I very much enjoyed Sir Anthony Seldon’s book on Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous term as Prime Minister of the UK. But one point really jumped out at me as extraordinarily inaccurate. He reports that her engagement with the EU, while prime minister, opened the way to the eventual Windsor Framework signed between her successor, Rishi Sunak, and the EU the following year, and indeed highlights this “pathbreaking work” as the sole foreign policy success of her premiership.
Like much of Seldon’s book (including many of the best bits), this is probably based on an assertion from a single source, and I think Seldon could usefully have questioned it. It very much clashes with the received narrative of Truss’s relations with the EU in relation to Northern Ireland.
The best quick summary of that received narrative, i.e. what we all thought had happened, is laid out by Truss herself in her own book. She discusses the topic in a short section at the end of Chapter 8, her experience as foreign secretary (rather than as Prime Minister). She tells how (despite discouragement from “lots of people”) she decided to take over the EU dossier from David Frost when he resigned in December 2021 and “put in a call to Boris and expressed my thoughts on what we should do to take on the EU over the unworkable and damaging Northern Ireland Protocol”.
In her version, Johnson duly gave her the role of dealing with the EU, but negotiations with the EU got nowhere, so “I then prepared a law to put through Parliament with Attorney General Suella Braverman. This became the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and used the doctrine of necessity to overcome international law issues.”
The Bill got through the House of Commons before Johnson’s resignation, and he and Truss then planned to use the Parliament Act to force it through against the House of Lords. “It never got to that point, as my successor withdrew it. Yet the Windsor Framework that he installed in its place simply does not resolve the issues. Too much was given away to the EU. That is why I could not support it.”
I don’t agree with most of Truss’s political judgements, but I also don’t dispute any of the historical facts that she states. (The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill did make some progress in the House of Lords before it was withdrawn by Sunak, but Truss can be forgiven for missing it.)
Seldon’s version is very much at variance with the historical facts as I understand them to have been and as Truss reports them. He introduces the topic in Chapter 5, on Truss’s foreign policy as prime minister. He starts by framing the issue tactically, as one where Truss could gain the support of “the ‘no-surrender’ ERG MPs”. Seldon describes the Northern Ireland Protocol as “stuck together by Johnson in 2019 to replace May’s ‘backstop’ to ensure Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the rest of the UK post-Brexit” which is inaccurate on several points, most notably that the Protocol ensures that Northern Ireland will remain aligned with the EU, not the UK.
Seldon goes on, “For two years, inertia had reigned while hardline Brexit minister David Frost had been overseeing it. But possibilities for progress were suddenly opened up when he resigned from Johnson’s government the weekend before Christmas in 2021.” It’s a peculiar positioning of blame for the failure of the EU-UK negotiating process in 2020 and 2021 on Frost. First of all, even unsympathetic observers would cut Frost a little slack due to the global pandemic. Secondly, the perception in Brussels at least is that Frost was only channeling his master’s voice, and that Johnson was the real problem.
Seldon: “Johnson alighted on the Foreign Secretary as the ideal figure to take on the matter. Truss had no delusions that the master schemer was offering it to her knowing it would be ‘a poisoned chalice’, a clever wheeze his team had concocted to trip up a rival whose star continued in the ascendant… Her team fully intended it would rebound against No. 10.” This is completely at variance with Truss’s account of her volunteering for the task, eyes wide open. They cannot both be right. Possibly Seldon’s (justifiable) contempt for Johnson is misleading him here.
Seldon: “Their rivalry reached a high point in March when a paper she had placed in his PM box was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph. The press report, which painted her as trying to stop Johnson from invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, provoked fury against her among Brexiteers. ‘It was not true, and they knew it. It was No. 10 making mischief so Johnson could be seen to be tougher on Northern Ireland than Liz, and good in the eyes of the right wing,’ said an aide. Truss was furious; ‘We’re not going to submit anything on paper to No. 10 ever again,’ she fumed. She stormed into No. 10 to see Johnson on Monday 28 March, the day after the article appeared. ‘Right, we’re going to legislate on this, no compromises,’ she told the PM, one aide recalled. They agreed that any hope of support from the EU was forlorn, and from their deliberations emerged the hardline Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which ground through the system until Johnson resigned in July, for her to pick up when she became PM.”
There are a number of inaccuracies here. The leak that annoyed Truss appeared on 13 March, not 27 March as Seldon implies (it is dated 12 March on the Telegraph website). The lede is that Truss had “set out plans to put the potential triggering of Article 16 on hold because of the Ukraine crisis and instead help Northern Ireland businesses with an ‘economic stimulus’ package including tax cuts.” It also quotes “Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, [who] warned that it would be ‘risible’ to shelve the triggering of Article 16 until later this year because of the war in Ukraine.”
What did appear on 27 March was an interview with Truss where the Telegraph noted that “she does not deny having shelved the idea of triggering Article 16 any time soon, because of the need for a united EU front in the face of Russian aggression”. The problem was not the leak, but the fact that she did not push back firmly enough in the interview on the suggestion that she was wobbly on bashing the EU; not for the first or last time, she lost control of the message, and blamed it on someone else (Johnson in this case). In Seldon’s version, it was from this moment on that Truss and Johnson determined to align on Northern Ireland and legislate to break their previous commitments and international law. I wrote in May 2022 about the foolishness and short-sightedness of their position.
Seldon comes back to the topic when he brings Truss, by now Prime Minister, to New York for the UN General Assembly, in a rush after the Queen’s funeral in September 2022. “Truss’s political team said she should go, and she herself was anxious to have her planned bilateral with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the Northern Ireland Bill… She ended up seeing von der Leyen twice and she proved key to unblocking the impasse. Their meeting secured agreement for back channels to open up, and for ideas to be explored and tested. After the Mini-Budget[,] momentum was lost, and it was left for Sunak to pick up the pieces. The result was the Windsor Framework of February 2023, a legal agreement between the UK and the EU to adjust the Northern Ireland Protocol, bearing more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before.”
(Seldon then spends some time on Truss’s meeting with President Biden, which was also coloured by the Northern Ireland issue, but I don’t have space for that here. I am trying to track down an amusing report that Truss instructed the British ambassador in Washington to complain to Biden’s chief of staff that he was listening too much to his advisers Jake Sullivan and Amanda Sloat on Ireland; Biden’s team apparently told the ambassador to get lost. I happen to know Amanda Sloat, who has spent more time in Northern Ireland than the entire Truss government combined. Or the Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Starmer governments, for that matter.)
I don’t find any contemporary reference to Truss and von der Leyen having had more than one meeting in New York on 21 September, or any other meeting anywhere else at any other time (they don’t seem to have interacted at the Queen’s funeral), and the statement post-meeting (and press briefing around it) suggests that they mainly talked about Russia. Truss and von der Leyen probably did agree back-channel communication to de-escalate tensions – it rings absolutely true for both of them – and of course one would not expect to see that in any contemporary reporting. Truss had already had a calm meeting with then Taoiseach Micheal Martin on 18 September, in the margins of the Queen’s funeral, leading to lower-level meetings on 6 and 7 October; but neither she nor Seldon mentions the Irish government at all in their books – it is of no importance to either narrative.
The one intervention that really did make the difference in terms of mood music during Truss’s premiership was the heartfelt apology to Ireland from Steve Baker, former Brexit hardliner turned Northern Ireland junior minister, during the Conservative Party’s annual conference. Baker was undergoing his own struggles at the time, as we now know, and Truss said that he was “speaking for himself”; but it made much more difference to the atmosphere than anything Truss did in public. The Irish Times ran a piece on 5 October (in advance of the 6/7 October talks mentioned above) wondering if the new mood music could be taken seriously, hopefully citing Martin’s conversation and also sources close to von der Leyen. Of course, the writing was already on the wall for Truss’s premiership by then, so it hardly mattered much. Perhaps it did matter a little.
I am particularly puzzled by Seldon’s assertion that the Windsor Framework of February 2023 bears “more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before”. The word “reference” here is presumably a mistake for “resemblance”. The puzzling question for me is: what ideas had Truss promoted the year before? The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which is the only such idea mentioned in Seldon’s earlier chapter and the only one mentioned by Truss herself in her book, was a unilateral revocation of parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement; you cannot draw a straight line between it and the Windsor Framework, which is a rather modest, mutually face-saving adaptation of the original Protocol. Truss herself certainly didn’t see them as related; she spoke out against the Windsor Framework, voted against it when it came to the House of Commons, and as noted above criticizes it again in her book.
POLITICO published an in-depth account of how the Windsor Framework was negotiated on 28 February 2023, the day after it was signed. The lion’s share of the credit is given to three British officials, Tim Barrow, Mark Davies and Brendan Threlfall; but I’ll admit that the article does give some mild kudos to Truss, basically for not being Boris Johnson and therefore changing the atmosphere of UK/EU relations for the better. (Other people given more credit than Truss in the piece include Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly and King Charles III.) Even so, the piece says that Truss “soon became ‘very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU’.” I suspect that this is standard Truss language for people who won’t do what she wants; she makes similar comments about others in her book.
So, coming back to Seldon: it is decidedly odd that he gives Truss credit for the Windsor Framework, when it is clear that she herself thinks that the Framework is a dud and that Sunak threw away all her hard work. The consensus from other sources is that under Truss, relations with the EU improved simply because she was not Boris Johnson. I find it difficult to give her much credit for this – it’s not as if she had any choice in the matter. It’s a shame that Seldon allowed himself to be mesmerised by his anonymous source, without checking the details a bit more carefully.
As always, if you read a book on a topic you don’t know all that well, and there is a bit in the book about a subject you do happen to know something more about, and that bit of the book is wrong, it’s a healthy warning about how seriously the rest should be taken. I’m still recommending Seldon’s book, which you can get here – just not as heartily as I would have liked.
