It has taken three prime ministers, three Northern Ireland secretaries, seven lawsuits by the EU and an epic breakdown of relations with Ireland before surgery was finally performed on one of the deepest wounds caused by Brexit.
The UK and the EU are inching closer to a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol and – if Rishi Sunak pulls it off and faces down opponents in the Democratic Unionist party and European Research Group (ERG) – he will have achieved something that eluded Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
Even with briefings to political leaders and diplomats in Belfast and Brussels, secrecy surrounds the deal. One EU diplomat said the silence echoed that from Michel Barnier’s team in the days running up to the original withdrawal agreement in 2019.
Despite DUP protestations, it is believed Downing Street has pencilled in an announcement for early next week. It may be no coincidence that the week will be dominated by a UN general assembly on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sucking the oxygen out of publicity from any rebellion.
So how did Sunak – the technocratic, cautious former chancellor with little previously known interest in Northern Ireland – get to this position when those before him failed?
Signs that a deal was on the cards emerged in October at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham after the Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker’s shock apology to the EU and Ireland over the behaviour towards them during the turbulent Brexit years.
As the wine flowed at a packed drinks reception hosted by Brussels afterwards, the EU ambassador to the UK, João Vale de Almedia, went bounding up to the Northern Ireland secretary of state, Chris Heaton-Harris, to exclaim, “let’s do this, let’s do this”. .
Any pact between the EU and the UK on the Brexit trading arrangements will be seen as a watershed in recent Conservative party politics, given it was only last June when Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, who at the time was foreign secretary, tabled the Northern Ireland protocol bill, shredding the already strained relations with the EU.
Signs of a softening towards the EU first emerged early in Truss’s short-lived premiership last September, when she met the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, before the Queen’s funeral. For that, Sunak must give her credit.
He received the “sign” the EU had been waiting for, that of a new political willingness to engage.
Within weeks, political talks had resumed after an eight-month standoff. In an extraordinary outbreak of peace, Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, was holding a joint press conference in Lancaster House with Baker and Heaton-Harris declaring a “flicker of optimism” and joking that his new friendship with the British ministers was not phoney.
The “new-look British government” had made “a positive effort to recalibrate where we are”.
But the way had been paved four weeks earlier in the distinguished grounds of Pembroke College Oxford, with dinners and drinks into the small hours.
The annual British-Irish Association, founded 50 years earlier to foster good relations between Ireland and the UK, hosted the European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič and a series of senior civil servants, diplomats and business leaders over a two-day summit, held under the confidential Chatham House rule.
EU sources say one of the things that “really changed the mood music” was Sunak’s openness to rebuilding relations with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. He has met her three times since entering Downing Street, including one meeting that was not “agenda necessary” at the Cop27 climate crisis summit in Egypt.
Sources say there was no immediate reason for that meeting, but EU leaders read it as a sign that Sunak “wanted to move on” and the “level of commitment” he had to restoring relations with Brussels.
Back in Northern Ireland, Heaton-Harris and Baker were putting in the hard yards. One business leader noted how the Northern Ireland secretary spent every second weekend in the region, not something others had done. “The meetings with Heaton-Harris would last an hour and a half, not the usual half hour you would have got with others. He would listen, he was keen to understand, make sure he wasn’t caught unsighted.”
Despite that there was scepticism as to their sincerity and motive. One Northern Ireland journalist put it to Heaton-Smith he was “no Julian Smith”, a reference to a Tory predecessor who had shown commitment to Northern Ireland. He would later quip privately that Julian Smith couldn’t bring the ERG with him on the journey.
Signs that efforts were being made to give talks the space they needed also emerged in the US. After a succession of warnings there would be no trade deal if the continuing dispute undermined the peace deal of 1998, the US state department counsellor himself warned that the “last thing we need is flare-ups” over Northern Ireland.
Since then, little has come from Washington that could be construed by critics as “interference”.
Observers note that Joe Kennedy III, scion of the US’s most famous political dynasty, has not set foot in Northern Ireland since being appointed special envoy to the region by Joe Biden before Christmas. His mission to drum up business for Northern Ireland appears to be headquartered in Washington, where Heaton-Harris recently met him.
If the UK and EU do announce a deal, expect a visit from Kennedy – and possibly Biden – to follow.
An announcement next week is puzzling to some, given it will be the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One school of thought suggests the attention on Ukraine will remove the significance of the expected opposition to any deal from the DUP and the ERG.
It is understood the announcement will be high level, celebrating the fact it is a “negotiated” and a “voluntary” agreement, with most attention on removing checks on goods to supermarkets, corner shops, hospitals and schools.
The UK government will also talk about the new agreement on governance involving an arbitration panel staffed by UK and EU representatives as the first port of call. Sources say this will provide a “shield to the sovereignty side of the argument”.
Few expect the DUP to back the deal, noting that its anti-protocol stance has been popular and will help the party in local elections in May.
