Tag Archives: people: liz truss

Liz Truss and Northern Ireland: Examining Anthony Seldon’s narrative

Posted on by

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 (The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill did make some progress in the House of Lords before it was withdrawn by Sunak, but Truss can be forgiven for missing it.)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.

Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Prime Minister has to be both manager of their team as well as the captain on the pitch. ‘Hero Prime Ministers’ who try to do too much themselves, like Chamberlain in the Munich Crisis or Eden during the Suez Crisis, and who become detached from their Cabinets, become unstuck. This is what happened to Blair over Iraq, or Thatcher over the poll tax at the end of her premiership. Spurned Cabinets will eventually bite the Prime Minister. Hero premiers never end well.

This 384-page book covers the 49 days of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in intense detail. It’s the latest in a series of books by Seldon on British Prime Ministers, looking at the qualities which make for good (and bad) leadership, and how Truss’s ascent and downfall illustrate those characteristics.

The fundamental of the story is that Truss launched both a plan to help households with the cost of energy bills, and a bigger plan to cut taxes, without offering any hint about how the books would be balanced, indeed insisting that there would be no cuts to public spending. The Treasury, whose job it is to point these problems out, had been muzzled by the sacking of its chief official on Truss’s first day in office. In her own memoir, Truss is fixated on a particular set of financial instruments that she had never heard of and which started going wrong as the crisis spread, and blames other people for not briefing her.

But the fact is that there was never any plan for funding either the energy payments or the tax cuts, and Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were completely unable to give a straight answer to the question of where the money would come from, making them look financially illiterate. (Because they were.) The disintegration of the government rapidly followed. Truss blames the ‘deep state’ for her downfall; Seldon sees the problem as ‘deep incompetence’.

One of the headlines from media coverage of the book is that Truss supposedly considered cancelling cancer treatments by the National Health Service. This is not quite reported in the text; on 12 October, the day when reality broke in and the Truss team started frantically looking for £70 billion in savings, Shabbir Memali and Adam Memon, respectively economic advisers to Truss and Kwarteng, told Alex Boyd, Truss’s energy adviser, “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” (Boyd is obviously Seldon’s source.) It’s not a direct quote, barely even an indirect quote; my suspicion is that someone somewhere said, “Oh fuck, £70 billion is what the NHS spends on cancer” and the inference was drawn. Honestly, it’s clear that Truss had no specific ideas at all – which was part of the problem – and would not listen to anyone who told her this could be an issue – which was also part of the problem.

Another part of the problem was her leadership style, and given that Seldon and Meakin’s technique is to interview those close to the action and take those accounts as gospel, this is the part of the book that really does excel, even though I think some of the data could have been queried a bit (more on this tomorrow). In particular, Seldon finds her wanting in the skill of appointing good people and listening to them.

A point he doesn’t dwell on, but that is obvious to even the most casual observer, is that Truss is a very poor communicator. The local radio interviews after her mini-budget were the beginning of the end, really early in the game (29 September, in fact). The final blow, which fell suddenly and unexpectedly, was a completely avoidable breakdown in communications between Truss and her Chief Whip about a House of Commons vote on a relatively minor issue. She’s just not very good at people.

The best bit of writing in the book, however, is about an event that Truss had absolutely no control over: the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Truss had been briefed when she went to Balmoral for her formal appointment as PM that the end was much closer than most people knew. But when the moment came, she and a few aides crowded into the Downing Street flat for Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to get the news from his palace equivalent, Sir Edward Young. It’s certainly an event that will be remembered much more vividly than any other moment of her premiership.

This is not a perfect book; Seldon has an axe to grind about the extent to which Truss proves or disproves his own theories of good prime minister-ship, and grinds it hard; he takes his sources too seriously; he under-rates the importance of communication as a skill; he is very wrong about Northern Ireland, so wrong that I’m going to write another whole blog post about it. But all in all, it’s an engaging and fascinating account of an extraordinary political car crash, and you can get it here.

Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

My Brexit referendum campaign started with a hurried and unplanned departure from Europe. It was February 2016, and we were on a half-term family holiday in Paris. The tiny Airbnb I’d found on the top floor of an apartment block near the Arc de Triomphe looked much more attractive in the photos than it turned out to be in real life. We had only been there a few days when the call came from London: Prime Minister David Cameron had completed negotiations on his new deal with the European Union. He was convening an urgent Cabinet meeting the following day to showcase it and fire the starting gun on the promised referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU.

Liz Truss is the only British prime minister that I have actually met. (By contrast, I met Garret Fitzgerald and John Bruton many times, took Micheál Martin punting once in Oxford, and also have had a handshake with Albert Reynolds and a conspiratorial wink from Bertie Ahern.) We were both student Lib Dem activists in the early 1990s, though she is a bit younger than me, and I was in the room when she made her famous speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1994:

I congratulated her on her speech, though not long afterwards we found that our views diverged, and I never heard from her again.

As you may be aware, she failed to last even two months as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister back in 2022, but ably laid the foundations of failure that Rishi Sunak and his party are now digging even deeper. Her failure really should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Matthew Parris wrote about her rise and inevitable fall during that long hot summer two years ago. Here is the whole piece, but the first of many juicy quotes is:

In Times columns I’ve offered my first impressions of this candidate. They were that she was intellectually shallow, her convictions wafer-thin; that she was driven by ambition pure and simple; that her manner was wooden and her ability to communicate convincingly to an electorate wider than the narrow band of Tory activists was virtually non-existent; that she was dangerously impulsive and headstrong, with a self-belief unattended by precaution; and that her leadership of the Conservative Party and our country would be a tragedy for both.

Most, but not all, of this analysis is borne out by later history and by Truss’s own book, which I have now read. (I got it for free, don’t worry.)

The format of the book is a little unusual. The very first chapter is about her meeting with the Queen, and the Queen’s death two days later. Elizabeth II’s last words to Truss were “Pace yourself.” “Perhaps I should have listened”, she reflects, in a rare moment of self-examination.

The chapters on her political career in government, which form the meat of the book, are sandwiched between incoherent political rallying calls for Conservatives to get their act together and defeat the Left at home and China abroad. The first of Matthew Parris’s allegations, lack of intellectual depth, is amply borne out by these more polemical sections. One is reminded of the old saying that while the problem with liberals is that they only read liberal literature, the problem with conservatives is that they read no literature at all. It’s not that she doesn’t really engage with the arguments made by her opponents; she doesn’t even really engage with the arguments of those she thinks she agrees with.

Her account of her time as a minister under Cameron, May and Johnson (for all of whom she retains a certain loyal affection and sympathy) is surprisingly dull, because she didn’t achieve very much and wants to blame other people for that. She is clearly, as Parris points out, unable to communicate clearly outside her own office, and fails to put the hours in behind the scenes to build up what we in our business would call a stakeholder coalition. She seems to believe that having been put in charge is sufficient for everyone to start doing what she wants them to do. In real life, this is never the case, even in the most autocratic power structures.

She writes of one night that she lay awake worrying about a prison officer, injured in a riot, but apart from that, there is a surprising lack of reference to the human dimension of her policies. There are almost no personal glimpses of colleagues and few of her family. One doesn’t get much sense of Truss as a social animal from her own account. Maybe she just isn’t; but for me that’s one of the crucial political skills.

And these things all collide when tragedy strikes and she becomes prime minister. She explains at great length how the economic plans that she and Kwasi Kwarteng proposed weren’t really all that radical, but simply misunderstood and subjected to unfair criticism; but I think even sympathetic readers (which I am not) will be lost by her depiction of a grand Left Woke conspiracy to kill growth which includes the Bank of England and the financial markets. I was irresistibly reminded of the French presidential election debate in 2012, when the challenger François Hollande killed incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to fight back with the telling line, “Ce n’est jamais de votre faute!” – “It’s never your fault!”

In Truss’s world, it’s never her fault either.

In summary, this is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. It is clearly intended for the American right-wing conference circuit market – there are many explanations of basic British political concepts for the American reader, and also the annoying and frequent use of “math” rather than “maths”. You can skip it in good conscience; you haven’t missed anything. If you really want, you can get it here.

I think there is also some cause for reflection about how political parties should choose their leaders. Part of this is about having a good team of candidates, which the Conservatives have not had in recent years. But I am also unconvinced that a ballot of party members is such a good way of identifying a good potential prime minister.

The Conservative system allows MPs to winnow down the candidates to two, who are then voted on by party members. A contested vote among members has happened four times; twice party members confirmed the MPs’ vote, and chose leaders who went on to win the next election (Cameron in 2005 and Johnson in 2017), and twice they chose the candidate liked by fewer MPs, who then failed and was booted out before the next election (Duncan-Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022). Three leaders were elected without the need to consult members, Howard (2003), May (2016) and Sunak (2022); none of them was able to win the next election either, though May (who was also supported by MPs when they voted) came closest.

I don’t fundamentally mind if the Conservatives choose internal systems which increase their chances of electoral failure, but it’s probably not a brilliant thing overall for democracy.

The Northern Ireland Protocol: or, Now Look What You Made Me Do

Posted on by

It’s been a while since I have written at length about Brexit, but the most recent developments have driven me to put some electrons together on the topic. By way of introduction, I participated in a televised manel discussion on Al-Jazeera on Wednesday with Duncan Morrow of Ulster University and Graham Gudgin from Cambridge, which you can watch here:

Also very importantly, the excellent Brexit Witness archive has published a wide-ranging interview with Andrew McCormick, one of the best of the mandarins in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. I do recommend reading the whole thing, but Tony Connelly of RTE has published a summary here.

The other recent development, of course, is the Northern Ireland Assembly election. I wrote about the raw numbers last weekend; there is some necessary analysis which will come now.

To begin at the beginning. The Brexiters lied from the start about the effect of Brexit on the Irish border. Here is a BBC story from February 2016, four months before the referendum, featuring Boris Johnson stating that Brexit would leave arrangements on the Irish border “absolutely unchanged”. This was clearly untrue; taking back control of the UK’s borders was a constant theme of the Brexit campaign, and it was and is ridiculous to say that this would have no practical consequences on the UK’s only land border.

It seems however that this only slowly dawned on Whitehall after the referendum result. When the EU insisted that citizenship rights, financial obligations and arrangements on the Irish border should be sorted out as part of the divorce deal, the British initially found the first two much more difficult to swallow. Many in London seemed to believe that Chancellor Merkel of Germany would tell the Irish to accept whatever deal suited the British for the sake of future car exports, thus completely misunderstanding the weight of individual member states in the EU system, not to mention the politics of the German car industry.

Part of the myth spread by Brexit secretary David Davis is that the Irish government drastically hardened its line on sorting out the border when Leo Varadkar took over from Enda Kenny as Taoiseach in 2017. Again, this is untrue, but I categorise it as a misunderstanding rather than a lie; what actually happened in 2017 was that the UK actually started paying attention to the fact that Dublin had a view (to say that London was actually listening would be a step too far).

There is no need to rehearse at length the agony of Theresa May, who eventually realised that the hard Brexit to which she had committed herself at the start of the process would be disastrous if implemented on the Irish border, but failed to take her party with her, let alone the DUP. Johnson, having replaced her as Prime Minister with the help of the DUP, then (to my surprise) agreed a deal with Leo Varadkar including a special status for Northern Ireland which became the Protocol.

To remind you: the Protocol keeps Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market and customs union, in order to avoid customs checks on the land border. But since the UK has “taken back control”, this inevitably means that somewhere there must be customs and other checks on goods which might travel from the rest of the UK to the EU, and if the Border is to remain open, that means that those checks take place in the Irish Sea, between England, Scotland and Wales to the east, and Ireland and Northern Ireland to the West. The great sitcom Parlement spoofed these discussions rather well:

The question is, how did we end up with a situation where Boris Johnson claimed to have an “oven-ready” deal with the EU before the 2019 election, and now repudiates the Northern Ireland Protocol, one of the core planks of that deal? The UK government’s defenders make various arguments. Some say that the EU has been too tough in implementing the rules (which in fact have not yet been implemented in any meaningful sense). Some (including the then UK chief negotiator, David Frost) say that the deal was negotiated too quickly (after three and a half years, which does not really seem too short a time to prepare).

Dominic Cummings, who was Johnson’s chief of staff at the time, says that he and his team always intended to renege on “the bits we didn’t like” after it had been signed and the December 2019 election won, but he does not think that Johnson himself actually understood it. I am inclined to agree with those who think that Johnson was being actively mendacious rather than ignorant or stupid; he famously assured Northern Irish business leaders that they should throw any new forms in the bin, even though that is clearly what his deal would have required if he had had the slightest intention of implementing it.

The UK now threatens to unilaterally disapply the Protocol starting next week, provoking a trade war with the EU at precisely the moment that the West needs to be united in support of Ukraine. It is alleged that the new arrangements have made life worse in Northern Ireland (though the government’s own economists report that thanks to the Protocol, Northern Ireland’s economy is outperforming the rest of the UK’s). The EU is blamed for creating the trade barriers which the UK demanded and agreed to. The UK, now keen to sign trade agreements with the rest of the world, is about to tear up its biggest agreement, with its closest and largest trading partner. Not hugely smart.

Why do this? I ask again. My view is that Conservatives in general, who are genuinely and deeply emotionally attached to the Union, cannot bear the thought of implementing a trade and customs frontier inside the UK. Johnson assured them in 2019 that it would be all right, no matter what might actually be written in the deal, and they believed him, despite his track record with the truth. So I predict that the Johnson government, however long it lasts, will not implement the Protocol in any meaningful way.

On top of that, the consequences of fighting with the EU are largely positive for the Conservatives. It keeps Brexit going and puts Labour in a difficult position. Sure, there are economic consequences, but they are lost in the static of post-pandemic recovery and the effects of the war in Ukraine, and will be most felt in Northern Ireland where the Conservatives do not stand anyway. Few Conservatives care about the damage to the UK’s international reputation – they are all foreigners, after all. The strategy is in fact to fight rather than to win.

There is very little appetite in Brussels, Dublin or other capitals to give the British what they currently say they want. This goes right back to the early days of Brexit, when the EU was very alert to the potential for the UK to undermine the Single Market. In addition, the UK’s July 2021 Command Paper on the Protocol ambitiously rewrote the recent history of the relationship to an extent that was unrecognisable outside Westminster and further undermined trust. The tactics of escalation have failed to convince other capitals that the British are serious about finding solutions. It’s also noticeable that the current escalation is coming from the UK Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who clearly has ambitions to be the next Conservative leader, an election that must come sooner or later, and also needs to put her own previous pro-Remain baggage behind her.

The actual situation on the ground in Northern Ireland is barely relevant to Conservative decision-making. The DUP do have an outsized influence with the Tories because they have the largest delegation at Westminster, and their MPs are well networked with the Conservative back-benchers; Sinn Fein are not there at all, the SDLP have only two MPs, one of whom is the party leader, and Alliance have only one, who is the party’s deputy leader. But one should not exaggerate this factor; it did not help the DUP when the 2019 deal was passed, over their loud objections about the Protocol.

So, the last part of this post is about Northern Ireland, where the DUP last week paid the price at the ballot box for their strategic mistakes of the last few years. I wrote briefly about Arlene Foster’s leadership when she resigned; it’s worth adding that the DUP’s pledge to punish the Northern Ireland institutions, by not allowing a government to be formed until the Protocol has gone, has a real whiff of Blazing Saddles. Yes, it is a functional political problem that Unionists as a whole do not accept the Protocol; but Stormont has very little to do with that, and Westminster is where the battle actually is. (Unlike almost everyone else, I’m therefore actually rather sympathetic to Jeffrey Donaldson’s stated intention to remain an MP for the time being.)

That brings us to the other side of the DUP’s policy choices. There is a very strong perception among non-Unionists that the real reason that the DUP do not want to reinstate the Northern Ireland Executive is that Sinn Fein would get the position of First Minister, thanks to the rewriting of the rules at the behest of the DUP in 2007. Personally, I share that perception, though I will be glad to be proved wrong. If I am right that the UK government is about to escalate the situation with the EU, we will soon see if the DUP is actually prepared to accept the result of an election that it did not win. (For more on the election, see the very interesting analysis by Lee Reynolds.)

The DUP is under threat from Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice, which snatched a quarter of their 2017 votes away on 5 May (though remarkably failed to win any seats); Allister is very clear that Sinn Fein should not be allowed in government at all, and that the DUP would be stooges for enabling them to lead it, and the voters who defected to him from the DUP presumably feel the same. But if Northern Ireland is to have a long term future at all as a society, power-sharing is essential – as my father recommended in 1971.

A brief personal parenthesis: Both Jim Allister (when he was an MEP) and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson (when he was a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly) have been personally helpful to me in the past, knowing full well that I disagree with them on a lot of things, so I want to state on the record that I respect and salute their professionalism.

But if you are attached to the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland – and I am not – you will need to start selling the case for the Union better; as Lee Reynolds puts it, “The declining politics of birth and disappeared politics of push must be replaced by the politics of persuasion.” Crucially, you will need to show that Unionism accepts election results even when it doesn’t win; non-Unionists have had to accept that for a century.

We’re not yet at the stage where a border poll has become an immediate prospect, but we are not all that far away either. I wrote three years ago (scanned here) that voters in the convinceable middle, who historically have conditionally supported the Union, can foreseeably be persuaded to join a united Ireland, if three things happen:

  1. Brexit turns out badly (✔)
  2. Unionism continues to be worse than Nationalism at appealing to its own core vote and not engaging with the centre (✔)
  3. There is a better offer on the table from Nationalists (currently quite far from being achieved, and in particular the need for Nationalists to find a convincing narrative on health services is even more acute after the last two years).

Nothing is certain in politics, but the current direction of travel is clear, and the DUP and the Conservative Party are doing nothing to stop it.