Thread by @faisalislam

NEW: Coming up at 7 - major leak - Sky News obtains leaked Cabinet deliberations on Irish border, letter from Foreign Secretary to PM playing down a hard border saying “wrong to see the task as maintaining ‘no border’

FULL STORY: news.sky.com/story/boris-jo…

Shadow Foreign Sec Thornberry -“is there no issue that [Johnson] thinks he cant get through by lying? This is not acceptable, it is simply telling lies to the British people”.

THREAD on exclusive leak of hard border letter from Foreign Sec to PM -
document is Johnson response to PM asking him to substantiate a claim made at a meeting of her Brexit "war Cabinet" on 7 February, when ministers' talks centred on Northern Ireland and immigration. 1/10

title is “The Northern Ireland/Ireland Border - the facilitated solution” - “I offered, and you [the PM] agreed, to send you a paper setting how I believed the Ireland/ NI border issues could be managed on the basis of a highly facilitated solution."
- ie P1A option B
2/10

Bottom line: Foreign Sec tells PM: “our task after Brexit will be to stop this border becoming significantly harder, but it will continue to exist - wrong to see the task as maintaining “no border”...
- acceptance border could harden as a result of regulatory divergence 3/10

"..even if a hard border [was] reintroduced, we would expect 95%+ of goods to pass border [without] checks" - is a reference to HMRC currently checking "4% consignments arriving in the EU at the UK external border"
- playing down the impact of a hard border in letter to PM
4/10

this is what sparked the following reaction from Lord Heseltine: “This is the most remarkable revelation of duplicity”

The letter accompanies a paper by FCO officials which is "not agreed technical advice" but a "concept note" - ex-officials suggest this is civil Service distancing themselves from attempt to marry regulatory divergence with open border
5/10

Step back - it is also interesting that at the Feb 7th EU Brexit Cabinet subcommittee the PM asked Johnson to come up with a how to keep Irish open border commitments alongside his regulatory divergence plan
6/10

The implication of the memo is that this effort (designed to be discussed at Chequers meet last week), was not wholly successful -shows that FCO officials would not sign off these as “agreed technical advice”
7/10

This might also help explain why the UK has not put forward, as agreed in the Phase 1 Agreement Joint Report an Option B on N. Ireland, tech solutions, known in Brussels as the “Narnia option” - why we will see the full alignment option legal text only
8/10

9/10 - my reading of this leak is that the Foreign Secretary is playing down the impact of a hard border, setting sights lower [not significantly harder], and generally prioritising regulatory divergence as fixed point around border must adapt

10/10 Congestion charge analogy no gaffe - the leak shows he does believe something like that. Officials dont seem to, implicitly PM needed to be persuaded. But this is why Dublin/Brussels sceptical about commitments on Irish border - some Tory MPs too.