Northern Ireland bill on ice.

Rishi Sunak has put the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol bill on ice until the new year after private talks with Brussels paved the way for a new deal by February. Senior officials say the bill will not be returned to the Lords this year, giving negotiators time to thrash out new trade rules for a St Valentine’s Day agreement. The bill is designed to provide Britain with the right to unilaterally suspend aspects of the protocol, including excessive border checks if there is no deal with Brussels. But even Lord Caine, the minister in charge of pushing the bill through the Lords, has privately raised questions about whether it may break international law.

Any delay to the bill will make the European Research Group of hardline Eurosceptics suspicious Sunak is preparing to cede red lines on sovereignty. Lewis was deputy to Lord Frost when he struck Boris Johnson’s Christmas Eve deal with Brussels in 2020 but left No 10 early last year. Lewis is now acting as an unpaid intermediary with the ERG «to reassure them they are being listened to and are in the loop», a government source said. Conversations with key figures in London and Brussels have revealed that both sides think a deal can be done by February to stop any rows disrupting preparations for April’s commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

President Biden warned Sunak and Liz Truss that he wanted to resolve the matter before April’s anniversary. Plans for a Biden state visit to tie in with the anniversary depend on a deal being completed. « We want to give negotiations the best chance. We’ll let the team try the talks with Brussels first.

We’ll do the bill with the Lords». The two teams would then work flat-out on either side of Christmas to prepare for a month of formal negotiations in January. When he saw Biden at the G20 summit last month, the president stressed he cared about the Good Friday agreement and urged Sunak to find a constructive solution. Sunak replied that he was on the same page and urged the president to help with the deal.

Biden is shortly to appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland to lean on both sides to settle their differences. US diplomats have bluntly told Brussels to give ground on the need for checks on goods and the UK to drop some of the objections to the role played by the European court in advising adjudicators on EU law. Senior figures in Brussels have told prominent British politicians that the failure of Truss’s plans for extreme deregulation of the economy to make it a rival to the EU has made them much better disposed to a deal with the UK. « It will continue its passage through the Lords in the new year».

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