King William of Orange secured a victory over the deposed Catholic monarch James II – leading to the discrimination of Irish Catholics for centuries. The streets are lined with murals showing men wearing balaclavas pointing guns, with the words: “if you are attacked, defend yourself.”
“There were no Catholics in my area or school. For most of my life, I thought, we are the good guys – and all of them Catholics were evil, scary and wanted to kill us,” Keys told CNN. “But it’s not that young loyalists are running around with a hatred of Catholics in their hearts.”
These divisions are reinforced throughout society. Across Northern Ireland, 93% of children go to a school that is segregated by religion, per a UNESCO report from Ulster University in 2021. And more than 90% of social housing estates remain segregated into single identity communities, with that number rising to 94% in Belfast, according to 2016 figures from the Housing Executive.
In 2021, unionists held rallies and marches to protest the Northern Ireland protocol – recently rebranded as the “Windsor Framework – part of the Brexit deal that saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union, leading to a customs border in the Irish Sea in order to avoid having one across the island of Ireland. Loyalists’ anger boiled over and spilled into the streets. Adults cheered on children as they threw petrol bombs at police. Eight people were arrested for rioting, including Keys.
The teenage supermarket worker-turned aspiring politician was released from jail after his arrest, and shortly after was invited to appear before the Northern Ireland affairs committee to discuss loyalist anger. He stunned members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, known as Stormont, and faced media backlash, after claiming that sometimes violence is “the only tool you have left.”
But he has since spoken out against the renewed loyalist violence in his area, saying those who have accused him of supporting it misunderstood him.
“The Northern Ireland Protocol is interesting because I think loyalism has a point – and I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made that a customs border between Northern Ireland and Britain – similar to the way a border across the island, is wrong. But is it the case that these are the issues that people in my community are discussing? No. If you went out and did a survey and asked people in loyalist areas what is the Protocol – I’d be willing to bet that over half of them wouldn’t be able to tell you – there’s more important issues,” Keys told CNN.
More than anything, Keys is furious at how the current political impasse has left the people of east Belfast in poverty, adding that leaders of the Democratic Unionist parties need to understand that the new generation want better jobs and education, not the same tired sectarian politics pitting orange (Protestant) against green (Catholic).
“People in my community, they’re not lazy or stupid – so why are they stuck in the position they’re in? Why are they struggling to find employment? Why are some of them struggling to find a house?” Keys queried. “Because our schools have failed, and our political system is failing. But instead of addressing these problems, people are still in war mode. The Good Friday Agreement may have taken away the bombs and the bullets, but all this means is that we’re now at war with our words instead.”
In 2012, there were loyalist riots when the number of days that the Union flag flies over Belfast City Hall was limited from 365 days a year to 18 — the minimum required for UK government buildings. Protesters, angered over what they saw as an attack on British culture, threw petrol bombs, bricks and stones at police, burning the offices of political parties that voted for the decision.
“I remember running down to Belfast city center with my friends to riot. I picked up a bin and threw it. I looked across the street and saw a woman looking at me, an ordinary person going about their day. She was so appalled at what was going on – and I remember thinking, what am I doing?” Andrew Clarke, a 27-year-old Protestant from east Belfast, told CNN.
Clarke said that his identity at the time was firmly rooted in unionism, born out of his childhood and nurtured in a Protestant state school.
But at 16, after the 2012 riots he said his view of the issues facing his generation shifted dramatically when he changed schools from a Protestant state school to an integrated college. The move opened his eyes to other, more pressing issues, which he says he feels aren’t represented adequately by politicians today.
“I was a supporter of LGBT rights and abortion access for women, but the DUP opposed that. Growing up in a loyalist area, I’ve seen how loyalist communities are controlled by unionist politicians who don’t care about them – who use the constitutional question to ignore social issues, where social deprivation is tolerated because politics is seen as green and orange,” Clarke said, adding that he now aligns more with Irish Republicanism.
“There is a cost-of-living crisis, homelessness crisis and Belfast is the suicide capital of western Europe. There is nothing here for young people – so they flee abroad.”
In 2022, after the latest round of rioting subsided, the Democratic Unionist Party collapsed the power-sharing deal designed to stop the bloody conflict, in protest over the Northern Ireland protocol. It is the fifth time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed that sectarian politics has left the Northern Irish people without a government.
Without a body to allocate funding, Youth Action Northern Ireland, which runs the Rainbow Factory, may be forced to close some of their cross-community projects, one less opportunity for Catholic and Protestant children to meet, according to Conlon.
Northern Ireland has the highest levels of child poverty per head of population in the UK, with 100,000 born into poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree foundation. And, last week, Northern Ireland’s Department of Education announced that they were scrapping Holiday Hunger, a free school meal program, and a school counseling scheme due to budget cuts.
“Youth organizations are crying out for government support. There’s funding there that can’t be given out – because there’s no government – and these youth services are going to close. Young people rely on it so much. I honestly can’t even begin to imagine the impact this will have on their lives,” Conlon said.
“It feels like all these issues are more important than sectarian politics – but it feels like if we don’t address sectarianism – then we can’t deal with these issues.”
BELFAST — President Joe Biden arrives in Northern Ireland on Tuesday to salute the 25th anniversary of its U.S.-brokered peace accord. But it will be a hollow celebration.
Power-sharing between British unionists and Irish nationalists, the central vision of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, is failing.
Northern Ireland has for nearly a year had no elected government at Stormont, the grand parliament building overlooking Belfast. It has no annual budget either — only red ink, rising in a sea of dysfunction. And thanks to Brexit, the U.K.’s most socially divided region this month lost tens of millions in annual European Union funds that had sustained the poorest communities.
Northern Ireland’s fiscal council, created two years ago to advise Stormont following a previous government shutdown, estimates an extra £808 million is needed this year just to keep existing services running at a time of rising energy bills and wage demands.
Instead, the British government in London wants immediate spending cuts topping £500 million. Its failure to deliver a 2023 budget in time for the new fiscal year, or to fulfil pledges to match now-departed EU funds, have left local hospitals, schools and community groups scrambling for services to curtail and staff to cut.
Who slashes spending when there’s no bona-fide government? Emergency legislation laid in Westminster places this burden on 10 unelected permanent secretaries — senior civil servants who were employed to advise ministers neutrally, not take direct political decisions.
With finances running low, the education department has already ended holiday meal subsidies for schoolchildren from poor households — nearly a third of all students. Other departments are braced for cuts averaging 6 to 10 percent. Those drawing up the cuts are incensed.
“I shouldn’t be forced to play the role of minister. It’s an affront to democracy and it’s politically indefensible,” one of the permanent secretaries told POLITICO.
“Locally elected ministers must be taking these deeply consequential decisions if the power-sharing element of the Good Friday Agreement is to mean anything any more,” said the civil servant, who spoke on condition they were not identified because they traditionally do not talk on the record to journalists.
“As long as power-sharing is not working, London needs to take its own responsibilities seriously. Its refusal to act in a timely fashion is making matters needlessly worse. We’re doing damage to so many lives. It’s truly shameful.”
The U.K. government insists it’s right to expect sharp cuts now, arguing the financial problems were created by years of divided, indecisive Stormont governments that failed to take other tough financial decisions.
“We’ve inherited an enormous black hole,” said Steve Baker, a minister in the U.K.’s Northern Ireland Office. “It hasn’t arisen overnight. It is the product of many years of financial mismanagement, and often the expectation of bailout.”
Notorious DUP
Baker places primary blame on the Democratic Unionists, the main pro-British party in Northern Ireland, who refused to form a new unity government with the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin following last year’s Stormont assembly election.
The Democratic Unionists say they will indefinitely obstruct Stormont in protest at the U.K.’s Brexit treaty with the EU. It keeps Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., still subject to EU goods rules. Since 2021, that policy has kept cross-border trade with the Republic of Ireland flowing freely — but at the price of complicated new controls on goods arriving from Britain.
Unionists fear, and nationalists hope, that these shifting trade winds will eventually help push Northern Ireland out of the U.K. and into the arms of the republic.
After two years of diplomatic wrangling, the U.K. government and European Commission six weeks ago published a wide-ranging agreement, the Windsor Framework, that vastly reduced EU-required checks on British goods arriving at Northern Irish ports. London and Brussels voiced hopes this would be enough to revive Stormont.
But the famously stubborn DUP — which grew to become the largest unionist party specifically because it rejected the Good Friday deal and opposed compromise with Sinn Féin — is holding out for more, and still won’t re-enter Stormont alongside its adversaries.
Once committed to Northern Ireland’s violent overthrow and abolition, Sinn Féin topped last year’s election ahead of the DUP for the first time, meaning its regional leader — party vice president Michelle O’Neill — should be entitled to the top Stormont post of first minister. The DUP’s loss of top-dog status has increased unionist unease that Northern Ireland’s bonds with Britain could be irreversibly fraying.
The center cannot hold
Moderate politicians blame both extremes for making Northern Ireland ungovernable. They suggest that power-sharing rules drafted a generation ago no longer work in today’s hardened political landscape.
They argue the central requirement for “mandatory coalition” between unionist and nationalist forces should be eased. The policy effectively gives the largest party from each sectarian bloc — for the past two decades the DUP and Sinn Féin — the power to block the formation of any government. As a result, the hard liners have taken turns periodically shutting down Stormont over the past decade.
These rules have a particularly perverse impact on Northern Ireland’s most compromise-minded party, Alliance, which refuses to define itself as either British unionist or Irish nationalist — and is treated as a power-sharing irrelevance as a result.
Alliance was a fringe player back in 1998 but made the biggest gains in last May’s election, finishing third with 17 assembly seats to Sinn Féin’s 27 and the DUP’s 25. Yet instead of Alliance becoming a coalition kingmaker, the current power-sharing rules mean its nonsectarian votes don’t count at all.
Some suggest Alliance leader Naomi Long could sue the British government to force reform.
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long says the Good Friday Agreement’s power-sharing rules explicitly permit periodic reviews of the system | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images
“I don’t believe that our votes counting for less than other people is legal,” Long said, citing legal advice that found the prevailing rules violate European human rights law. “We are willing to challenge what is a fundamental inequality at the heart of our government.”
Long says she hopes such a confrontation won’t be necessary, emphasizing that the Good Friday Agreement’s power-sharing rules explicitly permit periodic reviews of the system.
Time for a new deal?
Bertie Ahern, the former Irish prime minister who worked alongside Britain’s Tony Blair in 1998 to achieve the Good Friday breakthrough, also believes the time for dumping “mandatory coalition” is fast approaching. In its place, as advocated by recent think tank papers exploring ways to save Stormont, would be a voluntary coalition — which Ahern pointedly describes as “what happens in a democracy.”
Such a change would mean Sinn Féin and the DUP retain rights, as the largest parties on either side of the divide, to lead a Stormont coalition together. But should either one balk, they could no longer block the formation of a different government combination. This would open the door for more moderate politicians to represent their communities once again.
But while Sinn Féin has said it would be open to talks on making the rules more flexible, the DUP has been quick to rule out the surrender of its veto.
For the journalist who famously broke the news of the Good Friday Agreement a quarter-century ago, Stormont’s ongoing inability to build a stable culture of partnership has made this week’s anniversary bittersweet.
Stephen Grimason, at that time BBC Northern Ireland’s political editor, became Stormont’s chief spin doctor for 15 years. He worked alongside a string of DUP and Sinn Féin ministers who, in his eyes, too often ducked the difficult decisions that would have delivered strong, reforming government.
“Looking back, I have this emptiness in the pit of my stomach about all the opportunities we had,” he told the Belfast Telegraph last week. “We missed every single one of them.”
DUBLIN — U.S. President Joe Biden will pay a five-day visit to both parts of Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord, according to a provisional Irish government itinerary seen by POLITICO.
The plans, still being finalized with the White House, have the president arriving in Northern Ireland on April 11. That’s one day after the official quarter-century mark for the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal designed to end decades of conflict that claimed more than 3,600 lives.
With Irish roots on both sides of his family tree, Biden has long taken an interest in brokering and maintaining peace in Northern Ireland. He has welcomed the recent U.K.-EU agreement on making post-Brexit trade rules work in the region — a breakthrough that has yet to revive local power-sharing at the heart of the 1998 accord.
According to two Irish government officials involved in planning the Biden visit itinerary, the president will start his stay overnight at Hillsborough Castle, southwest of Belfast, the official residence for visiting British royalty, as a guest of the U.K.’s Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.
Then he’s scheduled to visit Stormont, the parliamentary complex overlooking Belfast, at the invitation of its caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey of the Irish republican Sinn Féin party.
That could prove controversial given that, barring a diplomatic miracle, the Northern Ireland Assembly and its cross-community government — a core achievement of the 1998 agreement — won’t be functioning due to a long-running boycott by the Democratic Unionists. That party has not yet accepted the U.K.-EU compromise deal on offer because it keeps Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the U.K., subject to EU goods rules and able to trade more easily with the rest of Ireland than with Britain. Nonetheless, assembly members from all parties including the DUP will be invited to meet Biden there.
The president is booked to officiate the official ribbon-cutting of the new downtown Belfast campus of Ulster University. During his stay in Northern Ireland he also is expected to pay a visit to Queen’s University Belfast, where former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton serves as chancellor.
Next, the Irish government expects the presidential entourage to cross the border into the Republic of Ireland, potentially by motorcade, the approach last adopted by Bill Clinton during his third and final visit to Ireland as president in 2000.
This would allow Biden to pay a visit to one side of his Irish family tree, the Finnegans, in County Louth. Louth is midway between Belfast and Dublin. Biden previously toured the area in 2016 as vice president, when he met distant relatives for the first time and visited the local graveyard.
In Dublin, it is not yet confirmed whether Biden will deliver a speech at College Green outside the entrance of Trinity College. That’s the spot where Barack Obama delivered his own main speech during a one-day visit as president in 2011.
A White House advance team is expected in Dublin this weekend to scout that and other potential locations for a speech and walkabout. He isn’t expected to hold any functions at the Irish parliament, which begins a two-week Easter recess Friday.
Members of Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Síochána, have been told by commanders they cannot go on leave during the week of April 10-16 in anticipation of Biden’s arrival. The Irish expect U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to accompany the president and take part in more detailed talks with Northern Ireland’s leaders.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar plans to host the president and Blinken at Farmleigh House, a state-owned mansion previously owned by the Guinness brewing dynasty, inside Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park.
The final two days of Biden’s visit will focus on the other side of his Irish roots, the Blewitts of County Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast, which he also visited in 2016. Distant cousins he first met on that trip have since been repeated guests of the White House, most recently on St. Patrick’s Day.
White House officials declined to discuss specific dates or any events planned, but did confirm that Biden would travel to Ireland “right after Easter.” This suggests an April 11 arrival in line with the Irish itinerary. Easter Sunday falls this year on April 9 and, in both parts of Ireland, the Christian holiday is a two-day affair ending in Easter Monday.
LONDON — “Better than the last guy” might not be quite the tagline every world leader hopes for. It could yet be Rishi Sunak’s winning formula.
The British prime minister, swept into office late last year by wave after wave of Tory psychodrama, has cleared several major hurdles in the space of the past month. His success has even sparked a shocking rumor in Westminster that — whisper it — he might actually be quite good at his job.
That was the murmur among hopeful Conservative MPs ahead of this week’s U.K. budget, anyway — many of them buoyed by the PM’s recent moves on two long-running sources of angst in Westminster.
First came an apparent resolution to the intractable problem of post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Sunak’s so-called Windsor Framework deal with Brussels landed to near-universal acclaim.
A week later, Sunak unveiled hard-hitting legislation to clamp down on illegal migration to the U.K., coupled with an expensive deal with France to increase patrols across the English Channel. Tory MPs were delighted. The Illegal Migration Bill sailed through parliament Monday night without a single vote of rebellion.
Then came Wednesday’s annual budget announcement, with Sunak hoping to complete an improbable hat trick.
It started well, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt making the big reveal that the U.K. is no longer expected to enter recession this year, as had been widely predicted.
But a series of jaw-droppers in the budget small print show the scale of the challenge ahead.
The U.K.’s overall tax take remains sky-high by historic standards — an ominous bone of contention for skeptical Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers alike. Meanwhile, millions of Britons’ living standards continue to fall, thanks to high fuel bills and raging inflation. U.K. growth forecasts remain sluggish for years to come.
“He’s chalking up some wins,” observed one former party adviser grimly, “because he’s going to need them.”
‘Workmanlike’
Among all but the bitterest of Sunak’s Tory opponents, there is a palpable sense of relief about the way he has approached his premiership so far.
“It doesn’t mean everything will suddenly turn to gold,” said Conservative MP Richard Graham, a longtime Sunak-backer. “But like Ben Stokes and England’s cricket team, his quiet self-confidence may change what the same team believes is possible.”
Nicky Morgan, a Conservative peer and former Treasury minister, praised a “workmanlike” budget that would reassure voters and the party there was a “firm hand on the tiller” after the “turmoil” of the preceding year with two prime ministers stepping down, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt meets children during a visit to Busy Bees Battersea Nursery in south London after delivering his Budget earlier in the day | Stefan Rousseau/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Most of Wednesday’s biggest announcements, including an extra £4 billion for childcare and a decision to lift the cap on pensions allowances, were either trailed or leaked in advance. This may have made for a predictable budget speech, but as Morgan put it: “I think that’s probably what businesses and the public need at the moment.”
An ex-minister who did not originally support Sunak for leader said that the general tone of the budget, together with the Northern Ireland deal and small boats legislation, meant that “increasingly it’s hard for hostile voices to pin real failure on Rishi.”
Others, however, fear key announcements could yet unravel. An expensive change to pension taxes was instantly savaged by critics as a “giveaway for the 1 percent.” Headline-grabbing back-to-work programs and an expansion of free childcare will take years to kick in.
Hiking corporation tax was the “biggest mistake of the budget,” Truss ally and former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg complained.
Doing the hard yards
Observers note that in the wake of the rolling chaos under Truss and Johnson, the bar for a successful government has been lowered.
“[Sunak] could stand at the podium and soil himself, and he’d be doing a better job than his predecessors,” noted one business group lobbyist on Wednesday evening, having watched budget day unfold.
But even Sunak’s fiercest critics praise his work rate and attention to detail, in sharp contrast to Johnson. Most accept — grudgingly — he has set up an effective Downing Street operation.
Having returned from his Paris summit last Friday evening, the PM kicked off budget week with a whirlwind trip to the west coast of California to launch a defense pact with the U.S. and Australia, arranging a bank bailout along the way. He landed back in the U.K. less than 24 hours before Hunt unveiled the annual spending plan.
“It turns out working like an absolute maniac and being forensic is quite useful,” one of his ministers said.
Another Tory MP added: “He’s got the brainpower and will do the hours. He’s not good at barnstorming politics or old school dividing lines — but he is good for the politics we have right now.”
There has also been a clear effort to run a tighter ship behind the scenes at No. 10. One veteran of Johnson’s Downing Street said the atmosphere seemed “calm” in comparison.
There are tentative signs that voters are starting to notice.
James Johnson, who ran a recent poll by JL Partners which showed Sunak’s personal ratings are on the up, said the PM’s growing reputation as a “fixer” seems to be behind his recent rally, and that the biggest increase on his polling scorecard was on his ability to “get things done.”
It remains to be seen if this will shift the dial on the Tory Party’s own disastrous ratings, however, which languish some 25 points behind the opposition Labour Party. “Voters have clearly lost trust in the Tories,” Johnson said. “But if government can deliver … I would expect it to feed through.”
Anthony Browne, a Tory MP elected in 2019, expressed hope that Sunak had begun “changing the narrative” which in turn “could restore our right to be heard.”
Trouble ahead?
Sunak will be well aware that plenty of recent budgets — not least Truss’ spectacular failure last September — have unraveled in the 72 hours after being announced.
And while expanding free childcare, incentivizing business investment and ending the lifetime pensions allowance were all crowd-pleasers for his own MPs, they were not enough to conceal worrying subheadings.
The tax take is predicted to reach a post-war high of 37.7 percent in the next five years, while disposable incomes are hit by fiscal drag pulling 3.2 million people into higher tax bands. Right-wing Tories are not impressed.
Ranil Jayawardena, founder of the Conservative Growth Group of backbench MPs, described it in a statement as “an effective income tax rise,” which will be “a concern to many.”
Net migration is set to rise to 245,000 a year by 2026-27, and will add more people to the labor force than all the measures intended to make it a “back to work” budget, according to the Whitehall’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The message is not one Conservative MPs want to hear.
Already singled out by Labour’s Keir Starmer as a “huge giveaway to the wealthiest,” scrapping the lifetime allowance on pensions will cost £835 million a year by 2027-28 while benefiting less than 4 percent of workers. Conservative MPs reply that NHS doctors are one of the main groups to benefit.
Perhaps most worrying of all, the government’s own budget expects living standards to fall by 6 percent this year and next — less than the 7 percent fall predicted in November but still the largest two-year fall since records began in the 1950s.
There are some problems that can’t be solved by pulling an all-nighter. Ironically for Sunak, whose career was made in the Treasury, his may prove to be the state of the U.K. economy.
Rosa Prince, Stefan Boscia and Dan Bloom contributed reporting.
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Esther Webber, Eleni Courea and Emilio Casalicchio
President Joe Biden said Monday he intends to visit Northern Ireland to mark the upcoming anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which the US helped broker a quarter-century ago to bring an end to decades of sectarian violence.
The president was responding to an invitation from Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was visiting California to announce a new agreement with Australia and the United States to cooperate on building nuclear-powered submarines.
“I know that’s something very special and personal to you and we would love to have you over,” Sunak told Biden, extending the invitation to visit Northern Ireland in person.
“It’s my intention to go to Northern Ireland and the Republic,” Biden said afterward.
A presidential visit to Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the landmark Good Friday accord has long been the subject of speculation. The last US president to visit Belfast was Barack Obama in 2013.
For Biden, a visit to Ireland will mark a symbolic return for a president who often makes reference to his Irish roots, sometimes quoting lines of verse from William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney in his speeches.
It’s also a moment to celebrate one of the defining diplomatic achievements of the late 20th century, one that came with significant American involvement that Biden watched unfold as a senator. Former US Sen. George Mitchell helped deliver the agreement that helped end decades of sectarian violence known as The Troubles.
“Twenty-five years? It seems like yesterday,” Biden told Sunak on Monday.
Officials said it was likely that former President Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton would also take part in events surrounding the anniversary next month.
As the anniversary approached, it remained unclear whether Biden would ultimately decide to travel to Northern Ireland, particularly as the fragile peace was tested by a dispute over post-Brexit trade rules on the island.
Biden had taken a keen interest in the discussions, and had pressed Sunak to come to an agreement by the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Last month, Britain announced it had reached an agreement with the European Union, ending the long-simmering disagreements.
The new rules could go far in improving ties between Biden and Sunak. Biden made a personal appeal both to Sunak and his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, to resolve the dispute over the trade rules.
US officials have said previously that a presidential visit to mark the anniversary would hinge in part on resolving the trade dispute. Biden has also pushed for a restoration of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, which collapsed in part due to disagreements over the trade rules.
SAN DIEGO — U.S. President Joe Biden has accepted a formal invitation from Rishi Sunak to visit Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement next month.
The U.K. prime minister extended the invite as the two leader met for talks as part of the AUKUS submarine program at the Point Loma naval base in San Diego, California.
Sunak told the president: “I look forward to our conversations and also, importantly, to invite you to Northern Ireland, which hopefully you will be able to do, and so we can commemorate the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
” know it’s something very special and personal to you. We would love to have you over.”
Biden replied: “Twenty-five years? It seems like yesterday.”
Accepting the invitation, he added: “It is my intention to go to Northern Ireland and the Republic.”
The U.S. president’s presence at the Good Friday Agreement ceremonies had appeared in some question until Sunak brokered the Windsor Framework with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol, the hotly-disputed post-Brexit trading arrangement.
With Irish antecedents, Biden pays close attention to developments in Northern Ireland, and had made clear his displeasure at the standoff over the protocol.
He is due to host politicians from both sides of the border in the White House Friday as part of the annual St. Patrick’s Day commemorations.
Sunak later said Biden had invited him to make a return visit to Washington in June.
LONDON — Britain was rebuffed by the Biden administration after multiple requests to develop an advanced trade and technology dialogue similar to structures the U.S. set up with the European Union.
On visits to Washington as a Cabinet minister over the past two years, Liz Truss urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior Biden administration officials to intensify talks with the U.K. to build clean technology supply chains and boost collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors.
After Truss became prime minister in fall 2022, the idea was floated again when Raimondo visited London last October, people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO. But fear of angering the U.S.’s European partners and the U.K.’s diminished status outside the EU post-Brexit have posed barriers to influencing Washington.
Businesses, lawmakers and experts worry the U.K. is being left on the sidelines.
“We tried many times,” said a former senior Downing Street official, of the British government’s efforts to set up a U.K. equivalent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), noting Truss’ overtures began as trade chief in July 2021. They requested anonymity to speak on sensitive issues.
“We did speak to Gina Raimondo about that, saying ‘we think it would be a good opportunity,’” said the former official — not necessarily to join the EU-U.S. talks directly, “but to increase trilateral cooperation.”
Set up in June 2021, the TTC forum co-chaired by Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. trade chief Katherine Tai gives their EU counterparts, Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis, a direct line to shape tech and trade policy.
The U.S. is pushing forward with export controls on advanced semiconductors to China; forging new secure tech supply chains away from Beijing; and spurring innovation through subsidies for cutting-edge green technology and microprocessors.
The TTC’s 10 working groups with the EU, Raimondo said in an interview late last year, “set the standards,” though Brussels has rebuffed Washington’s efforts to use the transatlantic body to go directly after Beijing.
But the U.K. “is missing the boat on not being completely engaged in that dialogue,” said a U.S.-based representative of a major business group. “There has been some discussion about the U.K. perhaps joining the TTC,” they confirmed, and “it was kind of mooted, at least in private” with Raimondo by the Truss administration on her visit to London last October.
The response from the U.S. had been ‘’let’s work with what we’ve got at the moment,’” said the former Downing Street official.
Even if the U.S. does want to talk, “they don’t want to irritate the Europeans,” the same former official added. Right now the U.K.’s conversations with the U.S. on these issues are “ad hoc” under the new Atlantic Charter Boris Johnson and Joe Biden signed around the G7 summit in 2021, they said, and “nothing institutional.”
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up | Pool photo by Olivier Matthys/AFP via Getty Images
Securing British access to the U.S.-EU tech forum or an equivalent was also discussed when CBI chief Tony Danker was in Washington last July, said people familiar with conversations during his visit.
The U.K.’s science and tech secretary, Michelle Donelan, confirmed the British government had discussed establishing a more regular channel for tech and trade discussions with the U.S., both last October and more recently. “My officials have just been out [to the U.S.],” she told POLITICO. “They’ve had very productive conversations.”
A U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. remains committed to working closely with the U.S. and EU to further our shared trade and technology objectives, through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S.-U.K. Future of Atlantic Trade dialogues, and the U.K.-U.S. technology partnership.
“We will continue to advance U.K. interests in trade and technology and explore further areas of cooperation with partners where it is mutually beneficial.”
Britain the rule-taker?
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up. Senior officials hoped to get a deal securing the free flow of data between the U.S. and U.K. across the line and addressed similar issues as the TTC.
They couldn’t secure the data deal. The U.K. is expected to join a U.S.-led effort to expand data transfer rules baked into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trading agreement as soon as this year, according to a former and a current British official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The next formal meeting between the U.K. and U.S. is penciled in for January 2024.
Ongoing dialogue “is vital to secure an overarching agreement on U.K.-U.S. data flows, without which modern day business cannot function,” said William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “It would also provide an opportunity to set the ground rules around a host of other technological developments.”
In contrast, the U.S. and EU are always at work, with TTC officials in constant contact with the operation — though questions have been raised about how long-term the transatlantic cooperation is likely to prove, ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Unless you have a structured system or set up, often overseen by ministers, you don’t really get the drive to actually get things done,” said the former Downing Street official.
Right now cooperation with the U.S. on tech issues is not as intense or structured as desired, the same former official said, and is “not really brought together” in one central forum.
Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy | Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images
“This initiative [the TTC] between the world’s two regulatory powerhouses risks sidelining the U.K.,” warned lawmakers on the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in a report last October. Britain may become “a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker,” MPs noted, citing the government’s “ambiguous” position on technology standards. Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy, and others on critical minerals — like those used in EV batteries — or AI are also missing.
Over the last two years, U.S. trade chief Tai has “spoken regularly to her three successive U.K. counterparts to identify and tackle shared economic and trade priorities,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative, adding “we intend to continue strengthening this partnership in the years to come.”
All eyes on Europe
For its part, the EU has to date shown little interest in closer cooperation with the U.K.
Three European Commission officials disregarded the likelihood of Britain joining the club, though one of those officials said that London may be asked to join — alongside other like-minded countries — for specific discussions related to ongoing export bans against Russia.
Even with last week’s breakthrough over the Northern Ireland protocol calming friction between London and Brussels, the U.K. was not a priority country for involvement in the TTC, added another of the EU officials.
“The U.K. was extremely keen to be part of a dialogue of some sort of equivalent of TTC,” said a senior business representative in London, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive issues.
U.K. firms see “the Holy Grail” as Britain, the U.S. and EU working together on this, they said. “We’re very keen to see a triangular dialogue at some point.”
The U.K.’s haggling with the EU over the details of the Northern Ireland protocol governing trade in the region has posed “a political obstacle” to realizing that vision, they suggested.
Yet with a solution to the dispute announced in late February, the same business figure said, “there will be a more prominent push to work together with the U.K.”
TTC+
Some trade experts think the UK would increase its chances of accession to the TTC if it submitted a joint request with other nations.
But prior to that happening, “I think the EU-U.S. TTC will need to first deliver bilaterally,” said Sabina Ciofu, an international tech policy expert at the trade body techUK.
Representatives speak to the media following the Trade and Technology Council Meeting in Maryland | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
When there is momentum, Ciofu said, the U.K. should join forces with Japan, South Korea and other advanced economies to ask for a TTC+ that could include the G7 or other partners. At the last TTC meeting in December, U.S. and EU officials said they were open to such an expansion around specific topics that had global significance.
But not all trade experts think this is essential. Andy Burwell, director of international trade at the CBI, said he doesn’t “think it necessarily matters” whether the U.K. has a structured conversation with the U.S. like the TTC forum.
Off the back of a soon-to-be-published refresh of the Integrated Review — the U.K.’s national security and foreign policy strategy — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should instead seize the opportunity, Burwell said, to pinpoint where Britain is “going to own, collaborate and have access to various aspects of the supply chains.”
The G7, Burwell said, “could be the right platform for having some of those conversations.”
Yet the “danger with the ad hoc approach with lots of different people is incoherence,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above.
Too many countries involved in setting the standards can, the former official said, “create difficulty in leveraging what you want — which is all of the countries agreeing together on a certain way forward … especially when you’re dealing with issues that relate to, for example, China.”
Additional reporting by Mark Scott, Annabelle Dickson and Tom Bristow
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on February 27, 2023 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
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Stocks rebounded from last week’s lows but are still on track to end February in the red.
Stocks in the U.S. rose on Monday, but are still on track to end February lower. Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Tuesday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat even as the country’s industrial production in January fell 4.6% month-over-month, its biggest decline in eight months.
The U.K. and the EU signed a new trade deal. Known as the Windsor Framework, it remedies problems caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol, which mandates checks on goods that travel from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. Sterling jumped on the news.
Culture clashes may have contributed to China’s decision not to pick up the phone when the U.S. Department of Defense called after shooting down an alleged Chinese spy balloon, according to a researcher at a China-backed think tank.
Meta will create a new team that focuses on generative artificial intelligence models, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday. The team will build “creative and expressive” tools for the company’s products like Messenger and Instagram.
PRO The S&P 500 might fall back to a bear market in March, warned Mike Wilson, Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. equity strategist. “With the equity market showing signs of exhaustion after the last Fed meeting, the S&P 500 is at critical technical support,” Wilson wrote.
Markets pulled back from their lows of last week and managed to stage a rebound. The Dow Jones Industrial Average inched up 0.22%, the S&P increased 0.31% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.63%.
Investors felt they had slightly more breathing room after Treasury yields eased from their peaks on Friday, with the interest-rate-sensitive 2-year yield dipping from a 16-year high. As Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird, wrote, “the rapid shift in Fed funds expectations and the spike in short-term yields has been risk-off in the stock market, so some reprieve on rates today will likely boost equities.”
Additionally, a decline in orders placed with manufacturers may have given investors a sign of slowing inflation — such signs are increasingly rare. Data released Monday showed that sales of durable goods like appliances, TVs and autos dropped 4.5% in January, worse than analysts’ expectations of a 3.6% fall. By contrast, orders increased 5.1% in December. Though a plunge in airplane orders contributed to much of the decline, orders were still down 5.1% when excluding defense.
Earnings reports from major retailers like Target, Costco and Macy’s will be released this week and give an indication whether consumer spending will remain strong or start faltering. Regardless of what happens, analysts from JPMorgan’s Mislav Matejka to Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson aren’t too optimistic. It might be best to brace for a bumpy landing for the time being.
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Britain and the European Union have reached an agreement on new trade rules in Northern Ireland in an attempt to resolve a thorny issue that has fueled post-Brexit tensions in Europe and on the island of Ireland.
The deal could potentially resolve the issue of imports and border checks in Northern Ireland, one of the most challenging and controversial aspects of the United Kingdom’s split from the EU. Northern Ireland is part of the UK but shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state.
Speaking at a press conference in Windsor, just outside London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the new deal, called the “Windsor Framework,” will deliver “smooth flowing trade” within the UK, “protects Northern Ireland’s place” in the UK and “safeguards” the sovereignty of Northern Ireland.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged the tense relations between the UK and EU since Brexit. She said that in order for the two parties to “make the most of our partnership” new solutions were needed. She pointed to the UK and EU’s cooperation on Ukraine and said that “we needed to listen to each others concerns very carefully.”
The purpose of the deal is to fix the issues created by the Northern Ireland Protocol, an addendum to the Brexit deal agreed by Boris Johnson and the EU in 2019. The protocol was created to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland by keeping Northern Ireland aligned with the EU, meaning goods don’t need to be checked between the Republic and the province. The Windsor Framework will replace the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The two leaders laid out three essential areas in which the new deal will improve the protocol.
Sunak said the deal will protect the flow of free trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland by creating green and red lanes for goods flowing into Northern Ireland. Goods that might end up entering the Republic of Ireland will be placed in the red lane for checks before entering Northern Ireland.
Goods destined to remain in Northern Ireland will flow freely, Sunak said, meaning that “if food is available on supermarket shelves in Great Britain, it will be available in Northern Ireland.” New rules affecting different goods – like product labeling – will be phased in at different times to make the implementation of the framework as smooth as possible.
The prime minister said that through the deal the UK and the EU have managed to protect “Northern Ireland’s place in the union” by allowing the UK government to determine VAT rates applicable in Northern Ireland, as opposed to the current system where the rates are determined by the EU. He said this would allow recent policies, such as the reform to lower the price of pints in British pubs, to now apply in Northern Ireland.
Finally, he also announced a new “Stormont brake” that would allow Northern Ireland’s devolved government to pull an “emergency brake” on any new EU laws from being imposed on the province.
“This will establish a clear process through which the democratically elected assembly can pull an emergency brake for changes to EU goods, rules that would have significant and lasting effect on everyday lives,” Sunak said.
He added that if the brake is pulled by the Northern Irish government, the Westminster government will be given a veto over the law.
The Stormont brake is likely to be the most controversial part of the deal as it raises questions over the imposition of EU law on a sovereign country. While the brake makes use of an old mechanism that exists in the Belfast Agreement, a peace deal signed in 1998 that brought peace to Northern Ireland, there is inevitably confusion about how the brake will be used.
If the Northern Ireland government pulls the brake but the British government doesn’t use its veto, there will be tension between Westminster and Northern Ireland. If one party in the Northern Irish government wants to use the brake but another doesn’t (Northern Ireland’s government must be made up of politicians from both the Unionist and Republican communities) the government in Westminster might have to effectively pick a side.
UK government officials implied in briefings on Monday that there is a certain degree of flexibility in what will happen in these circumstances. It’s clear from the noises both in London and Brussels that the deal has been negotiated in a way that assumes good faith – something that seemed impossible just a few months ago.
The announcement of the deal will also raise questions about the future of British politics. Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, has spent recent weeks arguing that Sunak should not drop the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, legislation Johnson brought forward during his mandate that allowed the British government to effectively ignore parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Both Sunak and von der Leyen have made clear that this bill is now dead – possibly taking with it the political career of Johnson.
Von der Leyen arrived in the UK Monday for final talks with Sunak, ahead of a statement about the deal in the House of Commons. On Von der Leyen’s schedule was also tea with King Charles III at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace confirmed.
Now that a deal is done, Sunak faces a potential political backlash from hardline Euroskeptics in his Conservative Party, though many prominent Brexiteers have given the deal their blessing.
Von der Leyen’s meeting with the King has proved controversial. “The King is pleased to meet any world leader if they are visiting Britain and it is the Government’s advice that he should do so,” the Palace said when it announced the sit-down.
According to a royal source, the meeting would be an opportunity for Charles to discuss topics including the war in Ukraine and climate change.
But it was criticized by some prominent unionist figures. “I cannot quite believe that No 10 would ask HM the King to become involved in the finalising of a deal as controversial as this one,” former Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster wrote in a tweet. “It’s crass and will go down very badly in NI.”
The Northern Ireland Protocol, signed with Brussels by Boris Johnson, attempted to recognize the delicate situation that Brexit created in Northern Ireland.
Ordinarily, the existence of a border between an EU member state and a non-EU nation like the UK would require infrastructure such as customs posts. But during the period of sectarian strife known as the Troubles, security posts along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland became a target for paramilitary groups fighting for a united Ireland.
In theory, the Northern Ireland Protocol was intended to do away with the need for border infrastructure. It was agreed that Northern Ireland would remain within the EU’s regulatory sphere, and that goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain would be checked before they arrived – effectively imposing a sea border.
That enraged the pro-British unionist community in Northern Ireland, who argued they were being cut off from the rest of the UK and forced closer to the Republic. Disputes about the arrangements, in part, have been a barrier to the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has been suspended since 2017. The sharing of power between unionists and republicans is a key part of the Good Friday Agreement – the peace deal that marked the end of the Troubles.
The wrangling has also affected trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the extent that the UK has not fully implemented the protocol.
Without question the biggest issue in Northern Ireland at the moment is that it doesn’t have a government. The Belfast Agreement requires that Northern Ireland’s government is comprised of representatives from the the Unionist and Republican communities.
Disagreements over many things, including the protocol, caused the government to collapse, with the Democratic Unionist Party (the largest Unionist party) feeling cut off from the rest of the UK due to being in the EU’s regulatory sphere and subject to new EU law.
While this deal does make things less complicated and addresses the issue of EU laws being imposed, there will still be less friction between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland than Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
It’s also worth noting that the Stormont Brake can only work if there is a government, which could through stick rather than carrot finally restore the government in Belfast.
That depends on who you ask. Since the UK left the EU’s regulatory spare, trade between the two has been hampered. That has impacted all manner of businesses – from delays meaning retailers are unable to import fresh food in time to exporters giving up doing business in Europe due to it being too expensive.
The Bank of England has said that Brexit has made inflation worse for the UK and has discouraged inward investment.
Brexiteers, however, are quick to dismiss complaints about the economics of Brexit as being part of larger structural problems, like the war in Ukraine and the recovery from the Covid pandemic.
It’s worth noting that this deal only fixes the specific issues surrounding the unique status of Northern Ireland, but doesn’t change anything for the rest of the UK.
The EU is very happy. Brussels largely wants to stop thinking about Brexit, which has slipped quite a long way down its priority list since 2020.
Sunak will be happy for now. Prominent Brexiteers have given their approval to the deal, which was likely to be his biggest problem at home. Things might unravel as lawmakers examine the deal in closer detail, but the potential of a Conservative rebellion was the biggest risk to Sunak’s premiership taking a critical hit.
European officials are vaguely amused that the UK is still arguing about Brexit and privately point out that the UK hasn’t been able to implement its own deal – a sign that the balance of power lies firmly in Brussels. Still, the quickest way to get a European diplomat’s blood boiling is by asking a question about Brexit.
That said, this deal really has been negotiated in good faith. The flexibility the EU has shown and willingness to leave certain legal issues vague shows a dramatic improvement in trust.
The US president has said repeatedly that his priority is protecting the Belfast Agreement. This deal in theory means that the risk of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is off the cards for a while. However, that doesn’t mean tensions will evaporate, especially if the Unionist community feels hard done by.
Seven months since he announced his resignation as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson’s shadow still looms large over the ruling Conservative party.
Despite being forced from office in disgrace and presiding over a massive decline in support for both himself and his party, Johnson is still attempting to influence government policy. His supporters say his interventions are the Conservatives’ last hopes at saving the party from decimation at the next election. His critics think he is not only undermining current PM Rishi Sunak, but, by reminding voters – with many of whom he is unpopular – of his existence, he is damaging his party’s electoral prospects.
A quick recap: Johnson was forced to resign after multiple ethics scandals made his position untenable. Those scandals included the notorious “Partygate” where Johnson became the first sitting PM to be found guilty of breaking the law by holding illegal gatherings during the pandemic lockdown. The final straw came for Johnson after it allegations emerged that his deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, had been sexually harassing party members while drunk. Johnson hired Pincher despite being aware of rumors about his conduct.
Johnson has spent much of the past week leaving Westminster guessing as to whether or not he is going to publicly come out against Sunak as he attempts to negotiate an agreement with the European Union to fix part of the 2019 Brexit deal. It is worth noting that Johnson himself negotiated and signed that deal, calling it “oven ready” during his election campaign that same year.
The part of the deal causing all the problems is the Northern Ireland Protocol, an arrangement that theoretically prevents a hard border between Northern Ireland, which left the EU along with the rest of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state. Both sides agree a border should not exist for fears of provoking tensions and violence. Northern Ireland has been largely peaceful since a 1998 accord ended the three-decades-long “Troubles,” in which more than 3,500 people were killed.
The UK has not implemented the protocol in full for fears it would damage trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Northern Irish pro-British unionists claim the protocol cuts the province off from the rest of the UK, while hardline English Brexiteers believe the protocol – and any deal Sunak might make to revive it – is essentially a capitulation to the EU, despite them supporting the deal in 2019.
Those hardliners, along with Johnson, believe that Sunak should specifically not abandon a piece of proposed legislation that Johnson introduced during his time in office, the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which allows the UK government to rip up parts of the protocol. Critics say this would break international law. The constant noise and anticipation of a Johnson intervention has effectively killed talks of an agreement being reached with the EU and left many questioning Sunak’s strength to deliver as PM.
Johnson has also publicly implored Sunak to become the first Western leader to send fighter jets to Ukraine as the conflict marks its 12-month anniversary.
The vast majority of MPs that CNN spoke with are sick of Johnson’s “attention seeking,” as many of them described it. They all declined to speak on the record for fear of derailing Northern Ireland talks which, as many of them were quick to say, is a very dangerous situation, pointing to the shooting of a detective that took place in the province just this week.
“I just wish he would get on side and realize that his efforts would be best spent supporting Rishi,” said a former government minister who served under Johnson. “The next election is going to be hard enough without this distraction. Boris is still popular in certain parts of the country that we might lose seats. He should be up there campaigning, not teasing a return to the frontline.”
Another government minister who also served under Johnson is less optimistic about Johnson’s ability to help, even if he wanted to.
“He is fundamentally too selfish to want to help the people who he no doubt believes kicked him out of office unfairly,” the former minister said. “And he is unpopular enough that the prospect of him returning to the frontline could be one of the biggest motivating factors for people to vote against us.”
The polls back up this theory. A recent Ipsos MORI survey revealed that Johnson is still less trusted than either Sunak or leader of the opposition Keir Starmer. Poll after poll on the outcome at the next general election predicts the Conservatives suffering heavy losses. The dip in the Conservative’s fortunes can be traced directly back to the start of the Partygate scandal. Before that, Johnson was enjoying an unusually high level of support, thanks in large part to the UK’s successful Covid vaccine roll-out.
Johnson’s supporters don’t entirely believe the polls and challenge the narrative that the collapse in the Conservatives’ support was due to a media obsession with Partygate.
One Johnson loyalist told CNN that “people forget he won us the largest majority since Margaret Thatcher” and believes he is still “a giant” in the eyes of the public. His supporters in the party welcome his interventions, with one saying of the Northern Ireland debate, still taking aim at the press, that the media “should welcome the widest possible debate on this major constitutional issue for our nation.”
Other Conservatives fear that the Johnson loyalists, who are mostly at the harder end of the Brexit-supporting spectrum, will learn the hard way that their assumptions are wrong.
“Most of his supporters in parliament have either already decided to stand down at the next election, probably because they know the writing is on the wall, or stand a very good chance of losing their seat,” the former government minister said.
A senior Conservative and former cabinet minister who worked in government with Johnson looks on with some degree of bewilderment. “I don’t really know what these hardline Brexiters are hoping to achieve. The public largely views Brexit as a mistake, so why double down on it so aggressively,” they mused.
There are an increasing number of Conservatives who look at the polls and think a heavy loss at the next general election is inevitable. They see one big advantage of Johnson returning to the frontline: that him lose losing might finally kill the myth that he is the “chosen one” and finally draw a line under the whole Johnson experiment.
It seems unlikely that Johnson will end his agitation from the backbenches, especially over policies that he believes might trash his legacy. However, the louder he shouts and the harder he stamps his feet, the biggest threat to the Johnson legacy could easily become Boris Johnson himself. Whether he brings down his party too seems a matter that doesn’t unduly bother many of his supporters.
LONDON (AP) — A senior Northern Ireland police officer was in critical but stable condition in a hospital after two masked men shot him after he coached a children’s soccer team, authorities said Thursday.
A dissident Irish Republican Army splinter group is suspected of shooting the detective Wednesday night after a kids’ soccer session at a sports complex in Omagh, about 60 miles (nearly 100 kilometers) west of Belfast. Three men were arrested Thursday on suspicion of attempted murder.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland named the wounded officer as Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, a well-known officer who has led investigations into murders, organized crime and dissident paramilitary groups.
The leader of the police force, Chief Constable Simon Byrne, called the shooting “a brazen and calculated attack.”
“Our thoughts are with John and his family as he fights for his life in hospital today,” Byrne told reporters.
Assistant Chief Constable Mark McEwan said two gunmen attacked Caldwell as he put soccer balls into the trunk of his car, accompanied by his young son. Caldwell had just coached an under-15s soccer team.
McEwan told BBC Radio Ulster that “the primary focus is on violent dissident republicans and within that, there is a primary focus as well on New IRA.”
The force said three men, ages 38, 45 and 47, were arrested and being questioned at a Belfast police station.
Politicians from across Ireland’s political divide, and the leaders of the U.K. and Ireland, condemned the attack.
The leaders of the five biggest parties, including Irish nationalists Sinn Fein — which was allied with the IRA during Northern Ireland’s decades of Catholic-Protestant violence — and the Democratic Unionist Party, issued a rare joint statement to condemn the violence.
“We speak for the overwhelming majority of people right across our community who are outraged and sickened by this reprehensible and callous attempted murder,” they said.
“There is absolutely no tolerance for such attacks by the enemies of our peace.”
More than 3,000 people were killed during three decades of violence in Northern Ireland involving Irish republican and British loyalist paramilitaries and U.K. security forces.
The 1998 Good Friday peace accord largely ended the conflict, known as “the Troubles.” Major Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups gave up violence and disarmed, but small IRA splinter groups continue to mount sporadic attacks on security forces.
In November, a homemade bomb exploded under a police car in the town of Strabane. The two officers inside escaped injury.
In April 2019, journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead while reporting on rioting in Londonderry, also known as Derry. The New IRA said one of its gunmen hit her by accident while targeting police.
The last fatal attack on a police officer in Northern Ireland was the April 2011 killing of Constable Ronan Kerr, who died when a booby-trap bomb exploded under his car in Omagh.
Omagh was also the site of Northern Ireland’s deadliest attack, an August 1998 car bombing that killed 29 people. A dissident republican group called the Real IRA claimed responsibility for that attack.
LONDON — The U.K. and the EU finally reached a deal after months of talks over contentious post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.
Already, both sides are pitching it as a major reset in frayed relations — but U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak still has to sell it to skeptics in his own party and beyond.
The so-called “Windsor Framework” comes after a final day of talks between Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor.
In key developments Monday:
— Sunak and von der Leyen talked up the deal as a “new chapter” in EU-U.K. ties at a Windsor press conference.
— The U.K. PM urged his MPs to get behind him in a Commons statement, as key Brexiteers gave supportive early comments.
— Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) vowed to study the text closely before deciding whether or not to back it.
— And Brexiteers in the U.K. hit out at No. 10 Downing Street over a meeting between King Charles III and von der Leyen on the same day a deal was struck.
‘New chapter’
Details of the new agreement are now being pored over by lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel, but the plan is aimed at easing customs red-tape, equalizing some tax rules across the United Kingdom, and giving Northern Ireland’s lawmakers more of a say over the future of the arrangement.
“The United Kingdom and European Union may have had our differences in the past, but we are allies, trading partners and friends, something that we’ve seen clearly in the past year as we joined with others to support Ukraine,” Sunak said at the joint press conference. “This is the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship.”
That line was echoed by von der Leyen, who said the plan would allow the two sides “to begin a new chapter,” and offer up “long-lasting solutions that both of us are confident will work for all people and businesses in Northern Ireland.”
Sunak — under pressure to hold a House of Commons vote on the agreement — told MPs Monday evening that the arrangement would end “burdensome customs bureaucracy” and “routine checks” on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, and claimed he had “delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for … We have removed the border in the Irish Sea.”
He now faces the sizable task of convicing Brexiteer lawmakers on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s fiercely anti-protocol DUP, to get on board.
“Our judgment and our principled position in opposing the protocol in Parliament and at Stormont has been vindicated,” said DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson Monday night. “Undoubtedly it is now recognized that the protocol does not work. When others said there would be no renegotiation and no change, our determination has proved what can be achieved.”
Stormont brake
The protocol has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the way it works.
Under the arrangement, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market and avoid such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP has been boycotting the region’s power-sharing government while it pushes for major changes to a set-up it sees as driving a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.
Speaking at the press conference, Sunak and von der Leyen talked up a host of changes to the protocol that they hope will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
Under the revised plan, goods moving from Great Britain but destined only for Northern Ireland will travel through a new “green lane” with fewer checks, while a separate, more stringent, “red lane” for goods at risk of moving on to the Republic of Ireland — and thereby entering the EU’s single market — will now operate.
Sunak said food retailers would “no longer need hundreds of certificates for every lorry” entering Northern Ireland, while food made to U.K. standards will be able to be freely sent to and sold in Northern Ireland. He also vowed that the new pact would scrap customs paperwork for people sending parcels to family or friends or shopping online.
UK PM Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hope that the host of changes to the Brexit protocol announced today will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland | Dan Kitwood/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The two sides have also amended the text of the protocol, Sunak said, to allow U.K. VAT and excise changes to apply in Northern Ireland — while a “landmark” settlement on medicines will mean drugs approved for use by the U.K. medicines regulator will be “automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland.”
And London and Brussels are now jointly pitching a new “Stormont brake,” claiming this will allow the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland — currently on ice amid a DUP boycott over the protocl — to prevent changes to EU goods rules “that would have significant and lasting effects on everyday lives” from applying in the region.
“This gives the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland a powerful new safeguard based on cross-community consent,” Sunak promised.
DUP’s next move
As he departed for London, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he and senior party colleagues would “take time to look at the deal” – a process likely to run at least through the weekend and to involve specially-commissioned analysis by constitutional lawyers. Early word from some Conservative Brexiteers was positive, with David Davis — who quit Theresa May’s government over her own EU deal-making — hailed it as a “a formidable negotiating success.”
Before flying out of Belfast, Donaldson briefed his party’s 25 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly about the expected key points. The DUP lawmakers met at Stormont, the seat of the power-sharing legislature that the DUP has blocked since May.
Donaldson said the DUP’s legal counsel would produce a detailed analysis for consideration by the party’s executive officers.
“It is vital that Northern Ireland’s place within the U.K. and its internal market is restored. We will have lawyers assess the legal text to ensure that this [is] in fact the case,” Donaldson told the Belfast News Letter, the main unionist newspaper in Northern Ireland.
Later, Donaldson told the BBC he was “neither positive nor negative” when assessing whether the DUP should accept the compromise package on offer.
“We need to take time to look at the deal, what’s available, and how does that match our seven tests,” he said, referring to the DUP’s July 2021 list of demands for “replacing” the protocol.
Other DUP officials said the party’s senior leadership would convene at party headquarters in Belfast, possibly on Saturday, to review the party’s legal verdict on the deal – and whether concessions won by the U.K. government were sufficient to end the DUP’s obstruction of power-sharing at Stormont.
Donaldson will seek maximum support at that meeting before committing to any policy pivot on the protocol. Other senior officials, including former deputy leader Lord Dodds, have explicitly rejected the idea of reviving Stormont if the revised protocol agreement retains any oversight role for the CJEU. Both Donaldson and the DUP’s “seven tests” have stopped short of drawing this red line.
Ever since narrowly losing May’s assembly elections to the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin, the DUP has refused not only to form a new cross-community government – the assembly’s central function under terms of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord – but also has blocked the election of a neutral speaker for the assembly, preventing it from sitting.
This developing story is being updated. Annabelle Dickson and Noah Keate contributed reporting.
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Matt Honeycombe-Foster, Andrew McDonald and Shawn Pogatchnik
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
DUBLIN — As if political tensions in Northern Ireland weren’t bad enough, Irish Republican Army die-hards unwilling to accept their side’s cease-fire appear determined to make matters worse.
An off-duty police officer is in hospital in a critical condition after being shot several times at close range Wednesday night as he coached a youth football practice on the outskirts of the Northern Irish town of Omagh. No group claimed responsibility, but politicians from all sides agreed that one of the small IRA splinter groups still active in the U.K. region must be to blame.
“The people behind this attack think they’re at war. Well they’re not,” said Colum Eastwood, the moderate Irish nationalist leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Their fight isn’t with any government, any police service or anyone else. It’s with the people of Ireland who have chosen peace. And it’s a fight they will never, never win.”
The last time any of the IRA factions killed a Northern Ireland police officer was in 2011, again in Omagh — also the scene of the deadliest attack of them all, when a Real IRA car bomb killed 29 people in 1998 in hopes of wrecking that year’s Good Friday peace accord.
The largest Irish republican paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 300 officers as part of its own 27-year campaign of shootings and bombings, but laid down its arms in 1997 and surrendered them to foreign disarmament officials in 2005.
That key peacemaking step, required as part of the Good Friday deal, ultimately helped persuade the Democratic Unionist Party to end its opposition to power-sharing and finally form a unity government in 2007 with their Irish republican enemies in Sinn Féin, longtime partners of the Provisional IRA. However, last year the DUP collapsed their coalition as part of its campaign against post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland, a dispute that U.K. and EU negotiators have spent months trying to resolve.
Wednesday night’s shooting brought back grim memories from a generation ago when such violence was a nightly occurrence, an era when militants effectively filled Northern Ireland’s prevailing political vacuum with bloodshed. The Good Friday pact and the cross-community government it spawned were supposed to keep such violence at bay.
With the Stormont parliamentary building shuttered amid Brexit fallout, politicians from all sides briefly spoke with one voice on social media to condemn the officer’s attackers.
“Those responsible for such horror must be brought to justice,” said Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, who has been in the post only since September.
LONDON — Rishi Sunak insisted Saturday he wants to “get the job done” on Brexit, promising he was “giving it everything we’ve got” to secure a deal with Brussels.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the British prime minister said he was hopeful of a “positive outcome,” as he launched a weekend media blitz, burnishing his Brexiteer credentials, and reassuring potential critics his deal “should command very broad support, because it ensures the free flow of trade within the United Kingdom’s internal market, it secures Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and it ensures sovereignty.”
Both sides continue to insist a deal to resolve the ongoing tension over Britain’s post-Brexit trading arrangements, which see Northern Ireland continue to follow some EU laws to get round the need for checks at the U.K.’s border with the Republic of Ireland, is not yet done, but could come within days if negotiators are able to close the remaining gaps.
Sunak, who himself backed Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2016, has been trying to win support from the Democratic Unionist Party and the hardline Brexit-supporting European Research Group in Westminster.
“I’m a Conservative, I’m a Brexiteer. And I’m a Unionist,” Sunak told the Sunday Times. “There’s unfinished business on Brexit and I want to get the job done,” he added.
Separately, in a piece for the Sun on Sunday, Sunak wrote: “There’s still more work to do but we have made promising progress recently and I’m determined to do right by the people of Northern Ireland and deliver for them.”
LONDON — After four months of intense talks (and plenty of squabbling before that), the EU and U.K. have a deal to resolve their long-running post-Brexit trade row over Northern Ireland.
But as U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak works to sell the so-called “Windsor framework” on the Northern Ireland protocol to Brexiteers and unionists, lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel and of the Irish Sea are getting to grips with the details.
From paperwork to plants, let POLITICO walk you through the new agreement, asking: Who has given ground, and how exactly will the deal thrashed out by EU and U.K. negotiators aim to keep the bloc’s prized single market secure?
Customs paperwork and checks
For businesses taking part in an expanded “trusted trader scheme,” the Windsor framework aims to considerably cut customs paperwork and checks on goods moving from Great Britain but destined to stay in Northern Ireland.
These goods will pass through a “green lane” requiring minimal paperwork and be labeled “Not for EU,” while those heading for the EU single market in the Republic of Ireland will undergo full EU customs checks in Northern Ireland’s ports under a “red lane.”
Traders in the green lane will only need to complete a single, digitized certificate per truck movement, rather than multiple forms per load.
Sunak has already claimed that this means “any sense of a border in the Irish Sea” — deeply controversial among Northern Ireland’s unionist politicians — has now been “removed.”
However, it’s by no means a total end to Irish Sea red tape. An EU official said that although the deal delivers a “dramatic reduction” in the number of physical food safety checks, for example, there will still be some — those seen as “essential” to avoid the risk of goods entering the single market.
These checks will be based on risk assessments and intelligence, and aimed at preventing smuggling and criminality.
U.K. public health and safety standards will meanwhile apply to all retail food and drink within the U.K. internal market. British rules on public health, marketing, organics, labeling, genetic modification, and drinks such as wines, spirits and mineral waters will apply in Northern Ireland. This will remove more than 60 EU food and drink rules in the original protocol, which were detailed in more than 1,000 pages of legislation.
Supermarkets, wholesalers, hospitality and food producers are likely to welcome the new arrangements. Many had stopped supplying to Northern Ireland because the cost of filling out hundreds of certificates for each consignment was deemed too high for a market as small as Northern Ireland.
Export declarations have been removed for the vast majority of goods moving from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.
The EU’s safeguards: While offering to drastically reduce the volume of checks carried out, the EU has toughened its criteria to become a trusted trader under the expanded scheme. The EU will now have access to databases tracking shipments of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in real time. The system was tested through the winter, helping build trust in Brussels, and is being fed with data from traders and U.K. authorities. The European Commission will be able to suspend part or all of these trade easements if the U.K. fails to comply with the new rules.
The timeline: The U.K. government said it will consult with businesses in the “coming months” before implementing the new rules. The green lane will come into force this fall. Labels for meat, meat products and minimally-processed dairy products such as fresh milk will come into force from October 1, 2024. All relevant products will be marked by July 1, 2025. “Shelf-stable” products like bread and pasta will not be labeled.
Governance
A key plank of the deal is the bid to address complaints by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — currently boycotting the power-sharing assembly in the region in opposition to the protocol — that lawmakers there did not have a say in the imposition of new EU rules in the region.
Under the terms of the new agreement, the Commission will have to give the U.K. government notice of future EU regulations intended to apply in Northern Ireland. According to Sunak, Stormont will be given a new power to “pull an emergency brake on changes to EU goods rules” based on “cross-community consent.”
Under this mechanism, the U.K. government will be able to suspend the application in Northern Ireland of an incoming piece of EU law at the request of at least 30 members of the assembly — a third of them. But if unionist parties in Northern Ireland want to trigger the new “Stormont brake,” they must first return to the power-sharing institutions which they abandoned last May. The EU and the U.K. could subsequently agree to apply such a rule in a meeting of the Joint Committee, which oversees the protocol.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this new tool remains an emergency mechanism that hopefully will not need to be used. A second EU official said it would be triggered “under the most exceptional circumstances and as a matter of last resort in a well-defined process” set out in a unilateral declaration by the U.K. These include that the rules have a “significant and lasting impact on the everyday lives” of people in the region.
If the EU disagrees with the U.K.’s trigger of the Stormont brake, the two would resolve the issue through independent arbitration, instead of involving the Court of Justice of the EU.
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s courts will consider disputes over the application of EU rules in the region, and judges could decide whether to consult the CJEU on how to interpret them. In a key concession, the Commission has agreed not to unilaterally refer a case to the CJEU, although it retains the power to do so.
The EU’s safeguards: The CJEU will remain the “sole and ultimate arbiter of EU law” and will have the “final say” on EU single market disputes, von der Leyen stressed. Whether Brexiteers and the DUP are willing to accept that remains the million-dollar question.
Tax, state aid and EU rules
The U.K. government will now be able to set rules in areas such as VAT and state aid that will also apply in Northern Ireland — two major wins for Sunak that were rejected by the Commission in previous rounds of negotiations with other U.K. prime ministers.
It will, Sunak was at pains to point out Monday, allow Westminster to pass on a cut in alcohol duty that previously passed Northern Ireland by.
But London has had to give up on its idea of establishing a dual-regulatory mechanism that would have allowed Northern Ireland businesses to choose whether they would follow EU or British rules when manufacturing goods, depending on whether they intended to sell them in the EU single market or in the U.K. The whole idea was deemed by Brussels as impossible to police.
The EU’s safeguards: Northern Irish businesses producing goods for the U.K. internal market will only have to follow “less than 3 percent” of EU single market rules, a U.K. official said. But the nature of these regulations remains unclear, and there will be increased market surveillance and enforcement by U.K. authorities to try and reassure the EU.
The timeline: The U.K. government will be able to exercise these powers as soon as the Windsor framework comes into force.
Parcels
The EU and the U.K. have agreed to scrap customs processes for parcels being sent between consumers in Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The EU’s safeguards: Parcels sent between businesses will now move through the new green lane, as is the case for other goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland. That should allow them to be monitored, but remove the need to undergo international customs procedures. Parcel operators will share commercial data with the U.K.’s tax authority, HMRC, in a bid to reduce risks to the EU single market.
Timeline: These new arrangements will take effect September 2024.
Pets
Residents in Great Britain will be able to take their dogs, cats and ferrets to Northern Ireland without having to fulfill a requirement for a rabies vaccine, tapeworm treatment and other checks.
Pets traveling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain and back will not be required to have any documentation, declarations, checks or health treatments.
The EU’s safeguards: Microchipped pets will be able to travel with a life-long pet travel document issued for free by the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Pet owners will tick a box in their travel booking acknowledging they accept the scheme rules and will not move their pet into the EU.
The timeline: The new rules will take effect fall 2023.
Medicines
Drugs approved for use by the U.K.’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, will be automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland, “at the same time and under the same conditions” as in the U.K., von der Leyen said.
Businesses will need to secure approval for a U.K.-wide license from the MHRA to supply medicines to Northern Ireland, rather than having to go through the European Medicines Agency. The agreement removes any EU Falsified Medicines Directive packaging, labeling and barcode requirements for medicines. This means manufacturers will be able to produce a single medicines pack design for the whole of the U.K., including Northern Ireland.
Drugs being shipped into Northern Ireland from Great Britain will be freed of customs paperwork, checks and duties, with traders only being required to provide ordinary commercial information.
The EU’s safeguards: Medicines traveling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will do so via the new green lane, which will have monitoring to protect the single market built in.
The timeline: The U.K. government said it will engage with the medicines industry soon on these changes.
Plants
The deal lifts the protocol’s ban on seed potatoes entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, and its prohibition on trees and shrubs deemed of “high risk” for the EU single market. This will enable garden centers and other businesses in Northern Ireland to sell 11 native species to Great Britain and some from other regions.
The Windsor framework also removes sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks on all these plants, and ditches red tape on their shipment into Northern Ireland.
The EU’s safeguards: Supplying businesses will have to obtain a Northern Ireland plant health label, which will be the same as the plant passport already required within Great Britain, but with the addition of the words “for use in the U.K. only” and a QR code linking to the rules.
The timeline: The new scheme and the lifting of the bans will all come into force in the fall.
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
LONDON — Whisper it softly, but the Brexit endgame has arrived.
Eighteen months after Brussels and London reopened talks on the contentious Northern Ireland protocol — and more than three years after Britain actually left the EU — panicked officials on both sides of the English Channel are frantically trying to manage expectations as reports of a technical-level deal between the two sides emerge.
“They’re still in calls with the EU, but it’s literally just lawyers tidying up bits of text,” one senior British government official said Wednesday, in reference to the U.K. negotiating team. “We’re done.”
Multiple reports suggest U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now has a draft technical deal on his desk to consider, despite a wave of both official and unofficial denials from politicians and diplomats on all sides.
“I suspect it is more the technical shape of a deal than a deal per se,” said a second person close to the talks on the U.K. side, “which might be giving them wriggle room to deny it.”
Denials of an outright agreement were still coming thick and fast Wednesday night after the Times reported that London and Brussels had indeed reached a deal on the key customs and governance disputes that have dogged talks over the protocol. Crucially — and most contentiously — its front page story suggested the EU has given ground on the role its top court will play in resolving future disputes.
Talks on smoothing the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol have been ongoing since the summer of 2021, with negotiators long targeting a deal this month, ahead of an expected visit to Ireland by U.S. President Joe Biden in April.
The protocol arrangement, agreed as part of the Brexit divorce deal, sees Northern Ireland continue to follow the EU’s customs union and single market rules, in an effort to avoid a politically-sensitive hard border with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member state.
Yet Northern Ireland’s unionist politicians have long objected to the protocol, with the Democratic Unionist Party boycotting power-sharing and arguing that checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland effectively separate the region from the rest of the U.K. They’re backed by critics in Sunak’s governing Conservative Party who resent the Court of Justice of the European Union’s place in protocol governance.
Officially, both sides are sticking to the script and insisting that talks continue.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters Wednesday: “I’m very sorry, but I cannot give partial elements — because you never know in the very end how the package looks like.”
In Downing Street, Sunak’s official spokesperson tried to steer journalists away from what he called “speculative” reporting.
“No deal has been agreed, there is still lots of work to do on all areas, with significant gaps remaining between the U.K. and EU positions,” the spokesperson said. “Talks are ongoing on potential solutions including on goods.”
But the senior U.K. official quoted before said the message from No. 10 that negotiations are ongoing only applied at a political level.
They added: “It’s now up to politicians to decide ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ Rishi could have further technical talks with Ursula von der Leyen and [EU Brexit point-man] Maroš Šefčovič and stuff like that, but officials are done. It’s plain as day.”
According to the second person close to the talks, Sunak has been receiving regular updates on the evolving technical shape of the deal.
“As far as I know, he hasn’t given it the green light yet,” they said. “But it is all being quite ‘secret squirrel’ in the [U.K.] Cabinet Office. So I don’t think many people will be fully in the loop.”
In Brussels and in London, EU diplomats were busy rubbishing reports of an imminent resolution, while acknowledging that information on the state of play is being kept tight. European ambassadors were briefed on Wednesday morning that a breakthrough is yet to be reached, and that the CJEU issue remains particularly tricky.
Even inside the U.K., claim and counter-claim were flying. Another British official close to the talks said it was “just wrong [that a deal] is close,” with “fundamental” issues outstanding “including making sure there isn’t a border.” They would not, the person added, “expect anything in the short term.”
One EU diplomat summed up the mood: “If somebody tells you they know what’s happening, they’re lying.”
In truth, a final agreement on Brexit has never looked so close.
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Leonie Kijewski, Esther Webber and Cristina Gallardo
BELFAST — A top-level British diplomatic mission designed to soothe tensions over the Northern Ireland trade protocol instead opened new divisions Wednesday when the leader of Sinn Féin was unexpectedly barred.
U.K. government officials offered conflicting explanations for blocking Mary Lou McDonald from the Northern Ireland Office meeting with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. He had traveled to Belfast to brief local party leaders on Monday’s breakthrough with the European Commission on making post-Brexit trade arrangements work better in what remains the most bitterly divided corner of the U.K.
McDonald’s exclusion triggered a boycott of the meeting by Sinn Féin, the largest party in the mothballed Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as its moderate competitor for Irish nationalist votes, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). It propelled the Belfast talks to the top of an Irish news agenda bored stiff by the long-running Brexit protocol dispute — and played straight into the hands of Sinn Féin, which lost no time in denouncing perfidious Albion.
“Apart from this being utterly bizarre, I mean beyond bizarre, it’s extremely unhelpful,” McDonald said nearby the Northern Ireland Office headquarters in central Belfast, where Cleverly hosted the talks attended by only three of the five parties from Northern Ireland’s collapsed power-sharing government.
“It’s a bad message and a bad signal if the British Tories are now behaving in this petulant fashion and saying that they would seek to exclude people from the very necessary work that needs now to be done,” McDonald said.
British government officials initially defended McDonald’s exclusion on the grounds that she is not an elected member of the Stormont assembly — a condition not cited or enforced on many similar political gatherings dating back to McDonald’s February 2018 elevation to the Sinn Féin leadership.
McDonald represents central Dublin in the Republic of Ireland parliament, reflecting Sinn Féin’s status as the only major political party contesting elections in both parts of Ireland. Since 2020 she has led the parliamentary opposition to the coalition government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin.
An explanation circulated by the Northern Ireland Office to journalists said its meeting invite had specified attendance by Michelle O’Neill, McDonald’s party deputy and the senior Sinn Féin politician north of the border.
O’Neill and McDonald had planned to attend together, as has been common. Both similarly plan to meet Varadkar and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer when they make separate visits Thursday to Belfast.
“The leader of Sinn Féin in the [Northern Ireland] Assembly was invited and remains invited. Her attendance is a matter for Sinn Féin. But she was not excluded,” the U.K. government said, referring to O’Neill.
Others quickly pointed out an evident contradiction. Leaders of two other parties — the Democratic Unionists’ Jeffrey Donaldson and the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood — had been invited, even though they, just like McDonald, have no role at Stormont.
Cleverly’s office circulated a second explanation citing a different protocol — diplomatic protocol — as the real reason not to permit McDonald through the door.
Those officials cited Ireland’s December 17 Cabinet reshuffle in which Martin replaced Simon Coveney as foreign minister. This meant, they said, Cleverly needed to hold a face-to-face meeting with Martin before he could do the same with opposition leader McDonald.
Irish nationalist and center-ground politicians dismissed both explanations. They noted that U.K. government leaders already have met dozens of times with Martin, who served as prime minister for the first half of Ireland’s planned five-year government.
In Dublin, senior officials also questioned the U.K.’s stated rationale.
“I’d like to think we wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to offer this insult up on a plate to Sinn Féin. It seems such an obvious point to make, but the parties in Northern Ireland should be free to choose who represents them at any table. This is normally never an issue. This shouldn’t be made an issue,” one official told POLITICO. “Citing the rules of diplomacy for this move boggles the mind.”
Cleverly and Chris Heaton-Harris, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland who also took part in Wednesday’s meeting, declined comment.
Donaldson — whose party is blocking the operation of the Stormont assembly and formation of a new cross-community government in protest against the trade protocol — said he wouldn’t comment on whether it had been right or wrong to exclude McDonald.
But he said Cleverly and Heaton-Harris had reassured him in the behind-closed-doors meeting that any agreement on reforming the trade protocol must meet his party’s core demands. These include an end to any EU controls on British goods arriving at local ports that are destined to remain within Northern Ireland.
“They recognize that a deal with the EU that doesn’t work for unionists just isn’t going to fly,” Donaldson said.
