The EU And UK Are Playing Chicken Over Border Checks

If you thought Brexit was “done”, think again. Stand by for another whole year of Brexit negotiations in 2022 and the familiar spectre of a no-deal cliff edge at the end of it.

- Andrew Grice

If you thought Brexit was “done”, think again. Stand by for another whole year of Brexit negotiations in 2022 and the familiar spectre of a no-deal cliff edge at the end of it.

Boris Johnson regards the Northern Ireland protocol, which prevents a hard border with Ireland, as unfinished business.

Allies say he is ready in principle to deploy what Brussels regards as the “nuclear option” of the protocol’s Article 16 to suspend key elements of it, but which UK officials describe as a “surgical strike”. The move would lift many of the checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. Johnson’s aim: to show the EU that this would not put at risk its cherished single market, so it eventually concedes the virtually invisible trade border the UK wants.

The problem is that Johnson signed up to a real trade border in the Irish Sea in 2019. Either he didn’t understand it, as some Whitehall officials believe, or he always intended to rip it up after a general election in which he needed an EU agreement to allay fears about no deal. Or perhaps both. As Dominic Cummings told us, Johnson “never had a Scooby-Doo” what the agreement meant and Downing Street always intended to ditch it.