Brexit deal: can Rishi Sunak win over the DUP?

Rishi Sunak has travelled to Northern Ireland today to start a weekend of talks aimed at pushing through a new agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The outline of a deal has reportedly been agreed with the EU, but the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is yet to give its blessing. Its leadership insists that Northern Ireland must not be legally separate from the rest of the UK.

Sunak met leaders of both the DUP and Sinn Féin at a hotel near Belfast today in an attempt to secure their backing for his plan. Later, he will travel to Germany to discuss the revised protocol with other EU leaders.

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In a sign that a deal is “imminent”, the EU summoned diplomats from its 27 member states to a briefing on the issue this morning, said The Guardian. James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, has also been holding talks with European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič.

What did the papers say?

“Is a deal done? From what I hear, not quite,” the BBC’s Brussels correspondent Jessica Parker tweeted.

Two main “stumbling blocks” remain: the movement of goods, and how any disputes will be resolved – with or without the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

“All of a sudden 2023 feels like 2018,” said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. “Once again, the tricky constitutional status of Northern Ireland sits at the centre of the debate.”

Since Brexit negotiations began, the Irish border has played an outsized role. All sides committed to preserving cross-border trade and travel, but that principle set up a conflict between Unionists, who wanted equally free trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and the EU, which wanted to protect its internal market from goods arriving from the UK.

The proposed solution was the Northern Ireland Protocol, agreed as part of the post-Brexit deal in December 2020. It introduced some checks for goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

The deal now being discussed “is expected to include a settlement on an elimination of some checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and a new dispute resolution mechanism not involving the European court of justice (ECJ) in the first instance,” said The Guardian.

“It is believed that the deal on the table includes a fudge removing the EU’s powers to go directly to the ECJ for a decision if it feels a trade rule has been breached.” There would be “an arbitration panel involving Northern Irish and EU judges to be created as the first port of call in any dispute”.

In terms of goods, “at the heart of the negotiated deal is a system of ‘red’ and ‘green’ lanes that allow goods travelling only into Northern Ireland and not then on to Ireland to face no customs checks”, said The Telegraph.

The question then is whether any of this will satisfy the DUP, which has set out seven strict conditions that must be met by any deal before it returns to Stormont’s power-sharing government.

There is “confidence on the UK side” that the DUP’s conditions have been met, but there were also concerns that until today the DUP had not been sufficiently kept in the loop on what the proposals involved, The Telegraph reported.

What next?

If the prime minister succeeds in getting support from the DUP, the deal would be presented to the cabinet on Tuesday then set out in the Commons, according to an earlier report by The Times. A command paper detailing the agreement would be published later that day.

It seems that Sunak would be able to get any new deal through the House of Commons, “given that Keir Starmer has pledged Labour support for a deal”, said The Telegraph. However, there is a risk of a Tory rebellion. The Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative MPs continues to say that Sunak’s “solution to the impasse will weaken Brexit”, said The New Statesman.

“Many eyes” will be on Sunak’s meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in Munich this weekend, tweeted the BBC’s Parker.

“The political tour that Rishi Sunak and his ministers are going on may be read as the kind of end-game choreography you’d expect to see before an announcement,” she said. But it could also mean that Sunak is still aiming to use today’s talks with the DUP to try to “press the EU for final concessions”.

We might be nearing a deal, but “this is politics and Brexit… it could all still fall apart”.