Truss will have to think outside the box to resolve NI protocol impasse

In appointing two former chairmen of the European Reform Group (the most hardline of the Conservative Party’s pro-Brexit lobby) as secretary of state and minister of state for Northern Ireland, Liz Truss sent a message to the DUP — trust me. But during her first outing at prime minister’s question time on September 7th she sent another message to everyone else: “What we cannot allow is for this situation [the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill] to drift because my number one priority is protecting the supremacy of the Good Friday Agreement.”

Trust from the DUP will be hard earned. It believes it was let down by Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Lord Frost (the UK’s former chief negotiator with the European Union).

The DUP knows every member of the ERG and Truss’s cabinet voted for a withdrawal agreement which included the protocol to protect the EU single market while avoiding a hard border and which was criticised by the leaders of every unionist party. So far, neither Truss nor Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker (the new secretary of state and minister) have acknowledged what the DUP view as the error of their ways. And while Jeffrey Donaldson has welcomed the appointment of Heaton-Harris, one DUP member told me: “It looks good, but I’m minded of the saying that you can only be betrayed by supposed friends.”

Truss, like Johnson and May before her, is instinctively pro-Union. She certainly doesn’t want the United Kingdom to disintegrate under her watch. That said, and like her predecessors, she doesn't have any emotional attachment to what might be described as ‘Ulster’ unionism. It’s an identity which has never been fully understood in Westminster — or even across the London-centric media — which may account, in part at least, for unionists’ regular feeling of betrayal. Indeed, every UK government since Harold Wilson’s in the late 1960s has, if memory serves, been accused of treachery by at least one of the main unionist parties (sometimes all of them, as with the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement).

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Which is why winning over the DUP right now is so important to Truss. She’s hoping that herself in Downing Street, James Cleverly (a committed Brexiteer) in her previous job at the foreign office and Heaton-Harris and Baker in the Northern Ireland office will be welcomed by the DUP as some sort of protocol-destroying equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Because, or so she reckons, if the DUP really does trust her to deliver on the protocol then Donaldson might be prepared to give the nod of approval to the rebooting of the Northern Ireland Assembly — even if the party stops short at rejoining the Executive.

Narrowing gap

I’m not persuaded the DUP will play ball. Opinion polls indicate a sizeable majority of unionists — from all parties — support a refusal to return to ‘normal business’ until the protocol is either binned or changed beyond recognition. More importantly, the polls also indicate the DUP is clawing back votes lost to the TUV in May’s Assembly election and narrowing the gap between itself and Sinn Féin.

In the absence of a functioning Assembly by October 28th (and it hasn’t fully functioned since February) there is provision for another election in the North. Yet after Michelle O’Neill’s recent comments about there being no alternative to the IRA’s campaign Donaldson might fancy his chances of rallying the unionist vote around the DUP, eclipsing Sinn Féin as the largest party and having dibs on first minister. Right now, that might seem a more attractive option than kick-starting the Assembly, risking further divisions within his party and sending support to both the TUV and the coalition of loyalists and unionists responsible for the anti-protocol rallies in the run-up to the last election.

Truss doesn’t want the Assembly and the Belfast Agreement to collapse under her watch, either. She doesn’t want the peace process to unravel, neither does she want to return to direct rule or anything like it. That’s why she described the supremacy and survival of the Belfast Agreement as her number-one priority; meaning, of course, it outranks a hard landing for a protocol resolution. Which, in turn, worries the DUP as well as younger, harder unionists and loyalists who would be delighted to see the Belfast Agreement and Assembly permanently mothballed. All of which suggests Donaldson’s room for manoeuvre is limited.

Parliament Act

Somehow Truss has to square a circle which keeps the DUP happy and doesn’t unsettle the harder wings of unionism and loyalism yet isn’t seen as so partisan that it drives Sinn Féin out of the process altogether. That is going to be an extraordinarily difficult trick to pull off and I’m not sure she can do it. But she has to do something because the protocol Bill — which unilaterally sets aside parts of the protocol — is likely to be mauled in the House of Lords (making it unacceptable to the DUP). This in turn will force her to deploy the Parliament Act to get it through in its original form — which could take until June 2023. And if the DUP sticks to its present boycott (a word which will rattle cages) it means no Assembly until then, either.

Truss met Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Sunday and the sense, as Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney noted, was that “the general signals we’ve got from London in the past few days have been quite positive”. She wants stability in her party and leadership. She wants the ongoing showdown with the EU and Irish government resolved — quickly. Her personal journey from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives; from left to right; and from Remain to Leave suggests she is adaptable and regularly prepared to shift position when circumstances demand. Again, a possibility which worries the DUP.

One thing is clear, though: unilateralism and partiality don’t work when it comes to Northern Ireland. In the absence of joint consent you are left with competing stand-offs. So Truss could do worse than revisit the joint letter written to Theresa May by Martin McGuinness and Arlene Foster in August 2016, which opened up the prospect of the Northern parties having a role in agreeing a deal all could buy into. This time the talks could include local parties, the UK government, the Irish Government and the EU. Who knows, they might even surprise themselves. Allowing the impasse to continue will, ultimately, do enormous long-term, maybe even irreparable damage.

Alex Kane is a commentator based in Belfast. He was formerly director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party