The former Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, has said it is “crucial parliament has a vote” on the much-anticipated deal to end the dispute with the EU over post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.
Villiers was speaking hours before the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, was due to meet Rishi Sunak for what No 10 has billed “final talks” over a revised Northern Ireland protocol pact. Villiers, who campaigned for Brexit while in her post in Northern Ireland, where the majority voted to remain in the EU, said she did not know how she would vote on the new deal but wanted one that would enable the return of the Democratic Unionist party to the devolved government in Stormont. “I want to see a deal which delivers a return to power-sharing in Northern Ireland,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The deal is expected to address the key issue of goods coming into Northern Ireland intended for the Republic of Ireland, and thus into the EU’s single market, by having most goods processed via a light-touch “green light” system to minimise checks. It is also expected to remove the EU’s right to automatically go to the European court of justice (ECJ) in the event of a dispute, instead establishing an arbitration panel involving Northern Irish and EU judges as the first port of call.
In what could be the most perilous week of his political life, the prime minister will meet Von der Leyen at lunchtime on Monday. The cabinet will meet shortly after, when Sunak, the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, and the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, will give an update on the talks. Sunak and Von der Leyen will then head to Windsor, raising speculation as to whether the European Commission chief will meet King Charles in a gesture that has already been widely criticised after plans for such an arrangement were made for Saturday and then cancelled. Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister and former Brexit secretary, is backing a deal. On Sunday, he said it would mark “a significant achievement” for Sunak and would be “a significant shift in the paradigm of arrangements” for Northern Ireland. “If we can get this over the line … it will be a really important deal. I think it would mark a paradigm shift, first and foremost for those communities,” he told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. But whether Sunak will be immune to the forces that felled Theresa May is unclear. The DUP is not expected to give an instant verdict on the deal but few expect it to back it as the party has been demanding an end to the application of EU law in Northern Ireland, arguing it makes it a colony of EU law. Pro-Brexit supporters in the Conservative party’s European Research Group are also unlikely to back a deal that retains a role for EU law and the European court of justice. As the concept of the protocol is predicated on EU law applying, it is highly unlikely it will be scrapped as this would throw out the protocol entirely. Mark Francois, the former chair of the ERG, demanded EU law be “expunged” from Northern Ireland, warning Sunak that MPs were “not stupid”. He told Sky that merely distancing the role of the ECJ by giving Northern Ireland courts and Stormont ministers a say in disputes and EU law was not good enough. “Just putting in a couple of intermediate phases, with a situation where you still end up with the European court of justice, is effectively sophistry,” Francois said. “We’re not stupid. What we want is a situation where EU law is expunged from Northern Ireland so it is treated on the same basis as England, Scotland and Wales,” he said. The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said Sunak should not worry if he could not convince his own backbenchers to support the deal, because Labour would supply the votes to get it through parliament. “We have said that the prime minister should not worry about the malcontents on his own backbenches and we will ensure that he has the votes to get this through,” she told Sky News. “I don’t want to jump the gun. We haven’t seen this deal. We don’t know how the DUP and others in the Conservative party are going to respond. The best thing would be to have cross-party support from right across the political spectrum for this deal, and I hope that the prime minister can secure that.” As speculation grew that the terms of the deal were close to being made public on Monday, the Tory former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg said Sunak might not have done enough to persuade the DUP to return to power sharing in Stormont. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “From what I’ve heard, he has done very well, but I’m not sure he has achieved the objective of getting the DUP back into power sharing, which is the fundamental point of it.” Rees-Mogg stressed that the DUP’s stance on the deal would be fundamental to securing Tory backbenchers’ support “because the protocol itself sets out in its first article that it is subsidiary to the Good Friday/Belfast agreement. So if the DUP doesn’t think that it meets the test, that will be very influential among Conservative MPs. “I’m afraid, with all the EU deals the devil is in the detail, so when people say ‘we need to see the legal text’, they are not larking about, they really want to see it to understand what the effect is.”