Cabinet and EU now persuaded that @BorisJohnson actually wants a Brexit deal. Ministers came to this view at Cabinet today - and paradoxically because he refused to provide any meaningful detail on what is being negotiated by Frost and Barnier in Brussels. “He knows we...
leak” a minister told me without a hint of irony. “And an inopportune leak could blow up our last chance to get a deal”. As for Brussels, it is persuaded Johnson wants a deal because the prospects of one HAVE NOT worsened as negotiations have continued over the weekend. But...
it will be tight to nail everything down by the deadline of Wednesday. The big sticking point is the question of how the new customs and regulatory arrangements for Northern Ireland could be terminated - which is something Johnson is insisting on but which Dublin and Brussels...
won’t accept if in practice they give the DUP the unilateral power to dismantle the new Johnsonian backstop. Also that Johnsonian Schrodinger backstop - simultaneously NI being in the customs union and not being in it - may yet prove too clever by half. They would...
put a border for customs between GB and NI in the Irish Sea, in an east-to-west direction, for GB stuff whose ultimate destination is the ROI or other parts of the EU single market. But if EU tariffs were to diverge significantly from UK ones, and were to be much higher...
than UK ones, they would provide an incentive for manufacturers to move to NI to obtain tariff free access to the EU single market, across the check-free NI border with the ROI. I am not clear how rules-obsessed Brussels could tolerate this over the long term.
