The British PM, an unlikely but potentially winning combination of Brexiteer and pragmatist, could unveil a deal this week that cleans up Boris Johnson’s mess.
| Almost seven years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appears within touching distance of Westminster’s elusive holy grail: to get Brexit done.
The answer is yes, and no. Johnson certainly crunched through a Brexit deal, but he was never fully frank with the British people - and perhaps not even with himself - about what he had signed up to.It was good enough to bathe Downing Street and Big Ben in a Union-Jack-themed light show in January 2020, some 3½ years after the referendum. But it was not good enough to create a durable system for managing Britain’s borders and trade with the EU.
The province of Northern Ireland cannot, for practical and political reasons, have a policed and visible border with EU member Ireland. The frontier is 500 kilometres long, with 300 major and minor crossings. And building border infrastructure would, it is feared, rekindle Irish-nationalist violence and even terrorism.
Brussels has been very inflexible about the kind of deal it could live with. The EU’s overriding objective is to avoid opening back doors to the single market. It is also determined not to dilute the market’s integrity and its structural underpinnings, including the European Court of Justice. This is the frozen mess Sunak inherited. On paper, he seems the ideal man to fix it. He backed Brexit from the very start, albeit pretty quietly, so he has cred with the Brexiteers. But also, and unlike most Brexiteers, he lives in the real world: practical solutions interest him more than political grandstanding.
Ultimately he doesn’t need the DUP. If the unionists won’t come back to the table, the province can continue being governed from London indefinitely.
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