3/28/2023 0 Comments Hannah spat![]() ![]() But what will the DUP do if Mr Sunak presents them with a deal and says take it or leave it? Now, Mr Sunak obviously hopes that whenever he presents this deal, it won’t immediately be thrown back in his face by the DUP. ![]() So it doesn’t look like it’s going to fly at this point. And the mood very much among those people is that even though there are different wings in the party, you know, some more hardline, some more moderate, they’re really quite united on this front and they really don’t like what they’re seeing. There are 12 party officers - Jeffrey Donaldson is one of them - that will look at this and then it will go to a wider executive of the party. They will take it back and scrutinise it. And the thing is that whenever a deal is put to the DUP, the DUP won’t say yes or no straight away. So the mood is really one of intransigence, I would say. Well, the party leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, came out of those meetings with the most conciliatory language we’ve heard for a long time, praising the progress that had been made and all the rest of it, and then this week in the Commons asked the prime minister to rewrite legally-binding parts of the protocol text. And we’d certainly not collaborate in administering Brussels law in our part of the United Kingdom. ![]() And we expect to be governed by British law, not Brussels law. This was Sammy Wilson, the DUP’s chief whip at Westminster. So we’re reaching a moment, I think, quite soon where the prime minister is gonna have to decide whether to push ahead with what will be to everybody an imperfect deal but clearly a substantial advance on where we are now, or whether he’s going to back down and run the risk of looking weak.Īh, Jude, Rishi Sunak met the DUP leadership at the end of last week at the five-star Culloden Hotel just near Belfast. And what Rishi Sunak is being faced with are people, particularly on the Unionist side, saying, “No, no, it’s got to be full and complete sovereignty”, which is not on the table. And so what’s been proposed is a deal in which essentially Britain accepts that point and the EU responds by not actually using the powers that it has very much at all, by being very generous on the implementation of this deal - that’s clearly roughly the shape of the fudge that’s being offered. And I think the fundamental point that he’s struggling to get past is this: that the EU is not prepared to budge on the fundamentals of EU jurisdiction in Northern Ireland if it remains in the single market for good. They’re pushing back on certain key points. But what we also know is that they’re not satisfied with it. And we know that Rishi Sunak has been actively trying to sell it to the Democratic Unionist party and to his own Conservative backbenchers. We have a reasonable idea about some of the key components. We know that there is the structure of a deal in place. Well, I think we’re not that much further along from where we were at the end of last week. Robert Shrimsley, where have we got to at the end of this week of backroom discussions and high-level diplomacy? The country has to wait while he plucks up the courage to take on the malcontents, the reckless, the wreckers, on his own benches. It’s comments like that from backbenchers that honed Keir Starmer’s attack on the prime minister in the Commons this week. I think that is quite, quite a high bar because it is going to involve the EU accepting that Northern Ireland cannot be subject either to EU law or in the single market. We need to make sure that if a deal is struck here that it is genuinely a better one than that which we can achieve through our own legislation to fix the protocol. There are plenty of backbenchers in his party who think the only solution is to remove all traces of Brussels from Northern Ireland, former Cabinet minister Simon Clarke among them. Mr Sunak’s been trying to sell the outline deal to both groups this week. Rishi Sunak faces many questions in his attempt to strike a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol, particularly from the Democratic Unionist party and his own Eurosceptic Tory MPs. ![]()
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