In Northern Ireland, where the Irish language is a proxy battleground between Unionists and Nationalists, dual-language signs have become a “key point of contention at Stormont”, said the BBC.

In October, Belfast City Council approved a draft policy to promote its use in public life, with bilingual signs across its facilities and official buildings. Sinn Féin hailed it as a “historic milestone” for a long-marginalised language.

But unionists objected, triggering a mechanism to “scrutinise the legitimacy of the decision”, said the Belfast Telegraph. Communities minister Gordon Lyons claimed some were using the language as a “weapon of cultural dominance”. The legal action has now arrived at the High Court.

A ‘greening’ of Ulster?

“What was once dismissed as a fading tongue is undergoing an exhilarating and vibrant revival”, said The Irish Times. North of the border, Belfast is leading the way. Bilingual street signs, permitted in Northern Ireland since the peace process, previously required approval by a two-thirds majority of residents. That was typically reached only in majority-Catholic neighbourhoods. But Belfast reduced the approval threshold to just 15% in 2022.

The dual-language signs are sparking anger in some areas “badly scarred by the Troubles”. “In a land where territory has long been marked by murals, flags and kerbstones daubed in national colours, they see the rollout of Irish signs as a ‘greening’ of Ulster by nationalists.” Existing bilingual street signs in the capital “have been vandalised more than 300 times in five years”, according to the BBC.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill and her deputy have been “unable to agree a joint position” on the latest Belfast policy, and won’t mount a challenge to the High Court action, said Irish News. Justice McLaughlin has reserved judgment on the legality of the policy, saying: “I’ve got an awful lot to think about.” Until then, the draft proposal remains on hold.

Irish language ‘imposed’

Irish was declared the first official language of the Irish Free State in 1921, but in the six counties that remained in the UK as Northern Ireland, the language continued to be suppressed and treated with suspicion by the authorities. Less than 2.5% of the population in Northern Ireland speaks it daily, according to 2021 census figures.

However, the government, which “suppressed Irish for decades, is now openly boosting it”, said The Washington Post. The Identity and Language Act of 2022 bestowed official, protected status on the Irish language in Northern Ireland and overturned a ban of almost 300 years on its use in court.

Last year, Stormont appointed Northern Ireland’s first Irish language commissioner to promote its use across public bodies. Irish-language schools and classes are growing in popularity, “even among Protestant parents”, marking a “stark shift in attitudes about culture, identity and heritage that are gaining pace throughout Belfast”.

The language has “scored cultural breakthroughs”, said The Guardian. Popular Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap, who sing primarily in Irish, “have given the language a punk cachet” and are credited with sparking increased uptake in classes.

“However, beneath all this buzz lies a battleground,” said The Irish Times. The Irish language remains “highly politically charged across Northern Ireland”. Unionist leaders reject “what they see as an erosion of their identity and traditions”.

“There are some who wish to see Irish imposed on the whole society,” Clive McFarland, a spokesperson for the Democratic Unionist Party, told The Washington Post. They are “trying to make Northern Ireland less like the United Kingdom and more like the Republic of Ireland”, with the goal of a referendum on reunification.

There is growing pressure on the government to formally name an MI5 spy who operated at the heart of the IRA for decades.

Freddie Scappaticci, known by his codename “Stakeknife”, was outed in an investigation into the actions of Britain’s security services during the Troubles.

Scappaticci was recruited by the British Army in the 1970s, working until the 1990s as a mole within the IRA’s internal security unit tasked with identifying and killing informers. The West Belfast man, long suspected of being a British agent, was unmasked by the media in 2003, although he denied the allegations and went into hiding. He died in 2023.

Why is this coming out now?

Scappaticci’s alleged activities and the efforts of MI5 to protect his identity have been set out in the damning 160-page Kenova Final Report. It details the findings of a nine-year, £47.5 million investigation into Stakeknife’s alleged crimes.

The investigation revealed evidence of Stakeknife’s involvement in “serious and unjustifiable criminality, including kidnap, interrogation and murder”, said Kenova. He has been implicated in 14 murders and 15 abductions, while working in a notorious IRA unit known as the “nutting squad”, whose aim, ironically, was to flush out spies within its ranks.

An interim report last year found that Stakeknife’s actions probably “resulted in more lives being lost than saved”. Now the full report says he was “improperly protected by the British security services because they believed him to be a more valuable asset than he was”, said Max Jeffery in The Spectator.

It is “one of the Troubles’ most macabre twists that Scappaticci was secretly working for British security services and that his handlers allowed him to act as executioner to preserve his cover”, said The Guardian.

What did MI5 know?

In the past, MI5 has said its involvement with him was “peripheral” but the report clearly states the security services were “closely involved in his handling”.

“Everything done in respect of Stakeknife was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent; and MI5 had an influential role”, a member of the Army’s agent-handling unit told investigators. They concluded that “MI5 had automatic sight of all Stakeknife intelligence and therefore was aware of his involvement in serious criminality”.

Stakeknife submitted 3,517 intelligence reports during his time under cover. He was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for his services and even had a dedicated phone line he could call at any time to contact his handlers. Senior Army figures treated him as the “crown jewel” of British intelligence, and he had a reputation as “the goose that laid the golden eggs”.

Yet the report says protecting his identity became “more important than protecting those who could and should have been saved”.

What have MI5 and the government said?

Despite Scappaticci being outed by the press in 2003 and even telling his family his true identity, the government has “stuck to its routine practice not to identify agents, a principle known as NCND, an acronym for Neither Confirm Nor Deny”, said the BBC.

Iain Livingstone, head of Operation Kenova, has said that Stakeknife should now be named. Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn told the Commons that he would respond to Livingstone’s call at the conclusion of an ongoing case in the Supreme Court, which, Benn said, had implications for NCND. “The government’s first duty is, of course, to protect national security and identifying agents risks jeopardising this.”

This stance was backed by Benn’s Tory counterpart Alex Burghart, who said guarantees would be needed that the naming of Stakeknife would not impact on current security operations.

While Burghart admitted “people within” MI5 and the Army had “absolutely crossed the line in a way that wasn’t acceptable”, ultimately, the murders carried out by Stakeknife would have been signed off by the IRA Army Council. “If one is going to start pointing fingers, the first finger should be pointed in that direction.”

As many as 23,000 UK deaths could have been avoided if the first lockdown had happened a week earlier, according to the findings of the Covid-19 Inquiry. The government’s response to the deadly virus was “too little, too late”.

The 760-page report of the second part of the inquiry’s hearings makes for “grim reading for the country’s former prime minister, and much of his top team”, said Andrew McDonald in Politico. “Boris Johnson, look away now.”

‘Lack of urgency’ led to ‘inexcusable’ delays

“A combination of incompetence and over-optimism at the heart of government” meant that warnings from China were “dismissed for weeks”, said Eleanor Hayward and Oliver Wright in The Times.

Inaction and palpable “scepticism” turned February 2020 into “a lost month”, said inquiry chair Heather Hallett. Covid cases were soaring but the Cabinet did not meet during the half-term break and Johnson did not chair a single meeting of the Cobra emergency committee.

Scientific models suggest that a nationwide lockdown on 16 March “would have halved the number of deaths in the first wave” but, by the time a lockdown was even considered, a week later, it “was already too late”. It was a difficult decision but the delays were still “inexcusable” – particularly when the same mistake was made before the second lockdown in November.

Downing Street culture was ‘toxic and chaotic’

Johnson “reinforced” a “toxic and chaotic” environment at the centre of government, in which the views of colleagues, “particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making”, Hallett said.

This spread further than the prime minister. His special adviser at the time, Dominic Cummings, “materially contributed” to the sexist workplace culture. One “particularly disgraceful” WhatsApp message – “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that c***” – was symptomatic of his “offensive, sexualised and misogynistic language”.

Devolved nations ‘overly reliant’ on Westminster

The devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had to make “unenviable choices”, the report said. But they “failed to engage with the threat” and were “overly reliant” on Westminster to lead the response. A “lack of trust” between Johnson and the administrations’ First Ministers “coloured the approach to decision-making throughout the pandemic”.

None of the national cabinets acted with “sufficient speed” in the emerging crisis. The first case in Wales, for example, was identified on 28 February but, on 4 March, First Minister Mark Drakeford “chose to attend St David’s Day celebrations in Brussels rather than the Welsh Cabinet meeting”. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, “Covid-19 was only discussed under ‘any other business’ in meetings until as late as 24 and 25 February respectively”.

Partygate ‘undermined public confidence’

Rule-breaking and “Partygate” events resulted in public outcry. Then deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara told the inquiry that she “would find it hard to pick one day when the regulations were followed properly inside” No. 10.

Officials and ministers breaking lockdown rules, and that rule-breaking not being swiftly addressed, “undermined public confidence in decision-making and significantly increased the risk of people not complying with the rules designed to protect them,” said Hallett.

Scientific advice ‘flawed’ and ‘bamboozled’ polticians

Under the heading “Flawed scientific advice”, the report notes that, until 14 and 15 March, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance “advised that restrictions should not be implemented until closer to the peak of infections”. They believed the public might tire of complying with restrictions if they were imposed too early and went on for too long.

However, “scientific advisers had not appreciated the likelihood of the NHS being overwhelmed before then”. At this point, there was a lack of adequate infection data, as well as hospital and health service data.

The inquiry heard that “many ministers lacked confidence in their ability to understand technical material”, said Jessica Murray in The Guardian, with Johnson in particular singled out for struggling with scientific concepts. Vallance’s notes from the time said Johnson was “bamboozled” and that watching him “get his head around the stats was awful”.

Hallett made 19 recommendations, adding to the 10 issued in the first report. More will follow in eight further reports, set to be published over the next two years.

The humble ferry may not be as glamorous as a sleeper train, but starting your holiday by boat can be just as thrilling – and far more affordable. If you're looking to book a last-minute break in the UK, it's well worth hopping aboard a ferry for one of these scenic coastal adventures.

Penzance to the Isles of Scilly

Setting out from Penzance's South Pier, the crossing to St Mary's is the "indispensable highlight of any trip to the Isles of Scilly", said The Guardian. Head out on deck to catch a "glimpse" of Land's End as you depart the Cornish coast. Over the next three hours there is plenty of wildlife to spot, from fin whales to dolphins. Keep an eye out for "bird feeding frenzies" and bluefin tuna leaping "clear of the water".

Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight

Hop aboard a ferry in Portsmouth and in under an hour you'll arrive on the Isle of Wight. After disembarking at Fishbourne, take a bus to the "picturesque" seaside town of Ventnor, said The Independent. Thanks in part to its "renowned microclimate" and "abundant sunshine", in recent years it's transformed into a foodie haven (be sure to visit the Smoking Lobster to sample the local fare). Days are easy to fill with coastal strolls and bracing sea swims.

Berneray to Harris

Scotland is home to "many memorable ferry routes" but this "short voyage" in the Outer Hebrides is among the most "exhilarating", said The Guardian. Taking just an hour and spanning nine nautical miles, the crossing takes you over the Sound of Harris, which is "strewn with deadly rocks, dangerous tidal currents and frequent mists". Listen out for the "ghostly cries of seals" on the bigger islets and if you're lucky, you might even spot a "majestic white-tailed sea eagle".

Birkenhead to Belfast

From Birkenhead, jump aboard the Stena Line ferry to Belfast before taking the train to Coleraine, the perfect spot to embark on a hiking holiday, exploring the "magical glens of Antrim and the wild Causeway Coast", said The Sunday Times. Among the nearby highlights is the "fairytale scenery of Glenariff Forest", as well as the Giant's Causeway – a breathtaking geological formation comprising around 40,000 interlocking basalt columns.

Seahouses to Holy Island

During the warmer months, Billy Shiel's boats offer a four-and-a-half-hour trip from the charming coastal town of Seahouses to Holy Island, a tidal island off the coast of Northumberland. Boats cross at high tide (when the causeway is submerged), giving you a unique chance to enjoy the "'cut off' serenity of the island with its lofty castle, Norman Priory, small museum and cafes offering locally caught crab sandwiches", said The Telegraph.

Fifty years ago this week, one of Ireland's most popular music groups became the target of a terror attack in which three of its members were killed by loyalist paramilitaries posing as British Army soldiers.

A "controversial" parade due to take place in Northern Ireland this weekend "risks stepping over the line into the glorification of terrorism", said the BBC. Fifteen bands and hundreds of people are expected to take part in the Harris Boyle 50th Anniversary Memorial parade in County Armagh, in memory of one of the perpetrators of the Miami Showband Massacre.

Who were the Miami Showband?

The Miami Showband were a touring cabaret band formed in 1962, who became one of the biggest stars of Ireland's showband scene. An evolution from the travelling big bands of the 1940s and 1950s, showbands offered a more contemporary pop and easy listening sound, playing to packed houses across the length and breadth of the island of Ireland.

The Miami Showband's name was inspired by the first venue they played, the Palm Beach Ballroom in Portmarnock, north of Dublin. They had seven number-one hits in Ireland and performed Ireland's entry in the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing joint fourth. They also played in Northern Ireland, and had also appeared on UK television programmes.

What happened?

On 31 July 1975, the band were travelling home to Dublin after a concert in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, when they were stopped by a group of around 10 men in uniform at what appeared to be a British Army checkpoint. In fact, the "soldiers" were all members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group. Four of them were also serving in the British Army's Ulster Defence Regiment.

The attackers ordered the band members to line up at the side of the road while they attempted to place a bomb on the tour bus. It's believed that the plan was for the bomb to detonate once the van passed into the Republic of Ireland, framing the band members as IRA bomb smugglers, attracting bad publicity for the Republican cause and prompting stricter security measures at the border.

However, the explosive detonated prematurely, killing two of the paramilitaries, including Harris Boyle. The surviving gunmen then opened fire on the band, murdering lead singer Fran O’Toole, guitarist Tony Geraghty and trumpet player Brian McCoy. Two other members of the band, Des McAlea and Stephen Travers, were injured but survived.

Were the killers brought to justice?

In 1976, two men were jailed for 35 years in connection with the murders. Imposing the longest life sentences in Northern Ireland history, the judge said "killings like the Miami Showband must be stopped" and hinted that the death penalty would have been imposed had it not been recently abolished.

A third attacker, former British Army soldier John James Somerville, was convicted in 1981 for his involvement in the killings, as well as a separate sectarian murder. All three declined to name their accomplices and their identities remain unknown. They were released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

In 2019, Netflix documentary "ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre" brought the killings back into the public eye, following survivor Stephen Travers' fight to bring the killers to justice and keep the memory of his bandmates alive.

Muckamore Abbey Hospital, Northern Ireland, which provides treatment for adults with severe learning disabilities, became "one of the nation's biggest ever crime scenes" in 2017 when hundreds of thousands of hours of CCTV footage revealed that patients had been seriously abused, said the BBC.

Yet, eight years after the footage was discovered, no cases have come to trial, the hospital hasn't been closed and a public inquiry has yet to report its findings.

'Staggering' abuse

There were already concerns about the hospital's treatment of patients before the CCTV footage was discovered. Glynn Brown, for instance, believed that his severely disabled adult son may have been assaulted by staff but he was told there was no video evidence because the CCTV cameras, installed six months earlier, had never been switched on.

But, in fact, the cameras had been running the entire time and had captured a "staggering" 300,000 hours of footage that revealed widespread abuse and neglect of patients by hospital staff.

Vulnerable young adults were "punched, kicked, dragged across floors, tipped off furniture" and had "balls kicked at them", said the BBC. Their possessions were "taken away" and there was "emotional abuse", including patients with severe learning disabilities being "provoked into a reaction" and then restrained and placed in isolation.

As hospital trust officials took on the mammoth task of combing through the footage, families of the patients were told they would not be allowed to see it, to prevent any prejudice of criminal investigations. But relatives were contacted with descriptions of the incidents involving their loved ones.

This is the "largest systemic abuse case uncovered in the UK", Andrew McDonnell, a clinical psychologist with experience of such investigations, told the broadcaster. The "sheer volume and scale" of it "dwarfs anything I've ever seen before".

Inquiry yet to deliver verdict

Yet the families are still waiting to see anyone be held to account. In March, the hospital trust rejected calls for senior staff members to be sacked, reported Nursing Times. Belfast Health and Social Care Trust apologised for the failings of individual staff members at Muckamore Abbey Hospital but said that accountability "doesn't necessarily mean losing your job". In a statement to the BBC this week, the trust apologised to families and said some staff have now been dismissed.

In May, seven former members of staff appeared in court charged with ill-treatment of patients. They were released on bail pending an arraignment hearing, said the Belfast Telegraph. There have been 38 arrests to date, said the BBC, but no trials or convictions.

A public inquiry, which sat from 2022 until earlier this year, is yet to deliver its final report and recommendations. Families have criticised the inquiry, saying that hospital managers were not "rigorously cross-examined" and that lawyers representing patients and their families weren't allowed to directly ask questions of the witnesses. The Muckamore Abbey Inquiry said, in a statement, that lawyers for families of patients were permitted to make an application to the chair to ask witnesses questions directly but no such applications had been received.

The Northern Irish town of Ballymena is reeling after a fourth night of anti-immigrant violence, and a total of 63 police officers injured and at least 15 people arrested.

The riots broke out on Monday, after initially peaceful protests over the court appearance of two Romanian-speaking teenagers charged with the attempted rape of a local girl. "Masked rioters hurled petrol bombs, fireworks and masonry at police", said the Financial Times. On Tuesday night, "homes and businesses were damaged and cars set alight" and police responded with "water cannon and baton rounds". Some local residents "put signs on their homes, indicating their nationality" in a desperate bid to avoid being targeted as "foreigners".

What did the commentators say?

"Racism in 2025 bears a startling resemblance to sectarianism in 1969," said Suzanne Breen in the Belfast Telegraph. Ballymena's streets look "like a scene from the start of the Troubles, when families were burnt out of their homes because of their religion". These rioting "thugs" are engaging in a similar "collective punishment"; their "racist attacks" must "be called out for what they are".

Claims that the town's "demographic balance" has been destabilised are redolent of the language used in the past when Catholic numbers rose. Yet Stormont figures show that only 3.5% of Northern Ireland's population is from an ethnic minority, compared to 18% in England and Wales, and 13% in Scotland. "Northern Ireland remains the whitest and least diverse part of the UK."

This sort of thing is inevitably a "Rorschach test", said Brian O'Neill on Slugger O'Toole. "It's like every side watches the same footage and comes away with a completely different film in their heads." Some see "community defence", others see a "racist mob", then "there's the rest of us in the middle going, 'WTF?'"

The anger "isn't just bubbling among one community", said Rory Carroll in The Guardian. The unrest is "bringing Catholics and Protestants together in combined rioting against the foreigners" – a pattern that fits with the Belfast anti-immigration riots last August, "where you had loyalists with British flags marching alongside Dublin anti-migrant activists who had the Irish tricolour". You don't see that often in Northern Ireland.

And the sense of unrest goes beyond Northern Ireland, too, said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. It echoes the riots in Dublin in 2023 and the last summer's riots in Southport, which also triggered that "large scale agitation" in Belfast. The porous boundaries of social media seem to "turbocharge tensions on both sides of the sea".

The prospect of "civil war" in the UK once seemed "overblown", said Annabel Denham in The Telegraph, but that's changed as people reach "the end of their tether with illegal migration". If the "white working class feel they are constantly being expected to sacrifice their culture" and identity, in order to "celebrate those of immigrants", it "may not be long before they revolt".

What next?

"It is hard to see where this ends," said Connor Gillies on Sky News. Many fear this week's unrest is "just the beginning" and could go on for weeks, potentially spreading to other parts of Northern Ireland or beyond.

Speaking after the third night of violence on Thursday, Liam Kelly, the chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, said the police response to the riots so far had "undoubtedly saved lives" and prevented "a pogrom with consequences too painful to contemplate".

"There's not much that the Conservatives, the SNP and Labour agree on", but the band Kneecap has "pulled off the improbable and united political opponents against them", said The Spectator.

Criticism of the Irish rappers has been mounting after video footage emerged of a 2023 gig, appearing to show one member of the trio saying, "The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP." The band has issued an apology but several of their gigs have now been cancelled amid what their manager has called a wave of "moral hysteria", said the BBC.

A Downing Street spokesperson called the apology "half-hearted" and condemned "in the strongest possible terms" other comments Kneecap appear to have made "about the situation in the Middle East". The Metropolitan Police has said its counter-terrorism unit is assessing both the alleged call to murder MPs, and other footage apparently showing a band member shouting, "Up Hamas, up Hezbollah."

From Belfast to Baftas to backlash

The Belfast-based group was formed in 2017 by friends Liam Og Ó Hannaidh, Naoise Ó Caireallain and JJ Ó Dochartaigh. They rap in both English and Irish about working-class Belfast culture and post-Troubles Northern Ireland. (Their name is a reference to the punishment Republican paramilitaries would inflict, during the Troubles, on people they believed to be drug-dealers and child molesters.)

After the success of their second studio album, "Fine Art", their semi-autobiographical film, in which the band members played themselves alongside established actors like Michael Fassbender, won the 2025 Bafta for Outstanding Debut.

Kneecap's "punky attitude, fondness for coke and ketamine, anti-coloniser stance on British rule and defiant refusal to let the English language drown out their native tongue has made them social-media folk heroes", said The Scotsman. It has also made them "targets for right-wing tabloids and the British government".

Coachella censorship

Earlier this month, the group's set at US music festival Coachella "caught the attention of the world", with its "heavy political messaging" about Israel's bombardment of Gaza, said Business Insider. Organisers "attempted to censor the band" by removing their second set from the livestream, but this "only increased interest in the performance".

Former "The X Factor" judge Sharon Osbourne called for their US work visas to be revoked, saying they "openly support terrorist organisations". Kneecap's visa sponsor subsequently dropped them, meaning they'll need a new sponsor to be able to play their sellout North America tour in October.

'Coordinated smear campaign'

On Monday, after the daughter of MP David Amess, who was killed by an Islamic State fanatic in 2021, said that "this kind of rhetoric" should not be tolerated, Kneecap posted their "heartfelt apologies" to the families of Amess and Jo Cox, the MP murdered in 2016. "We never intended to cause you hurt," the band said in the 500-word statement on X. "We also reject any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual. Ever."

Nevertheless, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has said Kneecap should be prosecuted and "banned full stop", as their "glorification of terrorism and anti-British hatred has no place in our society". Badenoch and Kneecap are "already known to each other", said Sky News. When she was business secretary, she blocked a £14,250 government arts grant the group had won; last November, Kneecap won a discrimination challenge over that decision.

The group maintain that they are facing a "coordinated smear campaign". They said the footage about MPs was "deliberately taken out of all context" and "is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action. This distortion is not only absurd – it is a transparent effort to derail the real conversation."

And, although they "won't be silenced" about "the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people", they have said, "Let us be unequivocal: we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah."

2025 is looking good for travelers ready to check into someplace new. That might mean heading to Rome to see how the Orient Express handles luxury accommodations off the tracks or trekking to Uganda for an unforgettable stay among the gorillas. Whatever the type of hotel experience, you should be able to find it at one of these eight fresh properties.

One&Only Moonlight Basin, Montana

The first One&Only resort in the United States is coming to Montana. The hotel, located on the northwest side of Lone Mountain, will offer "direct gondola access to Big Sky's 5,800 acres of piste, as well as top-tier mountain golf," Elite Traveler said, in addition to kayaking, biking and other outdoor activities. Guests can expect comfortable rooms with fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling windows, leather furnishings and local art, with amenities like a hidden whisky shack in the forest and wellness treatments inspired by the wilds of Montana.

Orient Express La Minerva, Rome

When it opens this spring, Orient Express La Minerva will technically be the newest hotel in Rome, but its roots were planted long ago, in the 17th century. La Minerva, built for a wealthy family in 1620 and turned into an inn 200 years later, is the first hotel under the Orient Express brand. The "meticulously curated" property "highlights Rome's rich history," CNN said, and is steps from the Pantheon. Rooms feature king-size beds and marble bathrooms, and for a treat, book a signature suite with a private terrace, turntable and vinyl record collection.

Portrush Adelphi, Northern Ireland

Renovations are in full swing at Portrush Adelphi, a boutique hotel opening in April next door to the storied Royal Portrush Golf Club. Now part of Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts, the seaside property will "cater to golf enthusiasts," the Belfast Telegraph said, with fully revamped guest rooms and common areas. An on-site Italian grill and bar and concierge who will set up tee times round out the hotel's updated offerings.

Salterra, Turks & Caicos

Salterra offers a new way to experience Turks & Caicos. The property, scheduled to open in February, sits on South Caicos, far from the most populous areas of the archipelago. Each room is decorated in muted tones, with wood finishings and large windows to soak up the views. The nearby Salinas salt flats inspired the hotel's design, and an in-house "saltmelier" will be on hand to take guests to the Salinas boardwalk to learn about the island's history of salt production and guide them through a sea salt tasting.

Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Lodge, Uganda

Prepare to be awed when Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Lodge opens in May. Deep in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, this luxe 10-tent property is not only a great base camp for gorilla trekking but is often a stop for gorillas passing through the area. The comfortable accommodations include en-suite bathrooms with a bathtub and shower and private decks, where you can relax after a day of adventure, like taking a game drive through Queen Elizabeth National Park or hiking through the forest to meet members of the Batwa tribe.

Skyridge, Alberta, Canada

Glamp your way through all four seasons inside one of the micro-cabins at Skyridge, opening in January. This year-round, adults-only resort in the town of Canmore has two types of accommodations: the Sky Box and SkyGlass, an innovative structure with floor to ceiling windows for unobstructed views of the stunning Canadian Rockies. At 302 square feet, the cabins are designed for two guests and have everything necessary for "roughing it" in style, including a plush king-size bed, bathroom, kitchen with stovetop and microwave, and heating and air conditioning to keep glampers warm during the winter and cool during the summer.

The Sundays, Hamilton Island, Australia

The Sundays, opening in April, embraces its prime position in the heart of the Great Barrier Reef. The hotel's 59 rooms have been "conscientiously designed," Vogue Australia said, and the "calming combination of ocean and sand tones" act as an "extension of the beach surroundings." An oceanfront swimming pool and water's-edge restaurant and bar add to the "laidback lavishness" of the property.

Veranó San Juan, Puerto Rico

A 1950s office building in San Juan's vibrant Santurce neighborhood is getting a second act as Veranó, a stylish boutique hotel. Set to open its doors in April, Veranó will have 40 sleek rooms and suites, the City House restaurant and a rooftop bar perfect for grabbing a drink to enjoy at sunset. The property sits on the Avenida Ponce de León, amid shops, restaurants and art galleries and close to several beaches.

Getting from your hotel room to the links in a matter of minutes is everything a golfer on vacation could ask for, especially when the courses offer views so incredible they might distract you from the game itself. Here are 10 beautiful hotels with golf courses on property — or a few steps away — that will thrill any player. 

The Bushmills Inn, Northern Ireland 

The area around The Bushmills Inn is a golfer's dream. Historic clubs are abundant, from the Royal Portrush and its two majestic championship courses to the Portstewart with three emerald courses boasting views of the Atlantic Ocean, Donegal hills and River Bann. The inn offers transportation to the courses, among other amenities like a boutique cinema and traditional Irish breakfast served in the morning. The rooms and suites are charming, with features like four-poster beds and heated towel racks. After a day on the green, unwind at the legendary Bushmills Distillery for a tour and whiskey tasting.

Cabot Cape Breton, Inverness, Nova Scotia 

High on the cliffs above the Gulf of St. Lawrence stands Cabot Cape Breton and its three exceptional golf courses. Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs both made Golf Digest's World's 100 Greatest Golf Courses list, thanks in part to their stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean and rolling fairways. The newer Nest is a 10-hole, par 3 course designed for a quicker game. Stay in one of the comfortable rooms at the Cabot Links Lodge — each one has an ocean view — or upgrade to a plush golf villa overlooking the greens. 

Coeur d'Alene Resort, Idaho

This is a golf course with a twist. At the Coeur d'Alene Resort, the 14th hole is a floating green, with a tee that changes positions every day. You get two opportunities to land the ball on the island (if you miss, it gets dropped down) and then hop on an electric-powered boat to finish the hole. The views as you play are just as memorable, with Lake Coeur d'Alene in the background and geraniums, petunias, wildflowers and junipers dotting the landscape. The resort has five different kinds of accommodations; the 2,500-square-foot Hagadone Penthouse, complete with two private terraces and a glass-bottom swimming pool, is the most impressive. 

Half Moon Montego Bay, Jamaica

Golf carts are available to rent, but you are going to want to walk this one. The 18-hole championship Half Moon Golf Course stretches across the grounds of a former sugarcane estate, surrounded by native trees that almost always seem to be swaying in the breeze. Guests also have access to the nearby Cinnamon Hill and White Witch courses and can book private lessons with visiting pro instructors. All of Half Moon's rooms, suites and villas come with private balconies or patios, and there is an option to book a dining plan that lets you explore the hotel's 11 restaurants and bars.

Kawana Hotel and Golf Course, Shizuoka, Japan

You have two courses to choose from at the Kawana Hotel: Fuji and Oshima. The challenging Fuji Course is legendary, with 18 holes surrounded by deep bunkers. It is in a picturesque setting above the Pacific Ocean and in sight of Mount Fuji and must be walked with a caddie. Oshima, one of the oldest golf courses in Japan, is just as gorgeous, but golfers are allowed to use carts, do not need caddies and can play at their own speed. The hotel's spacious rooms make it easy to unwind after a day of golf, as does the Main Bar, where guests can enjoy a drink in a moody space filled with leather and wood.

The Lodge at Sea Island, Georgia

Sea Island entices golfers not only with three championship courses but also enchanting accommodations. Serious players can hone their skills with expert help at the state-of-the-art Golf Performance Center, while those looking to spend quality time with their kids will find it at the 18-hole Speedway putting course. A boutique experience awaits at The Lodge, with its 43 elegant rooms and suites that come with 24-hour butler service and nightly turndowns. The highlight of every evening occurs at sunset, when a bagpiper serenades guests from the Lodge's veranda, heralding the transition from day to night. 

Marine Troon, Scotland 

Put your golf skills to the test in Troon, Scotland, where the rugged Old Course at Royal Troon Golf Club awaits. A striking spot to play, with 18 holes that get more and more challenging, this is one of several courses near Marine & Lawn's Marine Troon. The property makes golfing easy, offering club storage and rentals, an expansive putting green for practicing and a concierge team ready to assist with scheduling tee times. Rooms here are warm and inviting, with colorful wallpaper, traditional artwork and velvet touches.  

Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Whitefield, New Hampshire

Make Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa your family's summer playground. Covering 1,700 acres, this immense property in the White Mountains offers a little bit of everything. The lovely nine-hole Mountain View Golf Course, originally built in 1900 and redesigned in 1938, can be played by novices and pros alike. To switch approaches, hang up your clubs and try your hand at disc golf. Afterward, visit the Mountain View Farm and its goats and llamas, play a round of tennis on one of four clay courts with views of the Presidential Mountain Range or jump in the outdoor pool. To ensure there is room for all your guests, book the Presidential Suite with a sleeper sofa and two bathrooms.

The Resort at Pelican Hill, Newport Beach, California

When designing the Ocean North and Ocean South Golf Courses at The Resort at Pelican Hill, architect Tom Fazio wanted every round to feel like "once in a lifetime, every time." He succeeded, as all 36 holes perfectly complement the majestic scenery, with the Pacific Ocean or lush greenery viewed from every tee. For a memorable experience, book a time early in the morning and another at sunset, to see the courses through fresh eyes and at golden hour. Accommodations at the resort include bungalows outfitted with limestone fireplaces and terraces and fully furnished villas featuring gourmet kitchens and marble bathrooms.

Villa del Palmar at the Islands of Loreto, Mexico

Perched above the largest marine preserve in Mexico, Villa del Palmar at the Islands of Loreto seems unreal. Dazzling views of the Sea of Cortez and Sierra de la Giganta mountain range are two perks of staying at this all-inclusive resort, with another being able to play on the 18-hole TPC Danzante Bay Golf Course. It is a remarkable spot, with valleys, dunes, foothills, cliffs and arroyos. Choose one of the resort's premium suites to get a view of the course plus amenities like a mini-bar stocked daily and access to the spa's hydrotherapy circuit.

The Irish government is under pressure to come clean about a decades-old secret agreement with the UK for RAF aircraft to defend Irish airspace in an emergency.

Although "never officially confirmed", the Anglo-Irish deal is understood to allow UK jets to "intercept threats" in Irish airspace, said Sky News.

Sinn Féin, the main opposition party in Ireland, is now demanding more transparency on the precise nature of the arrangement to ensure it's not in breach of Ireland's neutrality. Independent senator Gerard Craughwell, a veteran of both the British and Irish armed forces, has also launched a High Court case that would force the government to put the details before the Irish parliament.

'Naval chokepoint'

It is official policy in Dublin "to refuse to publicly discuss" Ireland's air defence arrangements with the UK or the presence of RAF interceptors in Irish airspace, said The Irish Times. But interviews with political, diplomatic and military figures suggest that the agreement "goes back over 70 years to the early days of the Cold War".

The first agreement was drawn up in the early 1950s, when tensions between the USSR and the West were "near boiling point". Although neutral, Ireland was concerned it was "wholly unequipped" to detect or intercept any Soviet airborne threat. That threat was more than theoretical, because Ireland was next to the waters known as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, a "naval chokepoint" that would be "vital to control if hostilities broke out between the two superpowers".

So, in 1952, Irish officials signed an agreement that would allow the RAF to enter Irish airspace if it detected a Soviet threat, formalising a similar arrangement in place during the Second World War. However, Ireland's neutrality and its location on the west of Europe meant "the threat of Russian bombers rarely kept politicians or civil servants up at night".

During the Troubles, a second secret agreement was drawn up, allowing British helicopters to travel up to three miles into the Republic of Ireland for counter-terrorism surveillance and pursuits of suspects.

Then, after the September 11 attacks, Ireland "woke up" to the fact that commercial aircraft could potentially pose "just as much of a threat as a hostile power", so it was agreed that RAF jets could intercept and shoot down aircraft in Irish airspace.

That dimension of the agreement was crucial because the only aircraft Ireland had that were capable of air-to-air defence was the Pilatus PC-9, a propeller-driven trainer acquired by the Air Corps in 2004. It had much in common with aircraft used as far back as the Second World War.

'Effectively defenceless'

In addition to demands for increased transparency, there are also calls for Ireland to become more self-reliant in the air. A report from the Commission on the Defence Forces in 2022 found that Ireland was effectively defenceless on land, sea and in the air and it called for a new air squadron that would give Ireland its own "quick reaction alert" system, allowing it to respond to threats in its own airspace without relying on London.

But it is "not as easy as just buying aircraft", said The Irish Times. "Vast infrastructure" would be needed, including ground controllers, primary radar and a completely new training regime.

After decades of "chronic underinvestment" in its military, Ireland lacks a primary radar system capable of detecting military aircraft once they turn off their transponders, said Sky News.

In 2020, Russian Tupolev TU-95 "Bear" aircraft twice entered Irish-controlled air space before being escorted away by RAF jets, said the BBC. This "type of provocation" has "become more and more common in recent years", said The Irish Times.

"In the face of an increasingly belligerent Russia" the nation's air defence capabilities are "at their lowest point in decades".

Parts of Rishi Sunak's Rwanda deportation act should be "disapplied" in Northern Ireland because they undermine the province's human rights protections, a high court judge has ruled.

Belfast High Court Justice Michael Humphreys said the Illegal Migration Act, a crucial element of the "Rwanda plan", conflicts with the Windsor Framework, the arrangement agreed with the EU to regularise Northern Ireland's status after Brexit.

The framework "deals mostly with trade issues", said the BBC, but also includes a commitment to the "human rights provisions that flow from the Good Friday Agreement".

Justice Humphreys found in favour of a legal challenge brought by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and a 16-year-old Iranian asylum seeker, ruling that multiple elements of the Act "infringe the protection afforded" by the Good Friday Agreement.

The judgment is significant because it could make deporting migrants to Rwanda impossible if they travel to Northern Ireland. 

"Oh, dear!" said Sky News's chief political correspondent Jon Craig. Sunak's Safety of Rwanda Act was "supposed to prevent this sort of legal challenge". But with the "ink barely dry on the act", Humphreys's ruling "bodes ill for the PM" and "potentially opens the door to more legal challenges".

The DUP warned that the ruling could make Northern Ireland a "magnet" for migrants. Gavin Robinson, the party's interim leader, called on the government to "assert the sovereignty of parliament and ensure that we have a UK-wide immigration system".

A "clearly annoyed" Sunak said that the judgment would not prevent the first flights to Rwanda taking off as planned this summer, Craig wrote for Sky News. The government is considering an appeal.

Although this case dealt specifically with provisions relating to Northern Ireland's legal framework, the challenge is "likely to form part of a wider attack" on the Rwanda plan, the BBC said, as critics believe it relies on laws that "breach basic safeguards for all refugees in the UK".

A new BBC documentary tells how in 1972 the Irish Republican Army (IRA) allowed an American TV crew to film the inner workings of "Europe’s deadliest guerrilla force".

It's "The Troubles meets a Tom Clancy novel", wrote Ed Power in The Irish Times.

The background

In 1972, during the "darkest days of the conflict in the North [of Ireland]", John Bowyer Bell, an American academic sympathetic to the IRA, persuaded its leadership to allow him to film its "bloody campaign from the inside, for a project he titled 'The Secret Army'", said Power.

Some of the scenes are "chilling", he added. For example, there is a sequence in which the crew accompanies IRA members as they plant explosives in central Londonderry – part of a bombing blitz that would claim eight lives.

Why did the IRA allow such access? They "must have imagined they were carefully stage-managing a propaganda coup that would loosen the purse strings of the US's millions-strong Irish community to donate to the Republican cause", said Oliver Harvey in The Sun.

The film showed "remarkable scenes never seen before or since", including the "nuts and bolts" of how IRA men and women "went about planning and unleashing mayhem, and what they thought about it", said Rory Carroll in The Guardian. But then it "vanished for almost 50 years".

The latest

The new feature-length documentary follows reporter Darragh MacIntyre as he attempts to "unravel the mystery" surrounding the making of Bell's film, said the BBC.

MacIntyre travelled "from Derry to Arizona seeking out documents and anyone still alive" who featured in the film, said James Jackson in The Times. "Intrigue led to further intrigue" because the film's director, Zwy Aldouby, was a Nazi hunter linked to Mossad and the Israeli intelligence agency itself was "snooping" on Muammar Gaddafi's links to the IRA.

In "another twist", said Carroll, a producer of the film said British intelligence viewed the documentary while it was being developed in London and before it was sent to the States. "Which raises another question," he added: "why did the spooks not pounce on material that incriminated [Martin] McGuinness and other IRA commanders?"

The reaction

MacIntyre's documentary has been well received by the critics, despite some challenging scenes. "As murky as this Le Carré-esque stuff was," said Jackson, there was "something fascinating simply in watching the former IRA guys remembering it all. Because it can be hard to know how to feel when seeing the elderly talk about their days supporting terrorism."

MacIntyre is the sort of investigative journalist television producers "adore", said Power, because "he isn't opposed to inserting himself into the action", and there will "always be a scene or three" in which he "huffs about, chasing a lead like Hercule Poirot hunting down a murderer".

The programme "points to the complexity of Northern Ireland's conflict" and its "continuing capacity to raise more questions than we are able to answer at this time", said Martin Duffy for E-International Relations. And it appears that British intelligence made a "deliberate decision to cultivate Martin McGuinness".

The BBC film is "astonishing", said the Belfast Telegraph, and it may not be the end of the matter. It was a "tangled, murky tale", said Jackson, and it's "not hard to think a movie is waiting to be made of it all".

Today marks four years since the UK formally left the European Union. Back then, Boris Johnson, who had just won an 80-seat majority promising to "get Brexit done", hailed the date as the start of a new golden era for Britain.

Turning rhetoric into reality has proved much harder, however. Johnson is gone, as is his successor Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak has adopted a more pragmatic approach and sought to mend ties with Europe, but several issues remain as "divisive as ever", said The Times, "including the UK's ability to control its own borders, British economic interests, the Northern Ireland protocol and freedom of movement in Europe".

The impact of leaving the EU has "not perfectly matched initial perceptions", agreed Sanjay Vallabh, managing director of Vallabh Associates, on Insider Media. While some pro-Brexit supporters looked forward to a "smoother transition to new trade relationships, the reality has been marked by complexities and disruptions". At the same time, "some of the dire predictions of economic collapse did not materialise".

Economy

The economic impact of Brexit has been a "subject of much debate", said Vallabh.  But the Office for Budget Responsibility's own forecasts suggest the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and EU, as set out in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) that came into effect on 1 January 2021, "will reduce long-run productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU".

Brexit contributed to Britain's "particularly high inflation" by "introducing friction into the country's most important trading relationship, and hitting the value of the pound, which has made imports more expensive", said CNN. A study by the London School of Economics found that Brexit was responsible for about a third of UK food price inflation since 2019, adding nearly £7 billion to Britain's grocery bill.

In August, the government announced that it was delaying health and safety checks on food imports from the EU for the fifth time in three years. The latest "foot-dragging demonstrates that Britain is still struggling to come to terms with the painful consequences" of leaving the EU, which has "piled costs on UK businesses and weighed on trade, investment and, ultimately, economic growth", CNN added.

Taken together, said John Springford of the Centre for European Reform think tank, the missed growth in goods and services trade account for "about a £23 billion quarterly hit" to UK exports,  which is consistent with a GDP reduction of 4%-5% compared to a Britain that had remained.

But because the EU is still by far the UK's largest trading partner, "we must keep on making piecemeal repairs to the EU-UK relationship, while accepting that Brexit is a fact of life", said historian David Reynolds in The New Statesman. 

New trade deals

The UK has also struggled to secure much-vaunted free trade agreements with some of the world's biggest and fastest-growing economies – what Boris Johnson famously described as the "sunlit uplands" for Britain outside EU "bondage".

A deal with India, which Johnson vowed to conclude by October 2022, is still pending, while negotiations with the US have been shelved until after the presidential election in November.

The UK has now "signed trade deals and agreements in principle with about 70 countries and one with the EU", said the BBC, but "the majority of these are simply 'rollovers'". That means the terms are the same as they were before Brexit. "And some of them are with countries with which the UK does very little trade."

Immigration

Immigration was a key factor for many who voted to leave the EU, but since coronavirus restrictions lifted, Britain has recorded huge hikes in net legal migration – the number of people who arrived, minus those who left. The population was boosted by nearly 750,000 in 2022, more than double the number in the year before the Brexit referendum.

"Immigration is replenishing Britain's labour force and deepening the diversity of its cities – a deliberate, if largely unspoken, strategy that is perhaps Brexit's most tangible early legacy," said The New York Times. "But it has come as a shock to people who voted to leave to make the country's borders less porous."

The reality proved "very different", said Jonathan Portes in The Guardian. Yet the migration statistics "reflect something that is rare indeed in the UK right now – a successful policy implemented efficiently and effectively and, even rarer, the crystallisation of a genuine 'Brexit opportunity'."

Northern Ireland

The Irish dimension was "another blind spot in the mindset of most English Leavers", said Reynolds. While Johnson effectively put a trade border down the Irish Sea, Sunak's Windsor Framework, concluded in February 2023, established notional "green" and "red" lanes to ensure a lighter touch for goods from Britain that would stay in Northern Ireland, compared with the tighter controls and checks on goods intended for the Republic.

"Irish backstop. Max fac. Settled status. Windsor Framework. Over the years, Brexit has spawned its own wide and weird lexicon," wrote Joel Reland of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. Looking ahead to 2024, "'trivergence' is the next new word which could be on the tips of Brexit-watchers' tongues", he added, referring to the scenario where Northern Ireland "diverges from the regulations of both the EU and UK – creating three separate sets of rules and leaving itself adrift of both".

Regulatory divergence also left Northern Ireland politically deadlocked, with the DUP refusing to return to power-sharing at Stormont in protest at what it saw as the deliberate undermining of the union – a boycott that may finally be coming to an end.

What next?

Polls conducted over the past four years have shown a slow but steady move towards supporting a closer alignment with the EU. A recent YouGov survey found that around half of Britons (51%) now favour rejoining the EU, followed by 42% who said they would support joining the EU Single Market. By comparison, just three in 10 (31%) would support maintaining Britain's current relationship with its largest trading partner.

Keir Starmer has promised to seek a major renegotiation of Britain's TCA trade deal with the EU in 2025 if the Labour Party wins the next general election. He has, though, ruled out both rejoining as a full member or even returning to the Single Market.

As the Financial Times journalist Peter Foster observed in his 2023 book "What Went Wrong with Brexit", for whoever wins the next election, "fixing Brexit" will not be primarily about the exit itself, but about "putting the UK's house in order" – an imperative from which leaving the EU has "proved a colossal distraction at a crucial juncture".

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has agreed to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland, ending two years of political deadlock.

In a press conference in the early hours of this morning, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said his party's executive had voted to end its boycott at Stormont after agreeing a legislative package with the Westminster government that addresses unionists' core complaints about the Windsor framework.

The DUP collapsed the Northern Ireland Assembly in February 2022 in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements that it said undermined Northern Ireland's position in the UK. The impasse left civil servants to run the country "on a form of auto-pilot amid a fiscal crisis, crumbling public services, strikes and doubts about whether devolved government would ever return", said The Guardian.

Tuesday morning's breakthrough paves the way for Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill to become first minister (the first Irish republican to hold the top position), with a DUP member appointed to the less prestigious post of deputy first minister.

'About 10 things that could still go wrong'

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who presided over months of tense negotiations with the DUP aimed at restoring power-sharing, called the move "a welcome and significant step".

But for others in London, Donaldson's statement was viewed with a "touch of caution", reported Politico. "This is obviously good news, but this is only one step and there are about 10 things that could still go wrong," one UK official told the news site. "Put it this way, we were expecting a statement at 10.30pm and it didn't come until nearly 1am. That says something about what the people in the room think about the deal."

What looks to have finally swayed the DUP executive was not the issue of Brexit but rather the damage continued obstruction of democracy was doing to the unionist cause. "We must not allow republicans to perpetuate the myth that Northern Ireland is a failed and ungovernable political entity," Donaldson said, arguing that an empty Stormont fuels republicans' demands for a referendum on unification.

'DUP sellout'

There remains "deep divisions" within unionism, said the Belfast Telegraph. Donaldson's victory, "and possibly his leadership", said The Guardian, will "be tested in the coming days by hardliners who consider the deal a betrayal that will weaken the union, raising the prospect of a party split".

Around 50 protesters waving Union Jacks picketed Monday's meeting with signs reading "Stop DUP Sellout".

Mel Lucas, from the Traditional Unionist Voice party, told the Belfast-based News Letter that Jeffrey "seemed to be very angry in Westminster last week about other unionists holding him to account". 

"But he really needs to be angry with the British government for betraying unionist people and not having the unionist people as equal citizens in the UK," Lucas said.

Another prominent loyalist, Jamie Bryson, appeared to have had sources at the supposedly confidential gathering of the executive, during which he live-tweeted: "There's only one betrayal, and it is of the mandate given to the DUP."

The Irish government has launched legal action against the UK in a bid to reverse a law that provides immunity for Troubles-related offences.

The controversial act, formally known as the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, was introduced by the British government in September despite opposition from politicians in Dublin and Belfast and from the families of victims. 

Ireland has initiated an "interstate" lawsuit against the UK government in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar saying his country had been left with "no option".

The act "effectively prevents prosecutions for serious crimes of soldiers as well as paramilitaries on both sides", said The Telegraph, with the British government giving amnesty for those who cooperate and provide information to an independent commission. It also ends any new inquests or civil actions related to the Troubles.

Ireland's subsequent legal action – which had received "the blessing" of US President Joe Biden – to challenge the bill has "plunged" the two nations into a "bitter diplomatic row", the paper added.

What the papers said

The UK government's position is that any prosecutions over the Troubles are "unlikely to succeed", said the Daily Mail, and an "independent body should be set up instead". 

But Ireland is to argue that the new act is "incompatible with the UK's obligations" under the European Convention on Human Rights, and there is "consensus from both governments and parties in Northern Ireland" to push ahead with legal action.

Critics claim the act "removed access to justice" for victims' families, some of whom have "already taken action against the UK government at Belfast's High Court", said the BBC. But despite victims' groups and the Irish government opposing it "right from its conception", the move to instigate interstate legal action is a "big step", said the BBC's Julian O'Neill, and it "will not have been taken without evaluating political implications". 

The UK government has persistently defended its decision to "legislate unilaterally", said the Financial Times, and has argued that it is "time to be realistic" about pursuing prosecutions. However, some human rights groups have said the law is a "barely concealed attempt to shield soldiers from prosecution". 

The Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, said the lawsuit was "misguided" and the government would "continue robustly to defend the legislation". He added that the Irish government had not made a "concerted or sustained attempt" to pursue prosecutions and it had been "inconsistent" – something "Dublin disputes", said the FT.

The legal action has also sparked "renewed calls by the Right of the Conservative Party" for the UK to "reconsider its membership" of the European Convention on Human Rights, said The Telegraph. That is a response that Rishi Sunak has "tried to stave off while he tries to force through his Rwanda Bill". 

European Research Group chair Mark Francois told the paper the bill had been "exhaustively debated" before being passed and should not be "overturned by an appeal to an activist foreign court".

What next?

A tense legal battle could have significant implications for relations between the UK and Ireland, and the prospect of "consequences for UK-Irish relations cannot be ruled out", said The Independent. 

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson told the BBC that it was difficult to see how the legal case would improve relations between the nations and accused the Irish government of double standards, saying it had "no proposals to deal with the legacy issues".

The UK government is adamant that it will successfully defend the legislation in court, but doubts have been cast over whether the ECHR will agree with its legitimacy. Law professor Kieran McEvoy of Queen's University Belfast told the FT that he could see "no way" and "no chance" that the European court would "find that amnesty to be lawful".

The lawsuit may end up not being necessary, the paper added, as Labour leader Keir Starmer has "vowed to repeal" the law "if the party wins the UK general election expected next year".

The High Court in Belfast is hearing a legal challenge against a controversial new act of parliament that will stop future prosecutions regarding crimes committed during the Troubles. 

When the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill was announced in July 2021, the then prime minister Boris Johnson said it would allow Northern Ireland to "draw a line under the Troubles". 

But the country's main political parties, the Irish government and families of Troubles' victims believe it will only cause further harm.

What does the act say? 

The act, which received royal assent in September, is an "attempt to resolve" the ongoing open investigations into murders committed during the 30 years of conflict between 1968 and 1998, Samantha Twietmeyer, of Queen's University in Ontario, wrote on The Conversation. More than 3,500 people died during that time.

Police investigations into Troubles-related crimes will be transferred to a newly created Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). The legislation will prevent victims' families from seeking further inquests or civil cases.

The ICRIR will also have the power to grant perpetrators immunity from prosecution on the condition they cooperate with the commission's investigations into events under review. 

Why has the legislation proved controversial? 

The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland's Historical Investigations directorate currently has "around 450 Troubles-linked complaints on its books", said The Irish News. "It estimates that it may only be able to report on up to 70 of those by May", when the ICRIR will take over managing investigations.

Hundreds of Troubles victims' families have this month been informed by the ombudsman that the investigations into their cases will be brought to an end before the change comes into effect.

The Council of Europe, which monitors its 46 member states' compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights, has warned that providing immunity from prosecution "risks breaching obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention to prosecute and punish serious grave breaches of human rights". It has "strongly urged" the government to reconsider the condition. 

British military personnel are also "subject to a number of open investigations" in relation to the Troubles, said Twietmeyer on The Conversation. "In simultaneously applying amnesty and closing investigations", the act could "prevent the truth of  government's culpability coming out".

What has the reaction been?

The act has been "strenuously opposed by victims' groups", said The Irish News, and – "in a rare display of unanimity" – by Northern Ireland's main political parties. 

In August, Sinn Féin's deputy leader Michelle O'Neill described Westminster's proposed legislation as a "denial of human rights of victims and their families". Last month, the DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly described the act as an "affront to justice". 

The legislation also faced "significant opposition" in Westminster, and from the Irish government. Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, has said the UK government's plan is "the wrong way to go about dealing with legacy issues in Northern Ireland". But the Conservatives "pressed ahead" with what many considered a "deeply flawed plan", said The Irish News. 

Speaking in the House of Commons in September, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said: "We must be honest about what we can realistically deliver for people in circumstances where the prospects of achieving justice in the traditional sense are so vanishingly small."

What will happen next?

Mr Justice Colton has said that Belfast High Court's "primary focus" during the hearing, which is expected to last five days, will be on the assertion that parts of the act violate the European Convention on Human Rights, said the Belfast Telegraph. The judicial challenge will also examine the creation of the ICRIR, and the end of police investigations, inquests and civil proceedings.

The Irish government has sought legal advice on raising a further judicial challenge against Westminster in the European Court of Human Rights. Should it choose to pursue such action, it "could put a vastly improved bilateral relationship under strain" once again, said the Financial Times.

In January, Labour leader Keir Starmer said that the then draft legislation indicated "how far this Conservative government in recent years has moved from a genuine understanding of the principles of the Good Friday Agreement". 

Hilary Benn, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, said in September that Labour would repeal the legislation if it were to win the next general election. "It would be useful," said The Irish News, "to hear more from Mr Benn about what that will mean in practice."

It was confirmed this week that dissident republicans had obtained reams of sensitive information about the staff of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), following a major data breach.

As a result of a botched response to a Freedom of Information request, the surname, initial, rank or grade and department of 10,000 PSNI employees was briefly published online last week. Chief Constable Simon Byrne warned the data could be used for “intimidating or targeting officers and staff”; and this week information from the breach was posted on a Belfast library wall, along with a threat. The Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, urged them to “exercise maximum vigilance”.

Separately, analysts warned that data stolen in a cyberattack on the Electoral Commission could be used to target voters with disinformation. Data relating to some 40 million people is thought to have been compromised in the cybersecurity breach, which came to light last week, in which hackers gained access to copies of electoral registers containing the names and addresses of all registered UK voters.

What did the papers say?

It is hard to imagine a “more serious data breach” than the leak of PSNI officers’ details, said The Daily Telegraph. A spreadsheet that included officers’ places of work and the identities of staff based with MI5 seems to have been published in response to an innocuous request about the total numbers employed by the organisation. PSNI blamed “human error”, but it seems more systemic than that. Why wasn’t the data more carefully guarded, and encrypted? Why was it so easy to publish it in error? PSNI staff are now in real danger, said the News Letter (Belfast). Republican dissidents have been “trying to kill officers for more than a decade”. This is “a blunder” that should never have happened”.

The threat posed by the hack targeting Britain’s elections watchdog is less immediate, said The Guardian. But it, too, is serious. Blamed on a “hostile actor” such as Russia, the breach happened in August 2021, but was only discovered after an “alarming” 14-month delay. Fortunately, most of the data leaked is publicly available and wouldn’t enable hackers to influence an election, said the Daily Mail. But this breach nonetheless shows that “all our democratic institutions must be constantly on their guard”.

The dark days of the Troubles, during which 302 Royal Ulster Constabulary officers were killed, are mercifully behind us, said Kate Devlin in The Independent. But the threat faced by officers of what is now the PSNI remains all too real: three officers have been killed in the 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed; and in February, an attempt was made on the life of a third, Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, who was critically wounded. PSNI officers are still obliged to check for explosives under their cars, and often keep their occupations a secret from neighbours and even relatives.

Northern Ireland’s terror threat level had already been raised to “severe” before this fiasco, said John Mooney in The Sunday Times – meaning an attack by republican dissidents is “highly likely”. Now that information from the breach has been “shared widely”, the outlook appears worse still. There will be security reviews and office transfers: some officers will have to move house.

It has been clear for a while that the PSNI is no longer “fit for purpose”, said Andrew McQuillan in The Spectator. The force faces a £38m funding gap, its leadership is viewed with suspicion by the rank and file, and public trust in it is low. It won’t be increased by the discovery that the police cannot safely “manage an Excel spreadsheet”.

The Electoral Commission hack could also conceivably have “lethal” consequences, said Edward Lucas in The Times. In that security breach, it seems that foreign spies “ran riot” in its networks for more than a year. “The kneejerk reaction was to blame Russia.” But China may be the more likely culprit. Beijing’s hackers have been “stealing big databases for at least a decade”, and a list of 40 million voters would be very helpful in their efforts to identify British intelligence officers. It could allow them, for example, to search for people who have dropped off the public electoral roll. “Cross-check that with academic records showing who studied Chinese (or Russian or Arabic), and you are well on the way to spotlighting our spooks.”

What’s next?

The PSNI is also investigating a second data breach, in which a spreadsheet naming more than 200 staff was stolen last month. The force could face a “multimillion- pound” class action lawsuit from officers affected by last week’s leak, reports The Mail on Sunday – as well as a substantial fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK data regulator.

Separately, it has emerged that 1,230 people, including witnesses and victims of crime, have had their data leaked by Norfolk and Suffolk police forces. The forces said that the data was erroneously included in Freedom of Information responses, owing to a “technical issue”.

The remains of a miniature dachshund-like dog have been found at what was once the villa of a wealthy family, suggesting that people kept pets during the Roman era. The 1,800-year-old remains, among artefacts recovered from a nature reserve near Oxford, suggest that it was 20cm tall at the shoulder, making it one of the smallest Roman dogs found in Britain, said The Times. “We can’t imagine it being used for anything other than a lap dog,” said Maiya Pina-Dacier, an archaeologist at DigVentures.

‘Haunted’ rocking horse sold

A “haunted” rocking horse that is believed to have moved itself from room to room over the years is going up for sale. The wooden toy is being sold by the great-granddaughter of a medium named Dick Godden, who is said to have used it to help summon spirits. Her great-grandmother told stories to people of leaving the house with the rocking horse on the landing but returning to find it in a completely different room, though no one else was in the house at the time, noted Fox News.

Man bids from drum record

A musician in Northern Ireland tried to reclaim a Guinness World Record by playing the drums for more than 150 hours. Allister Brown, 45, has held the record twice in the past, and was attempting to beat the current record of 134 hours and 5 minutes, which was set by Canadian Steve Gaul in 2015. His bid raised money for NIPANC, a Northern Ireland charity dedicated to pancreatic cancer awareness, and Mind, a mental health charity, noted UPI.

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“It’s quite a feat to leave the viewer feeling simultaneously galvanised, reflective and wrung-out, but the new five-part James Bluemel docuseries ‘Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland’ (BBC Two) manages it,” said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. Bluemel made a celebrated 2020 series about the Iraq War, and here he uses the same technique, allowing “ordinary people” to talk about their own experiences to powerful effect.

Aided by archive footage, the story is told chronologically, and “all sides and viewpoints are represented and carefully calibrated”: so we hear from ex-IRA members and loyalist paramilitaries as well as former British soldiers. It rushes a bit towards the end, but it’s a “stark masterclass in history, memory and emotion”.

“It’s the small things – the human, intimate things – that bring you to tears,” said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman. Particularly moving is the interview with John, a Protestant who recalls being told as a boy that his mother had died in a car crash, only to find out later that she was alive, but had been driven away because she was (unbeknown to him) a Catholic. “His story is unfathomable, but it was the way he smoked that set me off, his body wrapped around his cigarette as if in an embrace.”

The series gets “sidetracked” at points, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times – there’s a “sentimental digression about a record shop in Belfast”, for instance, that we could have done without. Mainly, though, it is brilliant storytelling: ”diligent, unsensational, modest”.

Where to watch: BBC Two/BBC iPlayer

Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland this week to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement has been closely watched by politicians both in Stormont and Westminster.

The Democratic Unionist Party refused to end its power-sharing blockade ahead of the US president’s arrival in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, resulting in a scaled-down visit. Biden had hoped to deliver a speech to members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, but instead made just one brief public appearance in Belfast before travelling south to the Irish Republic.

Biden yesterday met his Irish counterpart, President Michael D. Higgins, before delivering a speech to the parliament in Dublin. The US leader told lawmakers that Westminster “should be working closer with Ireland” to break the deadlock in Stormont.

His call for cooperation has been interpreted as a rebuke to Rishi Sunak that may leave a sour taste in the prime minister’s mouth as Biden’s visit concludes today with a trip to the town of his ancestors, Ballina in County Mayo.

To find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest developments in the news and other global events, put your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week

1. What is the name of the new Covid variant triggering a surge of infections in India?

• Arcturus
• Sirius
• Betelgeuse
• Vega

2. How many mobile phone thefts were reported in London last year?

• 25,000
• 50,000
• 91,000
• 104,000

3. Which new Channel 4 series has provoked almost 1,000 complaints to Ofcom?

• Naked Education
• Naked, Alone and Racing to Get Home
• Naked Attraction
• Naked and Invisible

4. The US and which other country this week launched their largest joint military drills in decades in the South China Sea?

• Taiwan
• Japan
• Philippines
• South Korea

5. What percentage of the UK’s public toilets do experts estimate have closed in the past ten years?

• 18%
• 25%
• 40%
• 50%

6. Researchers have discovered a “hidden chapter” of which religious text?

• The Bible
• The Koran
• The Torah
• The Gita

7. Which icon fashion designer died this week at the age of 93?

• Paco Rabanne
• Mary Quant
• Vivienne Westwood
• Issey Miyake

8. New York City’s new “rat czar” Kathleen Corradi previously worked as what?

• Zookeeper
• School teacher
• Plumber
• Bin collector

9. The risk of lightening strikes delayed this week’s launch of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission, which is due to reach the planet when?

• 2025
• 2027
• 2029
• 2031

10. King Charles’s coronation procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey covers a distance of how much?

• 1.3 miles
• 2.4 miles
• 3.1 miles
• 4.5 miles

1. Arcturus

Omicron subvariant Arcturus was first detected in late January and is being monitored by the World Health Organization as a variant of concern. Cases have been reported in at least 27 countries, including the UK.

2. 91,000

Newly released Metropolitan Police data has revealed that an average of 248 phone thefts a day were reported in 2022 in the English capital. The boroughs with the most thefts were Westminster (25,899), Camden (7,892), Southwark (5,690) and Hackney (4,618).

3. Naked Education

The six-part show, hosted by Anna Richardson, features adults removing their clothes in front of teenagers, sparking criticism from viewers and Conservative MPs.

4. Philippines

More than 17,600 military personnel are taking part in drills including live-fire exercises and a boat-sinking rocket assault, amid fears that China may be preparing to launch an offensive against Taiwan.

5. 50%

Raymond Martin, managing director of the British Toilet Association, told The Guardian that the closure of half of the UK’s public loos in the past decade was resulting in street urination, also known as wild toileting, “everywhere now”.

6. The Bible

The missing section dates back almost 1,500 years and is one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, according to scientists who used ultraviolet photography to find the chapter hidden beneath three layers of text on a manuscript in the Vatican Library.

7. Mary Quant

Fans worldwide have been paying tribute to the British designer, who pioneered the miniskirt. “Only the Beatles are more closely tied to the legend that is London’s swinging 60s than Mary Quant,” said The Guardian.

8. School teacher

Announcing the appointment, Mayor Eric Adams said former elementary school teacher Corradi “has the knowledge, drive, experience and energy to send rats packing and create a cleaner, more welcoming city for all New Yorkers”.

9. 2031

Juice is due to spend at least three years exploring Jupiter and three of its moons. “Perhaps the most exciting information” that the mission will provide relates to the “underground oceans of liquid water” on these moons – Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – which “could support life”, said Mike Sori, assistant professor of planetary science at Purdue University.

10. 1.3 miles

The distance is far less than the nearly 4.5 miles covered in Queen Elizabeth II’s procession in 1953, triggered concerns that well-wishers hoping to line London’s streets to welcome the king may struggle to find space.

A drama about the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement – 25 years ago this month – might sound a dry affair. But Owen McCafferty’s “searing” new play is anything but that, said Jane Coyle in The Irish Times. Agreement is a “compelling political thriller with echoes of Greek drama”, in which the playwright “peels away interlocking layers of compromise, dislike and distrust to reveal a fraught, painstaking journey towards an acceptable solution to a stubbornly intractable problem”. Featuring as characters all the main players – John Hume, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, George Mitchell, Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam – the play unfolds in a circular space, with a single round window to the sky, that becomes a “goldfish bowl of feverish political manoeuvring”.

If you think you might get lost in the finer points of what was at stake during the negotiations, fear not: “Mo Mowlam will helpfully turn to the audience and explain them”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. McCafferty clearly realised that covering the complexities of the three days of talks would be impossible. So his “bustling yet lucid” play rejects “conventional storytelling” and instead “embraces bittiness”. Characters stand at the front of the stage and introduce themselves. Scenes are mostly “secluded tête-à-têtes”, including a “memorable chat between Adams and Trimble at the urinals”. And the staging is inventive and unconventional; at one point there’s an Ethel Merman-style dance routine. It all adds up to a “vivid” tribute to the power of compromise, “outstandingly well-performed”.

This important play has been given a suitably first-rate cast and Charlotte Westenra directs them “superbly”, said Jane Hardy in The Irish News. Rufus Wright is “brilliant”, and often extremely funny, as Blair. Packy Lee is terrific as Adams, torn between the need to represent his nationalist constituency and his desire to make history. Patrick O’Kane is a “tortured, clever” and notably sweary Trimble. And Dan Gordon captures well the humanity of Hume, the calm voice of moderate nationalism.

Lyric Theatre, Belfast (028-9592 2672). Until 22 April; lyrictheatre.co.uk

Rishi Sunak has hailed his Brexit deal with the EU as a “new way forward”, claiming the so-called “Windsor framework” unveiled yesterday represents a “decisive breakthrough” on the rules governing trade in Northern Ireland.

The widely expected backlash from Tory Eurosceptics has so far “failed to materialise”, said The Telegraph, with even Steve Baker, a diehard Brexiteer and member of the hardline European Research Group of Tory MPs, congratulating Sunak and claiming: “He’s done it.”

But does this deal really represent the end of seven long years of negotiations between the UK and EU and the promise made by multiple prime ministers during that time to “get Brexit done”?

What did the papers say?

“Yes, there may still be a devil in the details,” said The Sun, “but his new deal on Northern Ireland looks a big win.”

The paper congratulated Sunak, adding that “he may just have got Brexit done at last”.

Asking whether the deal represented a “light at the end of the (now-infamous) tunnel”, Politico said: “There are hopes stretching from the press pack of political journalists to Conservatives scarred from the Brexit battles of the past half decade that within a few weeks Westminster will never have to talk about ongoing Brexit negotiations again. Maybe.”

“We’ve been here before,” warned John Crace in The Guardian. First there was Theresa May’s Chequers agreement, then Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready” deal. Now Rishi Sunak’s Windsor framework, “the likeliest contender yet”, he said. “Not least because everyone is so fed up with Brexit – no one wants reminding of what a disaster it has been – that even the hardest of hardliners can’t be bothered to oppose it.”

The Windsor framework is “an acknowledgement of a central reality of Brexit”, said BBC political editor Chris Mason. “Northern Ireland continues to have a different relationship with the EU than the rest of the UK and for as long as governments at Westminster say ‘no’ to closer economic ties with Brussels, that different relationship is guaranteed.

“It is a relationship destined to be bespoke, challenging and awkward – juggling a project about borders, Brexit, with an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic,” he said. “While many in Northern Ireland are comfortable with that, some unionists will probably never be.”

What next?

No. 10 will now wait for the all-important backing for the deal from the Democratic Unionist Party. Sunak has said he is “confident” his new arrangement addresses the DUP’s concerns as he travelled to Belfast this morning to sell it to the people of Northern Ireland.

Reports in The Irish News that the DUP is expected to back the deal and return to power sharing at Stormont were quickly shot down by party leader Jeffrey Donaldson. He has said that his party will not be rushed into making a final decision on whether to support or oppose the deal – “we will take our time” – but he did hail “significant progress” yesterday.

Nevertheless, the mood music appears, for now, to be overwhelmingly positive. Paul Waugh, chief political commentator for the i newspaper, said the deal announced yesterday prompted “the biggest outbreak of UK-EU harmony since the Leave vote seven long years ago”.

US President Joe Biden, meanwhile, described it as “an essential step”, raising the prospect he could make a historic visit to Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in a few months.

The deal could also have serious political implications for the prime minister. If the DUP eventually approves this deal, “Sunak will be able to boast that not only is he a better dealmaker than Johnson, he is a better guarantor of the Union than the man who effectively threw Unionists under a bus for his own ends”, said Waugh.

If finally ending the Conservatives’ long love affair with Johnson is not enough, “the bigger prize for the PM is that this breakthrough can revive his own premiership, but that’s a much tougher ask”, he added.

“Rishi Sunak has so far been a disappointing prime minister but if he pulls off this Brexit breakthrough on Northern Ireland, he will be more than a caretaker for a government limping to the end of its days,” said Alice Thomson in The Times. “He will have given his party back some dignity and made them look more credible, constructive and competent after an atrocious 2022 in which it mislaid two prime ministers.”

Ultimately when assessing the future of Brexit, though, the Windsor framework can be celebrated as “an agreement which redresses some of the most egregious imbalances in the original protocol”, said UnHerd political editor Tom McTague. But it essentially deems Northern Ireland as “both a source of permanent tension – and a kind of permanent forced friendship”.

“The solution Britain and the EU have arrived at does not mean Brexit is done,” said McTague. “It means both sides have agreed it never can be.”

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has agreed a new “Windsor framework” Brexit deal with the European Union over trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.

Sunak met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor on Monday and held a press conference to announce their agreement, which the prime minister said marked a “new chapter” in UK-EU relations.

The hope on both sides is that the deal will settle the long-running dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The UK government has sought to change the original protocol negotiated by Boris Johnson in 2019, arguing that since the UK left the single market in 2021, it has created unacceptable economic barriers in trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

“Nobody will get everything they want but everybody will get something,” a source close to the negotiations told the Daily Express. “The issue will be whether it is enough for people to grudgingly accept it or not.”

“Big chunks” of the deal had “already spilled out through unofficial channels”, said the BBC, and Sunak will face an enormous political challenge in getting Northern Ireland’s largest unionist party, the DUP, to back it.

While the agreement is yet to be published in full, here are five key points the deal is hoping to address.

Frictionless trade between GB and Northern Ireland

The first element of Sunak’s deal is “designed to tackle the most practical and obviously disruptive element of the Northern Ireland protocol”, namely that it has effectively created a customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reported The Times.

To address this issue, Sunak plans to introduce a “trusted trader scheme” that allows businesses to avoid all checks when moving goods from mainland UK to Northern Ireland, said the paper. Businesses will need to declare whether the goods are for sale in Northern Ireland or then being exported on to the Republic of Ireland.

Those sending goods to Northern Ireland will use a “green lane” system, while those exporting onwards will go through a “red lane” with full EU customs clearance in Northern Irish ports. Sunak said that “burdensome customs bureaucracy will be scrapped” for green-lane goods and that the deal has “removed any sense of a border in the Irish Sea”.

Northern Ireland’s place in the UK

The second element of the deal aims to address the issues within the Northern Ireland Protocol, which restrict Westminster from legislating on some Northern Irish matters.

Under the current agreement, Northern Ireland must follow EU single market rules on VAT, state aid and alcohol duty. Sunak has now said that under the new deal UK VAT and excise changes will apply in Northern Ireland. This means “British products such as trees, plants and seed potatoes will be available in NI and pet travel requirements have been removed”, said Sky News.

A “landmark” settlement on medicines also means drugs approved for use by the UK regulator will be available in Northern Ireland.

European Court of Justice jurisdiction

The protocol negotiated by Johnson meant that Northern Ireland would accept all future EU laws and regulations and be under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), a state of affairs that was “hugely problematic” for arch-Brexiteers and for unionists, including those in the DUP, “who prize Northern Ireland’s place in the UK above all”, said The Times.

A new “Stormont brake” will allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to pull an “emergency brake” on changes to EU single market rules that might apply to the region, Sunak announced. He said it will help correct “the democratic deficit” and provide “reassurance to everyone in Northern Ireland that they are in control of their own destiny”.

Getting the DUP onside

Sunak still faces the “daunting task” of selling the deal to the DUP, who have said they will not back it unless it met its “red lines” – the “seven tests” that the party outlined in July 2021, said The Guardian.

The DUP said it will only give a verdict on the deal once it has read the final and full text. It has left Downing Street “braced for a response that is at best suspicious and potentially hostile”. The unionist party warned over the weekend that an insufficient deal could leave Stormont in a “permanent state of collapse if they refuse to re-enter power-sharing”, said The Telegraph.

The problem for the DUP is that “accepting that Sunak has reached a good deal” will lead to them having to “restore power-sharing and facilitate the first Sinn Féin first minister”, said the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush.

“So my underlying assumption is that whatever Sunak agrees will not be good enough for the DUP, or the Tories,” he added. “Some of the Conservative party’s Brexit ultras will take their lead from the DUP, while others just want an excuse to do harm to Sunak politically.”

Johnson waiting in the wings

The new deal is one designed to effectively scrap Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which gave the UK government powers in domestic law to unilaterally override the Brexit treaty with the EU.

Sunak believes his deal has “fixed fundamental legal changes that render the Bill no longer necessary as a bargaining chip”, reported The Telegraph.

But the i news site said that Johnson may be planning to make a “constructive” intervention shortly, in which he makes clear he believes Sunak should press ahead with the legislation, which Sunak has temporarily paused.

But any such intervention would undoubtedly be seen as an attempt to “undermine” Sunak, said the paper, and even as “a ploy to return as PM himself”.

Rishi Sunak is trying to avoid becoming yet another prime minister undone by the seemingly impossible problem of Brexit and Northern Ireland.

As negotiations continue over a solution to the Northern Ireland Protocol, “senior Brexiteers within government will come under intense pressure from hardline colleagues to take a stand if Sunak’s deal fails to win the all-important support of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland”, Politico reported.

With the DUP once again holding both Westminster and the devolved assembly hostage, the ongoing stand-off and potentially permanent collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland has led some to suggest it is the Good Friday Agreement itself that needs reforming.

What did the papers say?

Sunak’s “Brexit dilemma” is that “he needs to reach an agreement with the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol, as well as restoring the Northern Ireland executive”, said The New Statesman.

The problem is that the Good Friday Agreement hands a veto over the executive to the largest nationalist and unionist parties, meaning one side can effectively hold the assembly to ransom indefinitely – as has been the case for the past year with the DUP boycotting the executive in protest over the protocol’s terms.

Emma de Souza, writing in the Irish Examiner, said the DUP’s “undemocratic actions” show that “public and good governance are second to the demands and agenda of a political party that has been gifted the power to pull down the government at its every whim”.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the former Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis wrote in The Telegraph of the need to “be honest about the fact that it was a brilliant framework for peace but is proving a poor foundation for effective government”.

Lewis points to the fact that under the current terms of the agreement the non-sectarian Alliance Party, which has seen its support surge in recent years, could never have the right to nominate the first or deputy first minister, even if it were to become the largest party at Stormont.

“Democracy cannot succeed when it is set in tram lines that can never cross,” he said, adding it was “time for us to confront difficult questions about whether the electoral system in Northern Ireland properly reflects the people and communities it is designed to serve”.

Former PM John Major, who did much to lay the groundwork for the Good Friday Agreement in the 1990s, agreed when addressing the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee earlier this month.

He suggested that with the core unionist and nationalist parties less dominant than they once were, the agreement may need to be changed to prevent one party from collapsing the executive. One idea aimed at breaking the current impasse suggested by the chair of the Northern Ireland Committee, Simon Hoare, was for the government to hand power to the next largest unionist party.

What next?

With polls suggesting a majority of unionists would vote against the Good Friday Agreement if a referendum were held today, “this is not on the cards for the moment”, said The New Statesman.

“Any change must be agreed by the UK and Irish governments, and the former has said it isn’t interested,” the magazine added. But if the government is unable to get the DUP back into the executive “then calls to revise the agreement could grow”.

“Those who profess to support the Good Friday Agreement should not be calling for the DUP to be ignored, but the opposite,” argued UnHerd’s political editor Tom McTague.

The deal now being negotiated between Britain and the EU “may be the last best hope of saving power-sharing in Northern Ireland this side of a Labour government”, he said, “but unless it can win the consent of both communities it will not end the crisis because, in the end, it is a political crisis of consent, not a technocratic one of management”.

For the time being these larger constitutional questions “must wait”, said Lewis in The Telegraph. “It is difficult to see how we can dedicate efforts to those challenging conversations when the key issue at the heart of Stormont’s current impasse remains.”

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.

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”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks ready to agree to a new Brexit deal with the European Union, ending the dispute over Northern Ireland.

Sunak is yet to sign the final agreement, said The Times, but an outline of the plans could be announced in the coming weeks. The government said it was still “engaging in intensive scoping talks with the EU” on customs in Northern Ireland, but the paper added that the EU has now agreed to “avoid the need for routine checks on products” destined for the region, paving the way to a deal.

The UK meanwhile has agreed that “the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will remain the ultimate arbiter of any protocol disputes”, said The Independent, but there will be a “stronger role for Northern Irish courts”.

The proposed deal, modelled on the UK’s plan “for a ‘green’ lane” of goods to Northern Ireland, risks inflaming Brexit tensions within the Tory party and presents the prime minister with an uphill battle in convincing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to sign up.

What did the papers say?

Sunak has had the “Northern Ireland Brexit deal on his desk for over a week”, said The Times, with his team “acutely aware of the need to manage the messaging surrounding any announcement” to convince the DUP and the hard Brexiteers in the European Research Group (ERG). Brussels however, remained “concerned” about the delays in signing off the agreement.

However, the prime minister is aiming to “swerve a Commons confrontation with hardline Brexiters”, with the plan “unlikely to necessitate a formal vote in parliament”, said The Guardian.

Sunak remains “under pressure from a divided Tory party”, said The Independent, with Eurosceptics pushing for him to hold off on the deal and others willing him to compromise.

One of the biggest challenges to a making new deal possible could come from the ERG, but The Guardian reports that if the two former organisers of the group, Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, who now work in the Northern Ireland Office, back the deal then “it would be difficult for the group to mount a protest big enough to damage Sunak”.

But the ERG has said it “is ‘in lockstep’ with the Unionists” that there is a need to “eliminate all border checks and remove EU law from the province”, said The Telegraph. It said a source insisted the DUP “will not ‘go wobbly’” and cave to the government’s new deal if it didn’t meet their requirements. Members of ERG also remain “unhappy at the prospect of any role for the ECJ”, said The Independent.

Brexit tensions were already heightened within the Tory party before news of the proposed deal. Tory Brexit supporters “reacted with anger” to the news that a cross-party conference on the “shortcomings of the UK’s departure from the EU” took place between high-ranking members of government and opposition, including Michael Gove, at Ditchley Park, said the i news site.

Brexit supporters have accused it of being an “attempt to weaken the Brexit deal”. Former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith told the i news site it was “diverting attention” away from dealing with the issues around the Northern Ireland Protocol.

What next?

The Ditchley Park summit came with “unhelpful timing for the prime minister”, wrote Katy Balls in The Spectator, even if it does not directly “impact Brexit in a meaningful way”. However, it shows that senior figures are becoming “more vocal” in their views on “Brexit’s shortcomings”.

Those on the right of the Tory party remain on “high alert” as Sunak prepares to agree his Northern Ireland deal, wary of indications that the government is “going back on its Brexit promises and agreeing to a compromise too far”.

Those on both sides though must face the “political reality” that the public is “increasingly disillusioned with Brexit”, said The New Statesman, as well as the “economic reality” that the “UK’s malaise has been deepened” by it. For the foreseeable future “the best option is for Remainers and Leavers alike to try to make Brexit work”.

A closer relationship with EU “is possible to envisage” in the long term, wrote David Hayward at the independent research group UK in a Changing Europe, but it requires “the necessary ‘political space’” not afforded by the Tories or Labour currently. He warns, however, that “supporters and opponents of the Brexit status quo” should take the current polling that “a clear majority remains dissatisfied with Brexit” very seriously.

February will mark two years since the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) brought down Stormont's power-sharing government in protest over post-Brexit trade checks between Britain and Northern Ireland.

The nation's next deadline for forming a government is looming, with early assembly elections on the cards if an executive is not formed by 18 January.

But this ultimatum will "more than likely be ignored" by Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, said ITV News, particularly given it coincides with the biggest ever strike by public sector workers. 

Heaton-Harris has already "pushed back this deadline several times via emergency legislation", said the BBC, and may well do so again.

Will there be more talks ahead of the deadline?

The DUP has insisted talks with the government over the Windsor framework – a UK/EU agreement that addresses concerns over the Northern Ireland protocol – will continue this week despite the apparent collapse of talks before Christmas. 

But in December, the Northern Ireland secretary said talks to restore power-sharing were over, adding it was "now time for decisions". This referred to the £3.3 billion package the government has offered in return for the restoration of the executive at Stormont.

Earlier this week, Sinn Féin, Northern Ireland's largest political party, called the talks a "charade" and accused Downing Street of "facilitating" them for "far too long" with no conclusion, said the BBC.

Can a breakthrough be achieved?

There is hope the stalemate could be broken. The "increasing public pressure" and threat of "mass strikes" could see the executive "restored in the new year", said the Belfast Telegraph in December, with unnamed DUP sources suggesting to the paper that it was "inevitable".

Publicly, however, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has said the government's current offer is not a "sound basis" for reforming the executive and said the £3.3 billion offer did not include "the recurrent aspect of that public sector pay award" for next year's Stormont budget – despite the UK government's offer including almost £600 million for a public sector pay deal. 

While Northern Ireland's other parties appear to have accepted that the UK has "made a final offer and the time for talking was exhausted", the DUP still appears to be in "haggle mode". The party is seeking more stringent legal assurances from Westminster over Northern Ireland's place within the UK internal market, said Politico in December.

Northern Ireland's political leaders have "accused Donaldson of refusing to accept political reality" and preventing the £584 million "financial injection" to the public sector, the news site added. 

"This is starting to feel a bit like a bad break-up, where one person has listed themselves on Facebook as single and the other one is still claiming: 'It's complicated'," said former justice minister and Alliance Party leader Naomi Long at the end of December's failed negotiations. "These talks are over."

Will the strikes force the DUP to act?

The legislative deadline for re-establishing Stormont's power-sharing government coincides with Northern Ireland's biggest ever strikes, as thousands of civil servants, health and education staff take action over pay and conditions. 

The strike may "increase pressure" on the DUP to end its block on power-sharing, while the Northern Ireland secretary will also come under pressure to resolve the dispute in the absence of a Stormont executive, said the BBC.

But Heaton-Harris has said the matter is for local ministers to resolve and said pay claims could be settled with the £584 million package on offer for the public sector in the event of a Stormont return.

Assuming the assembly election deadline is pushed back as expected, parties in Stormont will "already be preparing for a Westminster election" that is expected later this year. But a failure to restore the devolved government this year will "raise the question: What is the alternative?"

In August, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called for a "Plan B" if Stormont was not restored, urging the UK and Irish governments to "work hand-in-glove and apply both pressure and support – in a coordinated way" to restore power-sharing.

Should Stormont be restored, Sinn Féin's vice-president, Michelle O'Neill, is set to become Northern Ireland's first minister. It will be the first time an Irish republican has ever held the role in the Northern Ireland executive.

Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time in what has been described as a “hugely significant and historic moment”.

Results from the 2021 census released yesterday showed that 45.7% of Northern Ireland’s population are Catholic or from a Catholic background, compared with 43.5% from Protestant or other Christian backgrounds.

The census was carried out 100 years after Ireland was partitioned to create a Protestant region in the north committed to union with the UK. At the time of partition, Protestants made up about two-thirds of the population of Northern Ireland and it was expected that they would always constitute the majority.

Therefore, said The Guardian, the new census will “deliver a psychological hit to unionists”, who for decades have relied on a “supposedly impregnable Protestant majority to safeguard Northern Ireland’s position in the UK”.

The “demographic tilt”, as the paper described it, was expected, with higher birth rates among Catholics – who tend to identify as “Irish” while Protestants tend to think of themselves as “British” – closing the gap. In the census, the percentage of people who said they only identified as British sank from about 40% in 2011 (the date of the last census) to 32% in 2021, while those who said they were just Irish increased from 25% to 29%.

Noting that the results come soon after the elections in May in which the nationalist group Sinn Féin became the largest party in Northern Ireland for the first time, the FT said the census “could increase calls for a referendum on the region’s constitutional future”.

The Irish Times agreed that the census results are likely to “fire up those pushing for a united Ireland poll and dishearten an already insecure unionist population”.

Enda McClafferty, the BBC’s Northern Ireland political editor, described the census results as a “hugely significant and historic moment”, adding that “those pushing for a border poll and united Ireland” would be “energised” by the figures.

But Irish unity may take a back seat as the region tackles the cost-of-living crisis. Before May’s assembly election, the deputy leader of Sinn Féin, Michelle O’Neill, said that people in Northern Ireland were not “waking up” thinking about Irish unity but rather “the pressure they feel right now” over rising prices.

Charles III has become the first British king in almost 80 years to visit Northern Ireland as he embarked on the next leg of his royal tour of the home nations.

The King and Queen Consort visited Hillsborough Castle, the monarch’s official residence in Northern Ireland, where they met new Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris and Sinn Féin First Minister-designate Michelle O’Neill, before receiving a message of condolence led by the speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly. They were then due to travel onwards to Belfast, for a memorial service for the life of the Queen in the Church of Ireland St Anne’s Cathedral.

The King is not a stranger to the region, with his arrival in Northern Ireland marking his 40th visit, “but [it is] his first as monarch and the first time a British king has visited in almost 80 years”, said The Daily Telegraph.

Nevertheless, with Sinn Féin now the largest party in Northern Ireland’s assembly, commemorations for the Queen “put into sharp focus the rapid evolution of Irish republican politics” and its relationship to the crown over the past decade, said Politico.

What did the papers say?

As a “potent symbol of the union”, the Queen became a “major force” for reconciliation with Irish nationalists when she made a state visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011, the first monarch to do so in “almost century of independence” from Britain, said Reuters.

The monarch made “two striking gestures on that trip” that “transformed her relationship with Ireland”. The first was laying a wreath alongside the then Irish president, Mary McAleese, in honour of the Irish people killed while fighting for independence from Britain. The Queen then spoke a few words in Irish in her address at Dublin Castle, greeting her audience of Irish politicians and diplomats with: “A Uachtaráin agus a chairde (President and friends)”.

The state visit was widely touted as a “triumph”, which proved the “power of a mostly symbolic role” can nevertheless produce “measurable results”, said The Sunday Times. And Sinn Féin has since sought to “build on that moment” – despite initially boycotting the visit – which began a “transformation” of its relationship with the monarchy.

This was perhaps most memorably symbolised by a “four-second handshake” that took place between the Queen and former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, then Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland, in 2012, said the BBC.

What next for UK-Ireland relations?

With Sinn Féin now Northern Ireland’s largest party and effectively a government-in-waiting, it finds itself a party seeking to “mirror the sombre public mood” in the wake of the Queen’s death, said The Guardian.

The BBC added that Michelle O’Neill had “typified” her party’s new relationship with the monarchy when, “dressed in black, she reflected on the Queen’s contribution to peace and reconciliation”, before she led tributes to the Queen in the assembly chamber where she described the late monarch as “courageous and gracious”.

O’Neill has since further underlined her party’s willingness to build on the reconciliation process with the new monarch, telling reporters she looked forward to working with King Charles III as she signed a book of condolence at Belfast City Hall yesterday. “I’m sure that he will carry on the legacy of building relationships between our two islands,” she said.

The simple fact that the party “has to remind the public where the boundaries are reflects how far its relationship with the Royals has travelled,” said Enda McClafferty, the BBC’s Northern Ireland editor, with the party choosing to replace royal boycotts with “a maturing relationship with the monarchy”.

Nevertheless, as a republican party, Sinn Féin’s “ultimate aim is taking Northern Ireland out of King Charles’s realm”, said Chris Page, the BBC’s Ireland correspondent. Should there come a referendum on Irish unity, “the King will not be able to express an opinion”. But his decision to visit Northern Ireland and the other devolved home nations of the UK “will be seen as demonstrating his commitment to the union”, said Page.

The new King is hardly a stranger to Northern Ireland’s finely balanced political dynamics, said The Guardian, noting that during his time as Prince of Wales he made many visits to the region, where he sought to “reassure unionists that they were a cherished part of the UK while reaching out to republicans”, even shaking hands with alleged former IRA member and one-time Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams in 2015.

It is a role the Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin was keen to highlight as he told the broadcaster that the Queen’s death was a reminder to the UK and Ireland that they need to “proactively nurture” the relationship between the two nations.

The Taoiseach also “pointed out” that the Royal Family “had suffered their own hurt with the killing of Lord Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle, in an IRA bombing”, said the BBC.

“All of that has helped the cause of reconciliation – the basic idea we have a lot in common now,” said Martin.

Political leaders and media outlets around the world have been paying tribute to Queen Elizabeth II, who died yesterday at the age of 96.

After reigning for 70 years, Her Majesty died peacefully on Thursday afternoon at Balmoral, her Scottish estate, where she had spent much of the summer.

Newspapers and broadcasters in the UK have been providing blanket coverage of the story, but it is also being followed across the world, not least because of the Queen’s extensive travels during her remarkable reign.

UK’s ‘biggest strength’

“Queen Elizabeth II rarely had a misstep,” said the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper, recalling that “she would tell Canadians she was happy to be ‘coming home’”. It added that “her endurance has been her greatest gift to Canadians and her passing a great sadness, but hopefully for many Canadians, it will not be the end of the story about Canada and the Crown”.

Her long reign “straddled two centuries of seismic social, political and technological upheaval”, said The East African, as “the last vestiges of Britain’s vast empire crumbled”, “Brexit shook the foundations of her kingdom, and her family endured a series of scandals”. But “throughout, she remained consistently popular”, it said.

The UK “has lost its biggest strength – the glue that for so long has bound together the union – just as it is trying to define its place in the world for the decades ahead”, said The Sydney Morning Herald. The Australian paper noted that “in many parts of the Commonwealth, demands are mounting for a re-evaluation of Britain’s colonial past, for apology and atonement”.

The New Zealand Herald said that the island nation will now “move into a state of national mourning”. It noted that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had discovered the Queen had died when she was “woken by a police officer shining a torch into her room at 4.50am”.

An ‘unemotional sovereign’

In France, Le Monde said that the Queen was “revered by the British public” and “the unemotional sovereign who left a lasting imprint on the monarchy”. Le Parisien described the Queen as the “cement, the reassuring figure who embodied the unity of the kingdom”.

German broadcaster DW said that the Queen was “particularly partial to Germany and visited it more often than almost any other country”. It said that the monarch was “marvelled at, criticised, occasionally mocked, but always respected”.

According to The Irish Times, the monarch’s death is an “earthquake” for Northern Ireland’s unionists, a century on from the formation of the province.

“To lose her just as a humiliating centenary year is limping to its end, with the last UK prime minister ostentatiously disregarding them, and Irish nationalists and republicans getting more confident by the day, is just a disaster.”

‘But never Israel’

“Britain prepares for a new era after the Queen’s death,” said The New York Times, recalling that she was “unshakably committed to the rituals of her role amid epic social and economic change and family scandal”.

The New York Post talked about her relations with the US, noting that she “ultimately rubbed shoulders with 13 US presidents, starting with Herbert Hoover”.

In Israel, the Jerusalem Post pointed out that during her 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth “travelled widely and visited many countries” including Jordan, Egypt and others in the Middle East and North Africa – “but never Israel”.

“Her majesty and the Kingdom are a fabric of Iraq’s history,” said Iraqi News, adding that Iraq has a “long and complicated history with the United Kingdom”.

The state-owned Russian news agency Tass recalled that when the Queen met with the first person in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, she was “easy-mannered and informal during the meeting and did not stick to the strict protocol.

“When Gagarin ate a piece of lemon out of his cup of tea in breach of the protocol, the Queen supported him by following the suit,” it said.

With Tory leadership hopefuls jostling to position themselves on a range of policies, the issue of Brexit has once again emerged as a key dividing line.

Far from having “got Brexit done”, with controversial legislation to unilaterally tear up parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol set to go before MPs in the autumn, “it will fall to the next Prime Minister to decide how far it will go”, said the Belfast Telegraph.

Despite past differences of opinion, most contenders have come out in support of rewriting the protocol, including those the Daily Express called “Remain-backing moderate candidates” like Jeremy Hunt and Tom Tugendhat, who have both already vowed to press ahead with the bill.

Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge that the next prime minister must be a firm believer in Brexit and committed to tearing up the protocol.

Attorney General Suella Braverman said she would go further and take Britain completely out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The long-standing international convention meant to shield human rights and political freedoms in Europe has become a lightning rod for Eurosceptics since the European court blocked the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Now Braverman has sought to make withdrawal the next dividing line over Europe, with the i news site reporting she has challenged her rivals to do the same.

The problem is that, six years after the Brexit referendum, “it isn’t clear what our government wants to make of leaving the EU”, said Paul Goodman on ConservativeHome.

Bluster over the protocol and ECHR amid attempts to burnish their Brexit credentials for Tory members means candidates fail to answer the crucial question: “How will you make Brexit work?”, said Sean O’Grady for The Independent.

This includes weighing up the risk of retaliation from the EU for tearing up the protocol, which could lead to a devastating trade war in the middle of a cost-of living crisis and candidates' support for the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, including clauses on a level playing field on environmental standards, workers’ rights, competition policy, subsidy control, state-owned enterprises and climate change, which leads to “questions about those elusive ‘Brexit opportunities’”, said O’Grady.

“Better sharp questions than ecstatic cheers as a candidate tears up the Northern Ireland Protocol on stage. And louder cheers yet when a second one eats it. And louder cheers still when a third sets fire to it,” Goodman concluded.

What about Labour?

If Boris Johnson’s Brexit legacy looks safe under the next Tory leader, the same could be said of a future Labour government.

Last week, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer sought to draw a line under his party’s own Brexit melodrama by ruling out a return to either the EU’s customs union or single market.

“Laying out detailed plans to improve, not scrap, the deal Boris Johnson struck with the EU,” the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, confirmed the party would seek only limited changes and would not seek to rejoin the single market, which would bring the return of free trade and free movement of people, “in a move it concedes will enrage remain supporters”, said The Guardian.

“No doubt there are cynical party-political calculations behind Starmer’s volte-face,” said James Heartfield in Spiked.

“In a way, however, this is to be welcomed. The nation faces many challenges now. That means we need to be able to debate what direction the country should take in the months and years to come, without endlessly trying to re-litigate the EU referendum. It’s time to get on with it,” he concluded.

1. Scrapping the NI protocol is just the start. Johnson’s trade wars are Trumpism in action

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian

on populist policies

Britain’s foreign policy is “at the mercy of Boris Johnson’s reckless quest for survival”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Every trip abroad “is treated as a photo opportunity” as he promotes “the most intense economic disruption” in Europe’s peacetime history, Jenkins says. An “absurd ‘bromance’ is even staged” with Emmanuel Macron; “never was machismo so synthetic”. Yesterday’s vote on a bill that would permit the scrapping of the Northern Ireland Protocol “was a classic”, being “motivated by a desire to appease the province’s fast-disintegrating Unionist majority”. Johnson’s suggestions for “a ‘soft’ border with Ireland are actually quite sensible. But Downing Street’s three years of anti-EU rhetoric have exhausted any wish in Brussels to be co-operative.” The prime minister is “set on” a trade policy that is “not Toryism but Trumpism”. As a “populist” leader, Johnson “measures success in biceps rather than brain power”. This, says Jenkins, “is not democratic government”.

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2. Cutting literature degrees is cultural vandalism

Melanie Phillips in The Times

on concerns about courses

Sheffield Hallam University has suspended its English literature course due to graduates’ difficulties in securing high-earning jobs. The news “follows a threat by the Office for Students” that universities face penalties for courses with low rates of graduate employment, writes Melanie Phillips in The Times. When this writer studied English, she assumed it would equip her “for nothing practical and everything that mattered”. Studying literature “was in essence a moral project”. Vocational skills are “vitally important”, says Phillips. “Britain has always shamefully neglected them, largely through its identification of social status with a university degree.” Phillips says it was “snobbishness, masquerading as a drive to improve social mobility” that led to polytechnics becoming universities, with “the doubly unfortunate result” of reducing high-value vocational course numbers and lowering the standards of degrees to accommodate many students “unsuited to academic study”. Sheffield Hallam’s decision may be “cultural vandalism”, she concludes, but universities “have already long vandalised themselves”.

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3. Questioning Nato relevance is misguided and dangerous

Tom Røseth and John Weaver at The Hill

on international allies

Nato leaders are gathering in Madrid this week for the alliance’s annual summit. “Despite its longevity and success – or perhaps because of it – many people question NATO’s relevance today,” write associate professors Tom Røseth and John Weaver at The Hill. Some have even called for the US to withdraw from the alliance. “These attitudes are misguided and dangerous,” the writers say. Nato is “not only still relevant” to its members, “it’s necessary”. It has been “a key pillar in the fight” against Islamic State, and the alliance “came to the aid” of America following 9/11. Today, Nato’s contributions of weapons and training to Ukrainian forces “have been a testament” to its “resolve”. Nato’s allies “would be better served by using the summit as a means to strengthen their purpose”, particularly given the “shifting” geopolitical landscape. And allowing Finland and Sweden membership would “send a strong message to other would-be aggressors, that NATO is alive and well”.

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4. Our Auntie BBC loves all 150 genders… but not the over-60s

Clemmie Moodie in The Sun

on audience demographics

The BBC is “the most inclusive state broadcaster in the world”, says Clemmie Moodie in The Sun. China’s citizens “would kill for such diversity”. The Beeb recently hired non-binary inclusion consultants “to teach staff there are at least 150 different genders”. Staff “are being urged to declare their pronouns on emails with a list which has expanded to include newly invented ones such as ‘xe, xem, xyrs.’ Really,” says Moodie. “So far, so ‘inclusive’… unless, that is, you’re edging towards a bus pass”, in which case “watch ya back, you senile, lumbering ol’ lump of lard!” The BBC “goes all-out to be all-things to all-people” but “the one demographic it appears to despise is the very one it should be nurturing”. DJ Tony Blackburn has “hinted at ageism” after his Radio 2 show was moved from a Friday to a Sunday, and learning that “some employers were not considering over-55s for jobs”. Moodie says that “woke Aunty needs to start rewarding” audiences’ loyalty – “quickly”.

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5. Keir Starmer’s stance on the strikes is a betrayal of the people who need Labour

Simon Fletcher in The New Statesman

on political positioning

“Keir Starmer’s handling of the rail strikes has taken a wrong turn,” writes Simon Fletcher, a former adviser to the Labour leader, in The New Statesman. A “monumental battle is underway” over incomes and “plummeting” living standards. Labour “cannot afford to stand on the sidelines”. When rail strikes were announced, the party’s transport team started out with a “creditable” position – that the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps should “take responsibility for the dispute”. That “shifted”. Starmer said he was “against the strikes”, and instructed frontbenchers “to stay away from picket lines”. Political management, says Fletcher, “is not just ordering people about”. And “a public bunfight between the party, the unions, the left, the party’s membership” and Labour voters is “what the Conservatives want”. These “new and extreme” economic times “demand a new political approach”. Just as the government “is not neutral over the strikes, neither should Labour be”. The party “has a rare opportunity to forge a new consensus” and unite “everyone who needs an alternative”.

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1. Macron’s nightmare is complete

Jonathan Miller in The Spectator

on new coalitions

The results of the French parliamentary elections have been “much worse” for Emmanuel Macron than “almost anyone anticipated”, writes Jonathan Miller in The Spectator. The French president “has been humiliated by voters, weeks after being re-elected by an unenthusiastic electorate”, he says. “The hyper-president with ambitions to lead Europe looks like he will not even be able to lead France,” and the country “looks more ungovernable than ever”. Having lost his parliamentary majority, Macron “must now hope to create ad hoc” coalitions to pass reforms, “but he has few allies and will pay a high price”. And he “is not only incapable of uniting the country, he bears heavy responsibility for dividing it” too. Macron “commands little to no affection” and is now “doomed to preside over escalating chaos” as France faces cost-of-living, law and order and energy crises.

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2. I’m a trans athlete too – banning swimmers like Lia Thomas completely misses the point

Kylie MacFarquharson in The Independent

on questions of fairness

Fina, swimming’s world governing body, has voted to ban transgender women from elite women’s competitions. People who support the move “sometimes argue that segregation between trans and cisgender women in sports is regrettable, but necessary for fairness”, writes Kylie MacFarquharson in The Independent. They think the performance gap “is so large” that a cisgender woman would “be unlikely to ever win against a trans woman”, a sentiment MacFarquharson would “entirely agree with” if it were “true”. Evidence for trans women’s sporting performance “is sparse at best”, and this writer thinks it “ironic” that people often point to Lia Thomas as an example to “justify their position” given her recent results. Thomas did indeed win the NCAA 500 yard freestyle finals in Atlanta in March “but she didn’t set any records”. This policy “creates a situation where trans women are allowed to compete in name only; never fairly”, and “we can do better”.

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3. I negotiated a Northern Ireland deal that worked. Johnson’s Putinesque strategy will wreck it

Peter Hain in The Guardian

on political motivations

Peter Hain thinks there is “something Putinesque about the government’s framing of its Northern Ireland protocol bill”. Writing in The Guardian, the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland says: “Never mind that it breaks an international treaty the UK signed. Forget very old-fashioned notions of truth.” The “real purpose” of this bill is “dog-whistling to Johnson’s base by triggering a humongous row with the old villain Brussels because that worked so well in the 2016 Brexit referendum”. He says it’s “not the EU that has been gridlocking the negotiations” but the prime minister’s “failure along with first [David] Frost and now Liz Truss to negotiate seriously”. What “pains” Hain is “that the current batch of Tory leaders don’t really give a fig for Northern Ireland” or “even understand it” – and they “don’t know how to play the ‘honest broker’ role John Major extolled and Tony Blair exemplified”.

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4. Humour in the office matters, but can a boss be funny?

Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times

on careers and comedy

Workplace comedy PBC is “niche material for a select audience”, writes Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. This writer says the accountancy mockumentary “was not LOL-tastic” but it highlighted “a number of issues”. And one is “can a boss be funny?” A CEO once told Jacobs that the higher he climbed up the career ladder, “the funnier and better looking he became. Everyone laughed at his jokes and no one told him he looked rough.” In TV dramas, typically the boss is “a figure of fun rather than great wit”. But this writer wonders “if climbing the corporate or political ladder requires the power hungry to take themselves so seriously that it chips away at their funny bone”. Although Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are examples of success thanks “in part” to their “comedic skill”, perhaps, says Jacobs, “the truth is that to be truly successful you must also know when to turn the humour off”.

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5. Why I wanted to work with The Big Issue

The Duke of Cambridge in The Big Issue

on homelessness

Prince William says he was 11 when he first visited a homeless shelter with his mother, “who in her own inimitable style was determined to shine a light on an overlooked, misunderstood problem”. Writing for The Big Issue, he says that in the decades since he has seen “countless projects in this space grow from strength to strength”, and the publication is “perhaps now the most immediately recognisable”. Despite the progress, “homelessness is still seen by many as some entrenched phenomenon over which we have little power”. And the duke says there are “worrying signs that things might soon get worse”. He counts himself “extremely lucky” to “meet people from all walks of life” in his role, and he commits to “shine a spotlight on this solvable issue” in the years to come. Princess Diana “instinctively knew” that “the first step to fixing a problem is for everyone to see it for what it truly is”.

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The government is to set out its highly controversial plan to override parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol this afternoon as Brexit once again returns to the top of the political agenda.

The bill, detailing legal changes that allow ministers to rip up parts of the protocol, has long been touted by Boris Johnson and his hardline Brexit allies on both sides of the Irish Sea. But “with the prospect of opposition from both wings of the prime minister’s own party and a chorus of criticism which views the plans as likely to be illegal, its publication is only the first salvo in what is likely to be a very ugly battle”, said The Guardian.

Here The Week examines who wants to keep the Northern Ireland Protocol and who wants to tear it up.

DUP

The Democratic Unionist Party has been among the most vocal opponents of the Northern Ireland Protocol. It claims the provision, which effectively places the regulatory border between the UK and EU down the Irish Sea rather than on the land border between Northern Ireland and the republic to the south, fundamentally undermines the integrity of the UK.

Since the Stormont elections in May, which made Sinn Féin the largest party in Northern Ireland for the first time, the DUP has blocked the formation of an executive over its opposition to the protocol, signed in 2019 as part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

In an email sent to government officials and leaked to PoliticsHome, Naomi Long, leader of the non-sectarian Alliance Party, said “only one” political party in Northern Ireland – the DUP – had been “central to the preparation of this legislation”.

The Times reported that while they are willing to back the DUP over changes to the protocol, “ministers have privately told unionist politicians that they must re-establish full power-sharing with Sinn Fein before the bill is pushed through the House of Lords, where it is expected to face opposition”.

The Tory Party

Divisions within the Tory Party over the bill have only intensified since Boris Johnson narrowly won a vote of confidence in his leadership last week.

Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman reported that the bill is “said to have been written with input from members of the European Research Group – the band of Conservative MPs who have consistently lobbied for a hard Brexit”.

Opponents within the party are also preparing for a fight, accusing the government of pandering to the DUP while risking breaking international law and starting a trade war with the EU during a cost-of-living crisis.

A leaked briefing paper being shared among Conservative MPs and reported by the Financial Times described the move as “damaging to everything the UK and Conservatives stand for”, claiming it could be as devastating for the reputation of the party as the Iraq war was for Labour.

“Many Tory MPs see the rabble-rousing over Brexit as a lurch to the right designed to shore up support for the prime minister after last Monday’s damaging confidence vote,” said The Independent. “But the decision to push ahead with the protocol legislation risks alienating more moderate MPs, especially in Lib Dem-facing seats in the south of England.”

EU

The EU has warned the UK against unilaterally changing the protocol, saying it would undermine trust between the two sides. The Daily Telegraph has reported that the UK bill is “expected to prompt fury from Brussels”.

Counter to claims the EU is being “disingenuous” over the protocol, the BBC said that the bloc has proposed reducing checks on products coming into Northern Ireland, but not eliminating them altogether. In exchange, it wants safeguards to stop goods moving from Great Britain into the Republic of Ireland such as the UK giving the EU full access to its IT systems.

While it appears willing to make concessions, the EU has dismissed any attempt by the UK to remove the European Court of Justice’s role from the protocol.

Republic of Ireland

The Irish Examiner reported that the government in Dublin is “furious” at British plans.

Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney echoed opposition to the deal from European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič after both held short calls with UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Monday.

A spokesman for Coveney said it “marks a particular low point in the UK’s approach to Brexit, especially as Secretary Truss has not engaged with negotiations with the EU in any meaningful way since February”, the Belfast Telegraph reported.

“Far from fixing problems, this legislation will create a whole new set of uncertainties and damage relationships,” they added.

Speaking to Sky News, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said the protocol was working as it was intended and claimed Tory proposals to breach international law would “create huge, huge damage to the northern economy, to the Irish economy.

“They propose to breach international law and are on an agenda of undermining, attacking and damaging the Good Friday Agreement,” she added.

Boris Johnson and Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney have spoken of a possible “landing zone” to address unionist concerns about the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The UK prime minister is heading to Belfast today as tensions over the political deadlock in Stormont – and between London and the EU – have intensified.

He is expected to “sign off plans for a law to unilaterally scrap parts of the UK’s Brexit deal, in spite of warnings it could collapse talks with Brussels and spark a trade war with the EU”, said the Financial Times.

Unilateral action

The Northern Ireland Protocol, which was agreed as part of the Brexit deal, works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market for goods. Therefore, in Northern Ireland there are new checks and paperwork for goods that are imported into the country from the rest of the UK.

The DUP is unhappy with the resulting “border” in the Irish Sea and has blocked the formation of a new devolved administration in protest. Although Sinn Féin became the largest party in the Stormont elections earlier this month, its vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, cannot become first minister without a Unionist agreeing to become deputy first minister.

Johnson will hold talks with party leaders and attempt to persuade the Democratic Unionists to enter the power-sharing government. The FT said he hopes his promise to “fix” the protocol will “persuade pro-UK unionist politicians to join the executive”, but his threats to the EU have led to “fears in the Treasury that it could ultimately lead to EU trade retaliation and worsen the cost of living crisis”.

In a bid to “calm tensions” yesterday, the PM’s allies claimed that the plan to rewrite parts of the protocol “was only ‘an insurance policy’ in case talks with the EU on improving its operation failed”, added the paper.

Landing zone

Speaking to the BBC, Ireland’s Foreign Minister Coveney said comments by the UK government about taking unilateral action on the Northern Ireland Protocol had gone down “really badly” across the EU.

However, he hinted at a potential way forward, saying there is a “landing zone” for progress that could come through partnership “as opposed to grandstanding, threats and unilateral action which doesn’t help anybody”.

Writing in the Belfast Telegraph, Johnson said he would “keep the door open to genuine dialogue” and also referred to a potential “landing zone”.

The Ulster Unionist leader, Doug Beattie, used the same term last week. He said the executive needed to get “up and running again” so it could deal with the cost-of-living crisis for the people of Northern Ireland. “If the obstacle to doing that is the protocol then we need to deal with the protocol,” he was quoted as saying in the News Letter.

Beattie, whose party holds 10% of the seats in Stormont, said the “landing zone” must amount to “no checks on goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland if they are staying in Northern Ireland”.

Stormont or the EU

Johnson “may be forced to choose between a government in Belfast or the treaty he agreed with the EU”, said Sky News.

He has said that “there will be a necessity to act” if the EU refuses to change its stance on the protocol. The UK government has “a responsibility to provide assurance that the consumers, citizens and businesses of Northern Ireland are protected in the long term”, he said, adding that “he will set out a more detailed assessment and next steps to parliament in the coming days”.

Although the government is preparing to publish legislation to override the protocol, Sky News understands there are still concerns among cabinet ministers about the legal position.

An influential delegation of US lawmakers is heading to London as concern grows in Washington over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Following Boris Johnson’s threat to rip up parts of the post-Brexit trade deal, the White House has dispatched “at least half a dozen representatives from the US Congress” for a series of meetings in Brussels, Dublin, London and Belfast, The Guardian reported.

The group will be led by Richie Neal, the “influential” chair of the House of Representatives’ ways and means committee, “which has significant power over future trade deals”, the paper said.

US-Irish relations

Concern in the White House stems from Joe Biden’s commitment to preserving the Good Friday Agreement and Washington’s role as its guarantor. The president has repeatedly stated how integral the protocol is to maintaining peace and stability.

That Neal is being sent to lead the US delegation also underscores that concern. His “interest in Northern Ireland stretches over three decades”, The Guardian said. He also made clear earlier this year that while a US-UK trade deal was “desirable”, it would not progress if there was “any jeopardy” to the Good Friday Agreement.

Neal, one of the US’s “leading Irish-American politicians”, has also called on “political leaders in Northern Ireland to re-establish a government” as quickly as possible, The Irish Times reported following elections last week.

“The people of Northern Ireland just underwent a seismic election, and now, their newly elected officials must carry out their democratic duty through the power-sharing institutions established by the Good Friday agreement,” he said.

“All parties must stay the course to find durable solutions to implement the [Northern Ireland Protocol] and preserve peace and stability on the island.”

Man on the ground

As fear increases in the White House that the UK could move to “override” the protocol, The Times reported that President Biden is “on the verge of appointing a special US envoy to Northern Ireland”.

In a letter to the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, two senior US congressmen warned the UK government that its plans on the protocol are in “direct confrontation” with the “wishes of the majority of elected officials” in the Northern Ireland assembly.

Bill Keating, who sits on the House foreign affairs committee, and Brendan Boyle, co-chairman of the congressional EU caucus, added that “the ‘worst possible outcome of Brexit’ would be one that led to ‘violence and upheaval’ in Northern Ireland”.

They also warned that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made it clear that the White House believed it needed its own envoy on the ground in Northern Ireland, “in line with our historical role as a good faith arbiter”.

What next?

A White House spokesperson responded to questions about the delegation led by Neal by telling The Guardian that “the best path forward is a pragmatic one that requires courage, co-operation and leadership”.

“We urge the parties to continue engaging in dialogue to resolve differences and bring negotiations to a successful conclusion,” they added.

But the UK’s former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost hit out at the White House’s intervention, telling an event in Washington that the government is “well aware of how serious conflict in Northern Ireland would be” and accusing the Biden administration of failing to understand the “niceties” of Northern Ireland, Politico reported.

“It is our country that faced the Troubles. We don’t need lectures from others about the peace process,” Frost said, adding that it was “unreasonable and unfair” for Washington to refuse a trade deal with the UK until the protocol issue is solved.

In an opinion piece for The Telegraph, the former Brexit minister again attacked the arrangement this morning, arguing that “none of us could have imagined that the Protocol would get the handling it got” and accusing the EU of “weaponising” it against the UK.

1. Charles should ask: Do you want me as king?

James Kirkup in The Times

on the monarchy’s future

“One of the many services the Queen has done her country is to spare us from thinking too much about the constitution,” writes James Kirkup in The Times. “Her enduring constancy means most people don’t give any thought to the monarchy and its future.” But one sad day “that will end”, he writes. The royal succession will “convulse Britain in emotional turmoil beyond anything the past few years have conjured”, and our next king should be “ready to act, boldly, to meet that moment”. Although Charles “will take the throne by accident of birth” he will “still need a mandate”, suggests Kirkup. And one of the “boldest” ways Charles could take the crown with “the active support of the people” would be with a “public vote, either among the whole country or the citizens’ juries”, says Kirkup. “Either way, he should ask the people: Do you accept me as your king?” When the Queen dies all the “old certainties” over the continuation of the monarchy “will crumble”. The “only way” a “fundamentally anachronistic” institution such as royalty can survive that upheaval is to “accept the spirit of the age”, he writes. “Britain needs a democratic monarchy.”

Read more

2. Farewell to the brilliant iPod, doomed for doing one thing

Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph

on a technological icon

“I belong to Generation Mixtape, so I feel no nostalgia about the death of the iPod,” writes Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph. Nevertheless, “it changed the world, and Apple’s fortunes, selling 400 million and paving the way for the iPad and iPhone.” Now, these technologies have “superseded their parent gadget, and made its very purpose seem quaintly old-fashioned,” she continues. “Who needs a device solely for listening, when the phone in your pocket can do that plus every other thing?” Smartphones have now “gobbled up” many functions other gadgets once served, and the more they gobble up, the more we will “come to mourn” these now-defunct devices. But in its simplicity was the iPod’s “brilliance” and also its doom – “precisely because it can only do one thing”.

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3. The Tesco chairman is backing a windfall tax. This is not business as usual

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

on retail reality

“It’s a delicate moment for a chairman of Tesco, trying to describe reality while maintaining the brand-boosterism that someone in some distant MBA hell decided the shareholders demand,” writes Zoe Williams in The Guardian. But in an interview with the Today programme, John Allan, who is a former president of the CBI, “dispensed entirely with the second imperative”. He described what cashiers were telling him: “that customers were asking them to stop when they’d rung through £40. People are out of wriggle room.” It was a “crunchy, evocative description of how skint people are already, a tacit emphasis that this is everybody’s business, and a hint, if you chose to hear it, that this is unprecedented,” continued Williams. “Even more striking, though, was that he went on to endorse a windfall tax on oil and gas companies,” wrote Williams, who said it was “not a controversial point of view”. While it is possible to “split hairs” on whether energy companies’ profits are “obscene”, the “entire fossil fuel industry combined wouldn’t deny that it’s all been a bit of a lucky strike, and that they’ve been half-expecting a windfall tax since their bonanza began”.

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4. Threatening to break the Northern Ireland Protocol plays straight into Putin’s hands

Ian Dunt for the i news site

on another false alarm?

“The threat to tear up the Protocol is to the post-Brexit world what no-deal was for the Brexit one,” writes Ian Dunt for the i news site. “It is a constant threat which can be realised at any moment. Will they ever do it? No one really knows. Perhaps even they don’t know. Maybe this really will happen next week. Or maybe it’ll be like all the other false alarms,” he continues. But “what we do know for certain is that it’s often an empty threat”. The government has been “making belligerent threats about Article 16 for over half a year, and yet there was no legislation to implement it in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech”. It suggests that Boris Johnson’s government has a penchant for threatening “serious action without the intention of seeing it through”. “We also know one other thing for certain: each time the Government makes this threat they undermine the UK’s global credibility,” says Dunt.

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5. After Starmer: what’s next for Labour?

Katy Balls in The Spectator

on succession

“Sometimes a plan can be too successful,” writes Katy Balls in The Spectator. When Durham police announced on the day of the local election results that they would investigate Keir Starmer over ‘beergate’, “Tory MPs were delighted”. But now “Tory strategists have started to worry”. “What if Starmer actually resigned, as he has promised to do if he is fined? That would raise awkward questions about Johnson clinging on.” Starmer, in turn, by putting his job on the line, “has forced his party to think about successors, whether now or later”. Both of Britain’s main parties are “stuck with leaders being investigated by police for breaking Covid rules, but neither party has an obvious candidate for succession”, Balls continues. When it comes to a potential Labour leader, Lisa Nandy is “the option that Tories fear most”, with Conservative MPs believing “she has more bite than her boss”. When Durham police conclude their investigation, “the Prime Minister and his opposite number may both have reason to hope that they find Starmer not guilty”.

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There are elections across the UK next week, said The Guardian. Much attention has been devoted to their potential impact on Boris Johnson’s leadership, but the most profound consequences of the 5 May ballots may actually be felt in Northern Ireland. All 90 members of the Stormont Assembly will be elected by proportional representation, and there’s a good chance that Sinn Féin will emerge with the largest number of seats.

The current poll average puts its support at 24%, against the Democratic Unionist Party’s 19%. This would give the party the right to nominate its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, as the new first minister. In practical terms, it needn’t lead to a huge change. Under the power-sharing arrangement, the two largest parties must govern together, or not at all. But it would represent “a historic moment” for Northern Ireland, which has been led by unionists for more than a century.

This could be the most significant Stormont election in decades, said Ailbhe Rea in the New Statesman. There is now a “realistic prospect” that Ireland could have a Sinn Féin first minister in the north as well as a Sinn Féin taoiseach in the south, raising the chance of a referendum on unification. Yet such a poll won’t happen any time soon. Sinn Féin has built its support in the north by putting the Irish unity issue “on the back-burner” and concentrating instead on voters’ everyday concerns, such as healthcare and the cost of living.

Northern Ireland’s politicians will struggle to deliver on any of their election pledges in the current political climate, said Jude Webber in the Financial Times. The DUP pulled out of the Stormont executive back in February in a row over the post-Brexit trading arrangements known as the Northern Ireland Protocol. And it has refused to commit to nominating a deputy first minister if Sinn Féin comes first in next week’s elections, which could render the assembly unable to function. Months of “political paralysis” likely await.

To make matters worse, Downing Street has chosen this of all moments to suggest that it may introduce legislation granting the UK the power to unilaterally override key elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol, said Bobby McDonagh in The Irish Times. The move is “presumably designed to boost the chances of the DUP” in the elections, but it’s fundamentally unhelpful. Such a step would only “further unsettle the delicate situation in Northern Ireland by moving the real and unavoidable challenges of dealing with the consequences of Brexit back to square one”.

1. Why you should visit Belfast

Northern Ireland’s capital used to be “once synonymous with bomb explosions, gun battles and sectarian assassinations”, said The Guardian. But now, post-Troubles Belfast has “reinvented itself as one of the top-rated tourist destinations”.

In 2018, Lonely Planet named Belfast and the Causeway Coast as the No.1 region to visit in the world thanks to a “remarkable” transformation over the past two decades. The city is “full of hip neighbourhoods that burst with bars, restaurants and venues” while its old docklands are now the vibrant Titanic Quarter, “home to fancy apartments and a sensational museum”. Beyond the city, the “timeless beauty” of the Causeway Coast offers walking, golf, whiskey and some of the world’s most famous rocks.

Belfast “continues to thrive culturally” and a couple of days are “enough to get a feel for the city”, said Rough Guides. Its theatre and visual arts scene are “flourishing” and there are “plenty of places to catch the city’s booming traditional-music scene”. In November, Belfast was awarded the “City of Music” status by Unesco.

Movie and television fans are also flocking to the city. Titanic Studios were used as a filming location for Game of Thrones, while Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast was nominated for seven Oscars. Branagh’s “ode to his childhood” is “a beautiful story about a beautiful city”, the BBC said.

2. Top attractions: things to see and do

Titanic Belfast

Belfast is the “home of the Titanic” and home to the world’s largest Titanic visitor experience. Located beside the Titanic Slipways and the Harland & Wolff Drawing Offices – the very place where the ship was designed, built, and launched – Titanic Belfast relays the story of the doomed ocean liner and its subsequent place in history. Visitors can trace the ship’s journey through time and the role Belfast played in the wider shipbuilding industry.

The Troubles ‘tourism’

Troubles “tourism” is “booming” and the city’s “formerly most notorious areas” are becoming flooded with international visitors, said the Belfast Telegraph. The Crumlin Road Gaol, a 19th century Grade A listed jail, is open to the public for tours and is the No.1 attraction to visit in Belfast, according to Trip Advisor. It offers guided and self-guided experiences of the jail as well as “The Troubles Tour” via black taxi or on foot.

Ulster Museum is one of Belfast’s must-see attractions, said PlanetWare.com. This impressive national museum “should be high on the list for any visitor for a number of reasons”, not least of all that it “doesn’t shy away from the city’s recent troubled past”.

Taking a tour of the Belfast Peace Walls is now a thing or a tourist attraction of sorts, said the Brit On The Move blog. The peace walls – or peace lines as they are sometimes known – are a series of barriers in Northern Ireland that separate republican and nationalist Catholic neighbourhoods from loyalist and unionist Protestant areas. “It’s a deeply moving tribute to both sides.”

The Belfast Experience also offers walking tours and taxi tours of Shankill Road, which gives visitors the chance to “integrate themselves into historical events with a hands-on and thought provoking approach”.

Great outdoors: walking, golf and sailing

Just north of the city, a ten-minute drive from Belfast Zoo and a 20-minute drive from Crumlin Road Gaol, you’ll find Cave Hill Country Park, which offers “hands down one of the best walks in Belfast”, said James March on The Irish Road Trip. Deemed as Belfast’s top park by Lonely Planet, the panoramic view from the summit of Cave Hill (368m) “takes in the whole sprawl of the city, the docks, Belfast Lough and the Mourne Mountains – on a clear day you can see Scotland”.

Northern Ireland is a golfer’s paradise and offers around 100 courses for players to enjoy. If you’re in Belfast, “and have your clubs handy”, then make sure you play the “immaculately conditioned” Malone Golf Club, said Top100GolfCourses.com. “You’ll be hard pressed to find a better parkland course.”

For sailing enthusiasts, the spectacular sea inlet of Belfast Lough offers thrilling water adventures. Following Seas has a one-day “Sailing in the Wake of Giants” tour costing from £125.

CS Lewis Square

The Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis was born in Belfast and the square named after him is a public space featuring seven bronze sculptures from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. It is a “stunning display of public art”, said VisitBelfast.com.

Game of Thrones

Northern Ireland’s “coastal roads, craggy castles and sprawling glens” were used as a backdrop for the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones, said VisitBelfast.com. As well as film locations and driving routes, fans can also visit the official Game of Thrones studio tour at Linen Mill Studios in Banbridge, a 30-minute drive from the city down the M1 and A1.

3. Hotels and accommodation: where to stay

The best three hotels in Belfast, according to expert ratings on The Telegraph, are The Merchant Hotel, Europa Hotel, and Ten Square Hotel. While Trip.com ranks the Maldron Hotel Belfast City, The Fitzwilliam Hotel Belfast, and The 1852 as the top places to book.

For somewhere on the outskirts of the city, the 19th-century Culloden Estate and Spa was “originally intended as an abode for the Bishops of Down”, said The Luxury Editor. “The historic grandeur of the building is contrasted with a modern extension, in the form of the ESPA spa with steam room and hammam.”

4. Restaurants, pubs and markets: where to eat and drink

Belfast has been experiencing a “real renaissance from a food perspective”, said The Foodellers blog. “What was previously considered a dull and uninviting city for those who love food, is now one of the most exciting destinations if you travel to discover the flavours of the places you visit.”

In the 2022 Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland it was announced that Belfast restaurants Eipic, OX, and The Muddlers Club had retained their Michelin one star for another year, RTÉ reported. Two other restaurants – Deanes at Queens and Home – were also awarded a Bib Gourmand by Michelin for “good quality, good value cooking”.

Aside from the restaurants, there are many “unmissable” pubs and bars in Belfast, said The Foodellers. “Highly recommended” places for a drink and a bite include the Duke of York, Kelly’s Cellars, and Crown Liquor Saloon.

If you prefer food stalls to dining out, then St George’s Market is where to go to find the finest fresh local produce. One of Belfast’s oldest attractions, there has been a Friday market on the St George’s site since 1604.

Northern Ireland restaurants and pubs: best places to eat

5. Transport: how to get there

Airports

Belfast International and George Best Belfast City are the two airports serving the city. Belfast International is Northern Ireland’s main airport and located a 30-minute drive from the city centre. Visitors can travel between the airport and city on the Translink Airport Express 600 bus service.

Located just three miles from the city centre, and named after the Northern Irish football legend who was born here, is the George Best Belfast City Airport. Visitors can travel between the airport and city on the Translink Airport Express 300 bus service.

Ferries and cruises

As a port city, Belfast is an ideal destination for visitors travelling via the sea. There are ferry crossings to Belfast from Cairnryan in Scotland and from Liverpool in England, while cruise ships also dock in the city’s harbour. Cruise Belfast, the partnership between Belfast Harbour and Visit Belfast, announced that the city is expecting to welcome 130 cruise ships during the 2022 season, which runs to November. More than 50 different vessels from 33 cruise lines are due to dock with up to 340,000 visitors expected to come ashore.

6. What the locals say…

You may not go to Belfast for the weather, but there are “plenty of other reasons” to visit, said Northern Irish writer David McElhinney in Lonely Planet. A “thriving” performing arts scene and a nightlife culture “fuses haute cuisine with cozy pubs and Irish folk music”. And though locals “might bemoan the rising price of a pint”, Belfast “remains an affordable travel destination” for most budgets. “This small, idiosyncratic city has long punched above its diminutive weight in terms of cultural impact.”

When asked by Conde Nast Traveler why people should come to Belfast, singer and local Naomi Hamilton said: “I think it’s one of those charming, really friendly places that you can explore pretty quickly. It’s almost like a little pocket city – in 24 hours you could get a real sense of what it’s like, so it’s a great weekend city break.”

For the final word, who better to pick than Kenneth Branagh, who said that Belfast – “about a place and a people, I love” – was the most “personal film” he had ever made. Upon receiving his first Academy Award, for best original screenplay, he added: “It’s a great tribute to an amazing city and fantastic people.”

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Taliban vs. the World Bank

The World Bank has suspended four aid projects in Afghanistan, worth a total of $600m (£460m) after the Taliban reversed an earlier decision to allow girls to attend school. The Islamist group blamed problems with the national school uniform, but it is widely believed that the group is divided along ideological lines about whether girls should ever be allowed to return to high school. Is the Taliban slipping back into its old ways, and is there anything the West could or should do in response?

‘Don’t say gay’

This week the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed into law what has colloquially become known as the Don’t Say Gay bill. The new law, which forbids forbids teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to third grade (covering children aged five to nine), has drawn intense scrutiny and criticism, including from Joe Biden. But with DeSantis expected to run as a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, is it a sign of things to come?

Troubles trials

A former British soldier has gone on trial in connection with the death of Aidan McAnespie in Northern Ireland in 1988, in what could be the last prosecution before a proposed amnesty on Troubles killings comes into effect. The accused, David Holden, does not deny that he shot and killed McAnespie, an unarmed civilian, at a border checkpoint in Tyrone – but says he fired his weapon accidentally. What can this trial teach us about the state of the Northern Irish peace process?

Paul Givan has resigned as Northern Ireland’s first minister, adding to the political crisis in the province a day after agriculture minister Edwin Poots was accused of breaking international law by ordering an end to post-Brexit checks on goods entering the country from the rest of the UK.

Thursday marked “the end of what has been the privilege of my lifetime”, Givan said at a press conference. He hoped for “a resolution to the issues that have regrettably got us to this point” – namely disagreements about the Northern Ireland Protocol, created by the UK-EU Brexit deal.

Givan’s resignation is “part of the Democratic Unionist Party’s protest” against the protocol, said the BBC. The DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said yesterday that the arrangement “represents an existential threat to the future of Northern Ireland’s place within the Union”.

After months of unresolved talks between London and Brussels, on Wednesday Poots ordered a halt to checks on food and farming goods between the UK and Northern Ireland, a move that “was strongly condemned by the Irish Government”, said the Irish Times. Foreign affairs minister Simon Coveney described it as a “breach of international law”.

Peace under pressure

The country’s “institutions are being tested once again”, Givan said on Thursday, before his resignation came into effect at midnight. The deputy first minister, Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, will automatically lose her position due to the power-sharing arrangements that link the two roles.

In a statement from Westminster, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said he recognised “the impact the Northern Ireland Protocol is having on the ground” and offered an assurance that the UK government remains “fully committed to fixing the problems” with the agreement.

The news plunges Stormont “into turmoil two years after power-sharing with Sinn Fein was restored”, said The Guardian. New legislation from Westminster will “avoid a repeat of crash collapses” of the assembly, which will be allowed to continue for an initial six-week period, with the possibility of extending this to 24 or 48 weeks, said the BBC.

The new system, agreed in January 2020, was meant to provide a safety net, but “it will be far from business as usual” in the province, the BBC added. The Stormont executive cannot meet without a first and deputy first minister, and decision-making will be paused. Givan’s resignation essentially “ushers in a temporary state of paralysis in Northern Irish politics”, said The New Statesman.

In response to the news, Sinn Fein’s president, Mary Lou McDonald, has called for the next election of the assembly to be brought forward from its scheduled date of 5 May. But “there’s little to no chance” of that happening, said the magazine.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has been tasked with resolving the ongoing issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol after David Frost quit as Brexit minister.

Frost, who was elevated to the Lords and the cabinet by Boris Johnson to negotiate the Brexit deal, departed with immediate effect on Saturday night, citing concerns about the government’s “direction of travel”.

In a letter to Johnson, he called for a “lightly regulated, low-tax” economy and urged Downing Street not to be “tempted by the kind of coercive measures” seen elsewhere to tackle Covid.

Frost a ‘painful’ loss for Johnson

In The Spectator, James Forsyth called Frost’s resignation a “body blow” for Johnson. “He has lost the man who negotiated his Brexit deal, the person he used to reassure hardline Brexiteers he wasn’t going soft,” said Forsyth. In the letter, Frost called Johnson “an outstanding leader at a moment of grave constitutional crisis”, but Forsyth said Frost “will know” how much his departure will weaken the prime minister. “There’s little doubt that it will be seen by a group of Tory MPs as a signal to put letters in.”

It comes after the prime minister saw the “the biggest parliamentary rebellion of his time in office and by-election defeat in a seat held by the Tories for almost two centuries”, said The Sunday Times. Yet the paper added that Frost’s departure is “arguably more fundamental and symbolic than that” as it indicates that the “Conservatives have lost their soul under Johnson”.

Frost “practically oozed red, white and blue”, but “it was his claim to represent not just Britain, but the prime minister, that made him such a rarity within the cabinet”, said The Sunday Times. His resignation will therefore have been “more painful for Johnson than many of the others during his premiership”.

A ‘monster brief’ for Truss

Abolishing the role of dedicated Brexit minister, Johnson has handed Frost’s responsibilities back to the Foreign Office. The Telegraph thinks this will be seen as a “boon” to Truss, who is “already popular with Conservative members and has been touted as a future party leader”.

However, the paper noted that she will have to resolve the dispute over the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Northern Ireland – and the expansion of her portfolio will raise questions about how much time she will have to dedicate “to plotting a leadership challenge”.

Truss now has “a lot of jobs”, said Jessica Parker, the BBC Brussels correspondent: foreign secretary, minister for women and equalities, and lead negotiator with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol. “This is a monster brief,” she said. And, however confident Truss might feel, she is “inheriting a hard, and politically sensitive, task”.

The return of the Brexit brief to the Foreign Office after it was removed under Theresa May five years ago could be interpreted as “a shot in the arm” for the department under the “powerful” leadership of Truss, said Paul Goodman, editor of ConservativeHome.

But he suggested it is more likely the case of “a resourceful Johnson handing her a poisoned fruit”. If Truss is eyeing up No. 10, she will have to successfully woo those on the right of the parliamentary party who want to see Article 16 of the protocol invoked and those on the left who are “opposed to such a manoeuvre under almost any circumstances”.

“The future of the Protocol, of the UK’s relationship with the EU, and of Northern Ireland itself thus risk getting tangled up with Truss’s ambitions, and those who support and oppose them.”

Fears of a UK-EU trade war are growing after Britain again threatened to trigger an emergency clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol known as Article 16.

The European Commission’s Vice-President Maros Sefcovic said yesterday that the two sides would “intensify” efforts to break the impasse over post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland. But triggering Article 16 would have “very serious consequences”, he warned.

Adopting what The Irish Times described as a “more positive stance on some aspects” of latest talks with Brexit Minister David Frost, Sefcovic told an Irish parliamentary committee that he welcomed a recent “change in tone” from London. However, he added that “I worry about the rhetoric and action of the UK as regards the implementation of the agreement and in particular the protocol”.

Article 16 explained

Article 16 is a “safeguarding mechanism” for the Northern Ireland Protocol, a deal agreed as a part of the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement “to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland”, the Institute for Government explained.

The clause states that both the UK and the EU may take unilateral safeguarding measures if the protocol leads to “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade”.

The UK is arguing that this threshold “has already been reached as a result of the trade frictions” caused by the deal, said the Financial Times (FT). Although Boris Johnson agreed the protocol back in 2019, Downing Street now says it has caused far greater disruption than was anticipated and should be rewritten.

The government has also claimed that Ireland’s “unionist community” has “lost confidence” in the protocol and that its continued use could “destabilise the already fragile politics of the region”, the paper added.

Trigger points

The safeguarding mechanism is intended to be used only in the event of “serious difficulties” or “diversion of trade”, as opposed to “temporary or minor problems”, said the BBC. But there is no “specific guidance” on what qualifies as a “serious” issue or diversion.

In July, Johnson’s government published a paper, titled “Northern Ireland Protocol: the way forward”, that said the protocol had created a "significant diversion" of trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK that justified invoking Article 16.

The paper set out proposals to replace the Northern Ireland Protocol, but added that “for the time being, it is not appropriate to exercise” the UK’s rights under the safeguarding clause.

In October, the EU laid out the bloc’s proposals for reforming the protocol, in a bid to end the stand-off. Frost said they did not go far enough, however.

As the negotiations drag on, the UK government has “not clarified what unilateral measures under Article 16 it might seek to introduce”, said the Institute for Government.

But in an escalation of tensions last night, Johnson said that triggering Article 16 would be “perfectly legitimate”.

“Let me say – given all the speculation – that we would rather find a negotiated solution to the problems created by the Northern Ireland protocol, and that still seems possible,” the prime minister told an audience of business leaders and diplomats at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London.

“But if we do invoke Article 16 – which by the way is a perfectly legitimate part of that protocol – we will do so reasonably and appropriately, because we believe it is the only way left to protect the territorial integrity of our country, and meet our obligations to the people of Northern Ireland under the Belfast Agreement.”

Pulling the trigger

To invoke Article 16, the UK or EU would notify the European Commission of its intention to trigger the mechanism and lay out the measures intended to be taken. The two sides would then enter into a consultation process.

Under Article 16, permitted action is limited to what is “strictly necessary in order to remedy the situation”, and can only come into force after a month, unless it can be argued that action is required immediately.

The EU’s response to the clause being triggered would depend largely on “how expansively the UK used Article 16”, according to the FT. If London identified “specific problems”, Brussels would be likely to take “limited steps to address the fallout in those areas”.

But if the UK sought to “suspend key parts of the protocol – for example Articles 5 and 7, which form the basis for leaving Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods – then Brussels has suggested it could take far more draconian action”, the paper said.

Such suspensions “would effectively end the Irish Sea border and from the EU's perspective create a backdoor into its single market”, the BBC added.

With neither side willing to give way, pundits are warning that talks on how to reform the protocol could end with another “no deal” cliff-edge.

And the result could be a “serious rupture of economic and political ties” that “could also extend to foreign affairs and cooperation on a range of fronts, from data flows to pan-EU scientific research projects”, warned the FT.

The UK government is digesting an offer from the European Commission to scrap 80% of spot checks on foods coming into Northern Ireland from Britain.

The proposal, announced by the EU’s Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic yesterday, is “a significant concession” from Brussels “to ease post-Brexit border problems”, said The Guardian.

The offer came a day after Sefcovic’s UK counterpart David Frost demanded a total end to the Northern Ireland Protocol, set up after Brexit to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The protocol has effectively created a trade border in the Irish Sea –triggering months of disagreement between the UK and EU over border checks that Frost has described as “disruptive” and “damaging” for the nation.

Under the EU proposals, “goods destined for Northern Ireland only could go in an ‘express lane’ when arriving in the province from Britain”, explained The Telegraph’s Europe editor James Crisp. And customs paperwork would be cut by around 50%.

In return, “Brussels wants real-time access to UK trade databases in order to police which products cross into the Republic of Ireland, the EU’s external border”.

UK officials acknowledged that the proposals went further than expected, said the Financial Times. “But they fall short of Frost’s benchmark that for businesses in Great Britain, trading with Belfast should be as easy as commerce with Birmingham”.

The bloc also “refused to engage” on the UK’s demand for an end to the European Court of Justice’s role in oversight of the protocol. Frost argued that the court’s involvement created a “false sense of separation between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as trade arrangements operated within one part of the United Kingdom are ultimately overseen outside of it”.

Brussels insisted that if Northern Ireland follows EU rules for goods, it must accept the writ of the ECJ.

Despite that sticking point, Frost has vowed to work “very hard” to agree a deal, in a sign that the threat of unilaterally suspending parts of protocol “had been put on ice for now”, said The Telegraph’s Crisp.

“There is growing expectation that a fix can be found to keep EU judges at arms length in Northern Ireland,” he added.

The Guardian had a different take, reporting that Brussels officials “were ‘preparing for the worst’ amid signs Boris Johnson is set to reject the terms of the deal”. The chances of a compromise “appeared low”, said the paper.

Labour’s shadow minister for Task Force Europe, Jenny Chapman, said concerns are growing that the outcome will be “a mid-November showdown, with the UK invoking Article 16 and unilaterally ripping up the agreement” that Frost and Johnson negotiated back in 2019.

While this approach would “no doubt appeal to many on the government’s back benches”, wrote Chapman in an article for The Independent, “it would be damaging, counterproductive, and cause further instability”.

She warned of an “inevitable trade war with our biggest trade partners”, at a time when the country is already facing “a growing winter crisis as well as tensions in Northern Ireland”.

DUP MP Ian Paisley suggested last night that abandoning the protocol had been the plan along. “Boris Johnson did tell me personally... after agreeing to the protocol, he would sign up to changing that protocol and indeed tearing it up,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight programme.

The prime minister’s former top aide made similar claims in an online tirade yesterday. Dominic Cummings, who “has been a vocal critic of his former boss” since leaving Downing Street acrimoniously last year, “hurled grenades at Johnson in a series of late-night tweets”, said Politico’s Emilio Casalicchio.

The UK government “wriggled through with the best option we could” and then planned to “ditch bits we didn't like” after “whacking” Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election, claimed Cummings.

If true, “the PM was dead right to do so – given the hideous twin risks in 2019 of a ­Corbyn government and Remainers then overturning the Leave vote”, said The Sun in an editorial.

“Brexit is done,” the paper proclaimed, and the protocol “is being radically improved, as he hoped”.

The Times argued that Johnson was “given a mandate to get Brexit done, not to renege on international agreements voluntarily entered into”.

Now, said the paper, it is time to “instruct Lord Frost to get down to business, secure a workable compromise and finally deliver his promise”.

When the Brexit Minister Lord Frost announced his proposal to reform the Northern Ireland Protocol last week, he observed that most of the “current friction” between Britain and the EU stemmed from this arrangement. “It’s hard to argue with that statement,” said Peter Foster in the FT. Yet it is also hard to see Frost’s proposals as he tried to present them – as “an even-handed, mutually consensual attempt to make the Northern Ireland situation work for both sides”.

Frost’s 28-page “command paper” does not offer “detailed technical solutions to difficult problems”. Rather, it effectively suggests that the Protocol – which leaves Northern Ireland effectively inside the EU single market for goods, to avoid a hard border with the Republic – should be renegotiated. “It is an attempt to wind the clock back to arguments that were lost in 2019,” but that Boris Johnson’s Government “now wants to try to win again”.

The Protocol should be renegotiated, or better still, scrapped, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. “For six months, Britain has been bending over backwards to make the system work, while the EU gives every impression of relishing our discomfort.”

The UK has spent more than £500m helping businesses adapt. It has given EU officials unprecedented access to its customs systems. “It has repeatedly suggested ways to facilitate the flow of goods while ensuring that uncertified products don’t enter EU territory.” Brussels has responded to every offer “by insisting on the most intrusive checks possible”.

No one seriously thinks that this is really about British sausages “sneaking into Co Donegal”. Around 20% of all the regulatory checks carried out by the EU are done on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain – though the volume of trade is relatively tiny. “No, this is about squeezing the UK.”

The UK has “legitimate concerns” about the Protocol, said Anand Menon and Jill Rutter in The Guardian. It has caused genuine difficulties, both for Northern Ireland’s trade and for its politics. However, the fact remains that this Government signed this treaty less than two years ago. “The problems were both foreseeable and foreseen.” Brexiters, of all people, should have been aware that “the EU is not known for its flexibility”.

Brussels has duly dismissed the idea that the Protocol should be renegotiated, said The Times. And it would “be better to try to make existing arrangements work”, with both sides making “reasonable compromises”. But the clock is ticking. The latest grace period before EU regulations are fully enforced lasts until 30 September. It’s in both sides’ interest to make Brexit work for Northern Ireland.

The UK and EU are reportedly close to a breakthrough agreement on customs that could mean an end to years of “post-Brexit wrangling” over Northern Ireland.

The Times reported this week that Brussels had accepted a proposal that would “avoid the need for routine checks on products destined” for Northern Ireland.

The paper also said that the EU had “conceded for the first time” on a key issue to do with the oversight the European Courts of Justice (ECJ) would have over the region. It said negotiators had agreed the ECJ could rule on issues related to Northern Ireland only if a case was referred by Northern Ireland's courts, instead of – as the EU had previously insisted – that the European Commission should be able to take cases straight to court.

However, the BBC has reported that EU officials have “dismissed” such claims over a deal on the ECJ’s role in Northern Ireland. Two people close to the talks “pushed back hard against the report” with one describing it as “kite-flying” by someone in London.

The latest

The deal would mark a “critical step”, according to The Times, towards ending the impasse over the Northern Ireland protocol, which has been a sticking point in post-Brexit arrangements since they came into effect two years ago.

On trading arrangements, the Financial Times reported that those close to the talks believe a deal is “getting close”, and negotiators have briefed prime minister Rishi Sunak that a deal could be taking shape to resolve the dispute.

But Sunak will face a “big test of his authority as he agonises over whether he can sell an outline deal” to Eurosceptic Tory MPs and unionist politicians in Northern Ireland, said the FT. Eurosceptic MPs have warned they “would not accept any deal that left the European Court of Justice with any role in UK territory” amid reports that British officials could be prepared to accept some continued role for the ECJ in Northern Ireland.

Both the UK and the EU told the BBC that significant “challenges” remained over reaching an overall agreement, but that talks were ongoing on potential solutions, including over goods. A spokesperson for the UK government said “intensive scoping discussions” were taking place.

What is the Northern Ireland Protocol?

The Northern Ireland Protocol was agreed as part of the Brexit deal signed by Boris Johnson in December 2020 and is designed to protect the Good Friday Agreement by avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The protocol, which came into force in January 2021, works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market for goods. Therefore, Northern Ireland continues to follow some EU laws and there are new checks and paperwork for goods, which are imported into Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.

Some goods, including chilled meats and plants, were technically banned under the deal because such products cannot be imported into the EU from outside the bloc.

What is wrong with it?

The protocol is “threatening to derail the new Stormont power-sharing government”, said The Guardian, “after the Democratic Unionist party refused to appoint new ministers until the checks on the Irish Sea border on goods coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain were scrapped”.

Following the threats by unionists to boycott power-sharing in the province until the deal was reformed, Johnson said that the protocol was “not sustainable in its current form”.

Aside from the politics, the DUP argues that it is damaging Northern Ireland's economy and is causing major disruption for businesses.

What is being discussed?

Any deal between the two sides ultimately rests on whether the agreement can “reduce the levels of checks at the Irish Sea trade border to manageable levels and resolve the role of the European Court of Justice in enforcing the protocol”, explained the Financial Times.

The paper reported that those close to the negotiations have said that the EU has agreed “in principle” to a system of “red and green lanes” to reduce the need for checks on goods travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, “but that discussions were continuing over crucial details covering the scope and operation of the lanes”.

Goods crossing the Irish sea which were intended for sale on UK soil in Northern Ireland would go through a green lane which had reduced physical checks, supported by “real-time customs data”. Goods destined for the EU and the Republic of Ireland would enter a red lane and be subjected to full customs and regulatory checks.

The FT said that “all the outstanding areas of discussion between the two sides were still under review, including VAT rules, customs, state aid, the role of the ECJ and the terms of operation for the ‘red and green’ lanes”, per an internal briefing of EU diplomats in Brussels last week.

What does the EU want?

The EU has acknowledged that there are problems with the protocol, but has so far demanded a more limited set of exemptions and changes than the UK.

It has suggested changing EU law to allow medicines made in Britain to continue to be supplied to Northern Ireland and addressing the ban on the export of sausages to Northern Ireland by allowing products that play a part in the “national identity” of communities there.

However, the EU has insisted that the ECJ must still “ultimately police” the Northern Ireland Protocol and it says there should be no blanket exemptions on checks in the Irish Sea.

Northern Ireland’s political parties have united to oppose a Downing Street plan to block all future criminal prosecutions and civil actions relating to the Troubles.

The proposals were announced yesterday by Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, who told the Commons that the “painful” truth was that criminal investigations were unlikely to produce successful outcomes. Communities in Northern Ireland would remain divided unless “bold and different” action was taken, said Lewis, who unveiled plans to establish an independent body comparable to South African’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

But the amnesty has been rejected by all five political parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly and by the government of the Irish Republic, while relatives’ of victims of the violence have described the plans as a “disgrace”.

‘Line to be drawn’

Boris Johnson has long pledged to end prosecutions against former members of the British Army for alleged wrongdoing during the three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding yesterday to Labour criticisms of the amnesty plan, the Tory leader told Prime Minister’s Questions that the changes would allow the province to “draw a line under the Troubles”.

More than 3,500 people died during the conflict, which raged from the 1970s until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

The planned “statute of limitations” would stop prosecutions relating to incidents that occurred before the signing of the agreement, and “will apply to British veterans, former members of the security services and Royal Ulster Constabulary, as well as the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries”, The Telegraph reports.

A string of senior Tories yesterday endorsed the proposal, “arguing it was the only viable solution to ending the prosecution of elderly veterans”, the paper says.

Downing Street has also outlined plans to establish an Information Recovery Body that would have “full access” to information held by state agencies and could also take statements from individuals.

The independent body is “intended to help families find the truth about what happened to their loved ones”, says The Guardian. But the amnesty would “bring the shutters down on current and future inquests and civil actions, many of which relate to killings involving the army and police”, the paper notes.

Amid the widespread opposition to the proposals, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney told state broadcaster RTE that despite Johnson’s confident tone, the plans were not a “very much not a done deal”.

Pointing out that the changes would break the 2014 Stormont House Agreement on victims’ rights to truth and justice, Coveney said: “The British government is outlining a unilateral position which nobody else has signed up to.”

And without the support of Belfast and Dublin, there will be a “real problem here”, he added.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin has also spoken out against the proposals, which he described as “wrong for many, many reasons”. Addressing the Irish parliament yesterday, Martin said: “I don’t believe in a general amnesty for those who committed murder, whether there were state actors, or whether they're involved in terrorist or illegal organisations.”

Meanwhile, families of Troubles victims voiced horror over the plan to end criminal investigations. Access to due legal process was part of “an acknowledgement process”, said Damien McNally, who was four months old when his father was fatally injured in an attack by two gunmen in June 1976.

“It’s so important people have that rather than what’s being proposed today,” he told The Belfast Telegraph, adding: “These expectations that information is going to be made available either by paramilitaries or by the state, people have serious reservations over that.

“These proposals are a disgrace.”

That verdict was echoed by Louie Johnston, whose Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer father was killed by the IRA in 1997. The plans are a “slap in the face”, Johnston told the paper, and “it feels like victims have run out of another cheek to turn”.

Julie Hambleton - whose sister Maxine was among 21 people killed in the IRA pub bomb attacks on Birmingham in 1974 - told The Telegraph that she was considering legal action to try to block the amnesty.

“We will go to court over this if we can,” she said. “I cannot believe the government is willing to give amnesties to IRA terrorists who killed our loved ones. This is absolutely beyond the pale. Only those in Westminster could come up with this.

“They have no moral or ethical compass. They don’t know what it’s like to suffer the consequences of a terrorist attack.”

‘Perpetrator-focused’

The main criticism of the UK government’s plans is that they are focused mainly on avoiding “a ‘witch-hunt’ against ageing service personnel”, says The Guardian.

Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson told the Commons yesterday that “victims will see these proposals as perpetrator-focused rather than victim-focused and an insult to both the memory of those innocent victims who lost their lives during our Troubles and their families”.

Critics of the legislation have suggested that a statute of limitations that “effectively ends the investigation of serious human rights violations could breach the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights”, The Telegraph reports.

Government sources told the paper that the Northern Ireland secretary “has received legal advice warning that acting unilaterally could heighten the risk of a challenge being successfully brought at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg”.

“The Northern Ireland Office insists it is confident the plans are ECHR compliant and will press ahead,” says Politico London Playbook’s Alex Wickham. But “question marks remain if it will survive in its current form if Dublin and the main political parties in Northern Ireland oppose it”, he continues.

So once UK politicians return to Parliament after their summer break, “this could be heading for a major showdown”.

The UK’s Brexit minister will urge the European Commission today to bend its rules on the Northern Ireland Protocol and end the European Court of Justice’s role in the arrangement.

Speaking in Lisbon, David Frost is expected to warn that Brussels would be making a “historic misjudgement” in refusing to make further concessions on the post-Brexit trade deal that he negotiated last year.

Frost’s speech will “kick-start a pivotal week” in discussions over the future of Northern Ireland, said The Telegraph. His EU counterpart, Maros Sefcovic, is due to put forward proposals from the bloc tomorrow.

Meat of the matter

Frost has admitted that the protocol - which effectively created a checks border in the Irish Sea to avoid a land border on the island of Ireland - is not working out as planned. He has accused the EU of treating products coming into Northern Ireland as if they were “crossing an EU external frontier, with the full panoply of checks and controls”.

This alleged inflexibility has triggered rows over imports of goods including medicines, live animals and, in what was dubbed the “sausage wars”, chilled meats.

Frost was expected to argue today that the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in governing the arrangement has created a major imbalance in the way the protocol operates.

And if the two sides fail to move forward in the coming weeks, Frost has suggested that he might trigger Article 16, an option of last resort that enables one side to suspend parts of the protocol altogether.

Red lines

In a “late-night Twitter spat” on Saturday, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney accused Frost of “laying out red lines he knew the EU could not accept, to deliberately engineer ‘a breakdown in relations’” before this week’s crunch talks had even begun, reported the i news site.

Coveney told RTE radio yesterday: “When David Frost accuses me of raising issues on social media, it’s a bit rich, quite frankly. He is briefing British media to say: ‘The EU can make the changes they need to make, but it’s not enough. We want more.’”

Trade war

Brussels’ chief negotiator Sefcovic is expected to announce “far-reaching” proposals tomorrow that include offering to drop many checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland. But around half will still remain, “a situation considered intolerable by the UK government and the Democratic Unionist party, which is part of Northern Ireland’s administration”, said the Financial Times (FT).

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has already threatened to leave the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive as early as this month if the protocol is not scrapped.

The UK and the EU have “edged closer to a trade war” after the European Commission insisted on Sunday that the ECJ oversight must continue, said the paper, with Coveney’s latest comments “raising the temperature further”.

An EU diplomat told the FT that it was “very disturbing that the UK still does not do enough to implement the agreement and pretends not to have known the consequences of an agreement it wanted, negotiated, signed and ratified in the first place”.

“Friends and allies don’t treat each other like that,” the unnamed insider added.

Joe Biden ordered US officials to warn Boris Johnson against endangering the Northern Ireland peace process during the ongoing EU trade dispute in an “extraordinary diplomatic rebuke” before their first meeting at the G7 today.

According to The Times, Yael Lempert, America’s most senior diplomat in Britain, told David Frost, the Brexit minister, that the UK was “inflaming” tensions in Ireland and Europe by threatening to impose checks on ports in Northern Ireland.

Lempert further cautioned Frost that she had been authorised by the president “to take the step of issuing London with a demarche”, the paper adds, “a formal diplomatic reprimand seldom exchanged between allies”.

Frost-y welcome

Government minutes of the meeting between Lempert and Frost seen by The Times reveal that the US diplomat spoke about Biden’s “great concern” over Johnson’s stance towards Northern Ireland, adding that Lempert “slowly and gravely read her instructions [from Washington] aloud”.

She told Frost that the issue was “commanding the attention” of the US president and that the US “strongly urged” the government to come to a “negotiated settlement” with Brussels, regardless of whether that meant “unpopular compromises”.

“Lempert said the US was increasingly concerned about the stalemate on implementing the protocol”, the meeting notes said, continuing that “this was undermining the trust of our two main allies”. She also accused the government of “inflaming the rhetoric” surrounding the trade dispute, asking the UK to “keep it ‘cool’” as negotiations over the impasse continue.

A demarche is a formal communication most often sent to an adversary in order to lodge a protest at the behaviour of a foreign power. Often set alongside a summons for a country’s ambassador, a demarche was sent by the Foreign Office to Belarus following the forced landing of a Ryanair passenger plane in late May.

Lempert’s meeting with Frost will be the “elephant in the room” when Johnson and Biden meet for the first time since the president’s election at the G7 summit in Cornwall this afternoon, Politico’s London Playbook reports.

The trade dispute with the EU “is still threatening to derail proceedings in Carbis Bay over the weekend”, the site adds. The private intervention by the president may be followed by Biden raising his concerns “in public” during the summit.

Biden’s “overarching task” during his first foreign trip as president is to “deliver the diplomatic serenity that eluded” US international relations during the presidency of Donald Trump, The New York Times (NYT) says.

But “the goodwill Biden brings simply by not being Trump” may be somewhat undermined by his strong stance against the government’s actions in relation to the UK-EU trade dispute, the paper adds.

Nervy first date

What went on in the room between Lempert and Frost is not exactly clear, with CNN senior producer Luke McGee tweeting that US diplomats are “pushing back quite hard… on the assertion that Frost was given a dressing down on the orders of the president”.

But the reaction of some Conservative MPs is unlikely to defuse the tension, with one Tory Brexiteer telling Politico that “America should remember who their allies are”. Asked how Johnson should respond, the MP added: “Unfortunately he’s so senile that he probably won’t remember what we tell him anyway. Unless an aide is listening I’m not sure he’s going to remember for very long.”

Biden has made clear that he considers the Northern Ireland protocol to be “critical” to preserving peace on the island of Ireland, The Telegraph reports, with his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, saying negotiations must continue to “fundamentally protect the gains of the Good Friday Agreement and not imperil that”.

Sullivan declined to comment on “whether a failure to alleviate the Northern Ireland concerns could jeopardise a transatlantic trade deal”, the paper adds, instead reiterating that “our concern runs very deep on the Northern Ireland issue”.

The Times reports that Lempert offered Frost an “olive branch” during their face-to-face, telling him that Britain accepting EU rules on agricultural standards would ensure that the issue “wouldn’t negatively affect the chances of reaching a US-UK free trade deal”.

But the rebuke by the White House nonetheless “confirms that the Northern Ireland row is souring the lead-up to the G7 summit”, the Financial Times (FT) says, meaning Johnson will have to negotiate “awkward encounters” with European leaders in the coming days.

Seaside diplomacy

The prime minister maintains that Brussels’ demands for checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK are “too onerous and are disrupting trade, inflaming tensions in the pro-UK unionist community”, the FT continues.

But he will also be keen to avoid the issue becoming “a major distraction” during his meeting with Biden, the paper adds, during which the pair will sign a new “Atlantic Charter” that seeks to mimic the wartime cooperation between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt to deepen and confirm UK-US relations.

Biden will have his own awkward negotiations to contend with during the three-day summit, with “disagreements over trade, new restrictions on investing in and buying from China and his ever-evolving stance on a natural gas pipeline that will route directly from Russia to Europe” also on his agenda, the NYT says.

And after four years of Trumpism, he is also set to “face European leaders who are wary of the United States in a way they have not been since 1945 and are wondering where it is headed”, the paper adds.

Johnson is unlikely to have a relaxing trip to Cornwall, with “huge pressure” expected to come his way as European G7 members “press the message home” that he has to “relent” over the trade issue, The Times reports. And after Lempert’s intervention, “the blunt American message” is that he “has to find a way to make the protocol work even if that means painful political concessions”, the paper continues.

Having staked so much on the promise of a massive post-Brexit US free trade deal, the prime minister will have one eye on future transatlantic talks. And he can ill afford to create “an impediment” to getting an agreement over the line, the paper adds.