Boris Johnson’s plan to unilaterally override the Northern Ireland protocol has descended into a shambles that has left it more unlikely than ever to achieve any of its intended purposes.
The primary purpose of the bill that will be introduced next week is to shift negotiations with the European Union to Britain’s advantage. Its second political objective is to persuade the DUP to restore the power-sharing institutions at Stormont, and the third is to reinforce the prime minister’s own position among Conservative MPs.
The EU was never going to respond to what it regards as parliamentary antics by changing European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic’s negotiating mandate or agreeing to reopen the text of the protocol. But this week’s vote that saw 148 Conservative MPs declare no confidence in his leadership has left Johnson so weak that the EU will be inclined to withhold any concessions until he is gone.
The prime minister hoped that introducing the legislation would persuade the DUP to take the first step towards restoring the Stormont institutions by electing a speaker for the Northern Ireland Assembly. But the party is refusing to do so unless the bill directly disapplies parts of the protocol rather than simply giving ministers the power to do so.
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Johnson and his foreign secretary Liz Truss met members of the European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative Eurosceptics on Tuesday night and appeared to agree to toughen up the bill. But at a cabinet sub-committee meeting on Wednesday, Johnson told Truss to reverse the changes, some of which would have made the treaty-breaking character of the legislation even more explicit.
Too brazen a display of law-breaking would boost the number of rebel MPs from the liberal wing of the Conservatives, and would make all but certain the House of Lords’ rejection of the legislation. But as veteran Eurosceptic Bernard Jenkin made clear in the Commons on Thursday, too gentle a bill will lose the support of hardline Brexiteers.
Johnson appears to be holding tough for now, determined to face down the DUP and the ERG. But the prime minister’s positions can shift without warning, so the precise final form of next week’s bill is still anyone’s guess.