Will Farage change his mind about Boris’s Brexit deal?

It will be some days before the full character of the Brexit trade deal and other future partnership arrangements with the EU become clear.

The smoke and mirrors that often accompany budget statements surround this deal as well, and we must wait for expert analytical eyes to go through the body of the 500-page text and tell us what troubling details lurk inside it.

But nonetheless, the very striking of a deal which can be argued to observe Boris Johnson’s basic red lines and bring an orderly switchover of trading arrangement stymies those who were seeking to catastrophise the final phase of Brexit.

It also shows that the continuity Remainers who insisted Johnson was never serious about ending the transition period with a deal were talking nonsense. No wonder they were the ones sporting the longest faces and making the most sour statements on social media today.

With Nigel Farage having already taken the strategic decision to admit that Johnson has delivered on the big picture of Brexit – albeit with many imperfections – the early atmospherics surrounding the deal are all running in the Government’s favour.

That Northern Ireland first minister Arlene Foster also gave the agreement a qualified welcome would seem to close down another potentially troublesome flank for Johnson – the idea of him selling-out the Union.

The intermission of Christmas will also take early momentum away from those ultra-purist Brexiteers seeking to advance the idea of betrayal. It is hard now to imagine a generalised outcry among Leave voters of a kind that scares Tory backbenchers into open rebellion, although the mercurial Mr Farage is quite capable of changing his mind.

For the huge swathe of voters who were resolved that Brexit must go ahead but were also heartily sick of the years of division and angst which accompanied it, the predominant emotion will probably be one of relief and a wish not to hear nearly as much about UK-EU relations in 2021.

So barring any truly grisly discoveries within the legal text, most people are likely to consider that the PM has satisfactorily met his primary general election promise of a year ago: to get Brexit done.

Attention has turned to the response of Labour and Keir Starmer. The Labour leader is whipping his MPs to back the deal, to the disgust of many of his MPs and grassroots activists. He simply could not afford to give voters the impression that he would not honour the new settlement between the UK and the EU, should he ever make it to Downing Street.

The idea that he would seek to put Britain back into the Brussels orbit would be lethal to his prospects of winning back many of the Red Wall seats Labour lost last year.

As a long-time Brexiteer, I shall wait for people such as Martin Howe QC to comb through this agreement before taking a definitive view upon it. But my instinct is to say that Boris Johnson has done quite well given where we were when took over the reins of office from Theresa May.

We could doubtlessly have done very much better had the Tories not put Theresa May into Downing Street following the referendum and had the UK government, therefore, not accepted the EU’s ‘sequencing’ demands that minimised our leverage. But the last 18 months have brought much better news for Leavers than the three years which preceded them. Mr Johnson deserves credit for that.