Before they were bussed off to Windsor last Thursday for a fun-filled away day on how to approach the next general election, many Conservative MPs believed a corner might just have been turned in their party’s fortunes.
Rishi Sunak appeared to have pulled off a remarkable success with his deal on the Northern Ireland protocol. The newspapers had been full of stories suggesting the prime minister might be about to betray the Brexit ers and sell out the Democratic Unionist party (DUP). And they were raising questions about how Boris Johnson, still furious over Sunak’s role in ousting him from No 10 last summer, might exploit this moment of maximum danger to advance his own plans for a sensational comeback to Downing Street.
The choreography of the European Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to unveil the Windsor framework alongside the prime minister was intended to show that the Sunak government was approaching European negotiations differently from the days of the confrontational Johnson leadership. The UK and EU were now friends and partners after Brexit, no longer implacable foes.
In his statement to the Commons later last Monday, the prime minister was meticulous in explaining the detail of the joint UK-EU plan, particularly its surprise rabbit-out-of-the-hat element: the proposal for a “ Stormont brake ” that would allow a power-sharing Northern Ireland government to veto new EU laws it did not like.
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