Newton Emerson: Can the DUP sell its Brexit backstop climbdown?

Yards from the finishing line, the DUP’s Brexit hardball has gone flat. Even the party’s harshest critics must concede it has had a good run, at least within its own stated terms. The unionist tail has wagged the Westminster dog for a year and a half without the British government or any significant faction of the Conservative Party openly turning against it.

Nor has British public opinion spurned the union or unionism beyond the vocal minority which has always been so inclined.

Since the backstop emerged from withdrawal agreement negotiations in December 2017, the DUP has secured two apparently concrete victories: a commitment from London to protect the UK’s internal market, and a concession from Brussels to extend the backstop customs territory to the whole UK.

May is still counting on just enough Labour members breaking ranks at the last minute to support her

However, the DUP undermined those victories by damning them as inadequate, and now it is clear they are all it will get.

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Prime minister Theresa May’s is running down the clock – this has become painfully apparent. She is daring the House of Commons to back her deal or no deal. If that fails she will ask the EU to reset the clock until she succeeds. There is no other plausible deal, prime minister or plan.

The DUP remains in an influential position. Hopes of a government pact with Labour or factions of Labour, rendering the unionist MPs and their backbench Tory allies redundant, are merely being strung out to pass the time.

May is still counting on just enough Labour members breaking ranks at the last minute to support her. That means she needs to keep the unionists onside for Brexit, as well as for the rest of this parliament, as the Conservatives cannot govern without them.

Painfully apparent

Any minor gesture May can beg from Brussels in the next six weeks will be aimed at giving the DUP one last thing it can sell as a victory. But that is all the party can hold out for, as has also become painfully apparent.

Contrast the DUP’s present tone with December 2017, when a party source declared: “This is a battle of who blinks first, and we’ve ripped off our eyelids.”

On Monday, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said “it’s time to dial down the rhetoric and focus on solutions rather than scaremongering”, provoking widespread merriment given recent DUP rhetoric.

On Sunday, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson penned a strikingly emollient article in the Dublin press, admitting the party has been guilty of “megaphone diplomacy”, praising North-South co-operation and pledging to seek a Brexit deal and an open Border.

Donaldson quit the UUP in 2003 after dividing it by rejecting the Belfast Agreement. Now spoken of as an imminent replacement for DUP leader Arlene Foster, he seems to have been tasked with uniting the DUP behind the withdrawal agreement.

If Ian Paisley senior was still alive he would no doubt consider this an amusingly Old Testament parable.

The DUP’s Brexit spokesman, Sammy Wilson MP, continues to demand the backstop be scrapped, forcing the party to deny a split.

Every other senior member of the DUP, including Foster, has shifted from calling for the backstop’s removal to saying they could accept it with changes or qualifications, while leaving the options for that open. Yet they are also still warning it could break up the UK.

Border poll

In a related wobble the DUP is plainly unnerved by talk of a Border poll.

When Sinn Féin demanded a poll in 2013, Foster famously said “be careful what you wish for”. Since the EU referendum she has said a poll would be “divisive and destabilising”.

This is not because the DUP thinks unionism would lose, or even that a Border poll is likely, but because the party knows its voters do not thank it for raising the issue through its handling of Brexit.

Can the DUP sell what looks like an inevitable climbdown on the withdrawal agreement?

If and when May's deal passes, the choice unionist voters will perceive to have been made will be between the backstop and no backstop

Opinion polls show a solid majority of DUP voters prefer the backstop to a no-deal Brexit, in line with Northern Ireland voters overall. However, questions on stark hypothetical choices produce irrelevant results – much polling on a united Ireland has the same flaw.

If and when May’s deal passes, the choice unionist voters will perceive to have been made will be between the backstop and no backstop, and they will have to be talked out of the fears the DUP talked them into in the first place.

Mercenary chances abound to sweeten the deal. The DUP has an unprecedented moment of leverage and could ask for almost anything in the British government’s gift – most predictably more money for Northern Ireland, or more cannily ways to smooth the path back to Stormont.

But the party will be looking over its shoulder for hardline opportunism from smaller rivals. The UUP and the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) are both still demanding the backstop’s full removal.

Historically, pathetically, that is the tail that always ends up wagging the unionist dog.