Whoever wins the Conservative leadership next week, one can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for them. Even if it’s Boris Johnson. Liz Truss fulfilled her inadvertent promise to ‘hit the ground from day one’, and her successor might do the same.
One of first points of impact could be the Medium-Term Fiscal Statement due on October 31, when Hunt or his successor try to sell a divided party and an unhappy nation on a course of bitter public spending medicine that none of them want. Another is Northern Ireland.
Even as the would-be candidates struggle for nominations, Labour is taking the chance to go on the offensive. Sir Keir Starmer announced yesterday that the opposition will go hard at the Government’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords. Peers are set to table more than 20 amendments to the legislation, which will empower ministers to deliver unilateral remedies to the current trade border in the Irish Sea.
The ERG made it very clear that they had no intention of allowing ministers to evade the ECJ issue. They will likely tell whoever succeeds Truss the same thing
Watching closely will be the Democratic Unionists, who are currently in a face-off with Chris Heaton-Harris, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. In a recent visit to the Province, he doubled down on his commitment that a fresh set of Stormont elections will be held if the DUP haven’t agreed to re-form the devolved executive by 28 October.
For their part, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson insists that he and his colleagues will not go back into power-sharing in Belfast unless and until the British government makes real progress on dealing with the Protocol. And unless a new election sees them unseated as the largest Unionist party (unlikely), it won’t break their ability to keep the devolved government shut down.
None of this is doing Northern Ireland any good, of course. Before the DUP brought down Stormont over the Protocol, Sinn Fein did the same over the cash-for-ash scandal and again over welfare reform. A Westminster which took its responsibility to deliver not just peace but order and good government to Ulster would by now have developed the mechanisms for having key decisions taken by ministers in London; indeed, the threat of being so usurped might just have spurred recalcitrant MLAs to return to their posts.
Instead, successive governments have done the absolute bare minimum necessary to keep the Province ticking over. Heaton-Harris – perhaps in hope of spooking the DUP – has not even shot down claims by Alliance and Sinn Fein figures that any direct rule would require the involvement of the Irish Government.
One rather surprising feature of the Truss Government, given her role as architect of the NI Protocol Bill, was the suddenly warm mood music from London and Dublin about the state of the talks. All of a sudden, there was talk again of ‘landing zones’.
Yet according to reporting at the time, this was due in part to the suggestion that ministers might give way to the EU on the question of a permanent role for the European Court of Justice in Northern Ireland.
One can see why a Government that had just made a bonfire of its credibility might have wanted to avoid a trade war with Brussels. However, senior people at the ERG were making it very clear that they had no intention of allowing ministers to evade the ECJ issue. They will likely tell whoever succeeds Truss the same thing. Given their relative size and discipline, and the fragility of the Conservatives’ majority, a mutiny by the Brexiteers could make life very difficult indeed for whoever’s in No. 10.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter who that is. Because once again, we will see a change of government in London and a change in the team at the Northern Ireland office – the latest in a chain of resets of both political priorities and institutional knowledge that have undermined the UK’s diplomatic operation throughout the post-Brexit negotiations.
But if whoever succeeds Truss doesn’t want to just roll over to Brussels, they are going to need a plan for getting the NI Protocol Bill passed, wielding the powers it contains, and weathering the EU response. And if they are minded to give in, they’ll need a plan for delivering an acceptable bare minimum of government in an Ulster without a devolved executive – and for somehow keeping the ERG on side.
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