Boris Johnson Keeps Being Reminded About Just One Thing With The Northern Ireland Protocol

Boris Johnson has promised he will do all he can to fix the issues triggered by the Northern Ireland Protocol – but he seems to have forgotten that he’s actually the person who agreed to it.

The prime minister negotiated the protocol back in 2019 just months into his time in office. He hailed it as a breakthrough, considering negotiations about the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU had come to a standstill over Northern Ireland and a potential “backstop” pushed by his predecessor, Theresa May.

The protocol has now returned as the largest Unionist party (DUP) in the Northern Ireland Assembly is refusing to form an executive until their demands over the protocol are met.

Although Johnson has vowed to resolve the crisis, he continues to blame the EU for the way the bloc has implemented the protocol, simultaneously downplaying his own role in signing up to it.

But not many people are letting the prime minister get away with it that easily. He was cornered on Monday by various journalists who reminded him that he once championed the protocol as a “great deal”.

The BBC’s political editor Chris Mason said: “The reality of what you’re dealing with today in Northern Ireland is a direct consequence of the deal you signed,” to which Johnson replied honestly: “Yes, absolutely.”

Then Channel 4′s Paul McNamara took a firmer line, telling Johnson: “Two years in, this deal, this protocol has caused the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly, economic hardship for firms in Northern Ireland and now needs a major revision.

“Prime minister, you must be furious with whoever signed off on a deal this bad.”

Johnson replied, claiming that his priority was getting the Northern Ireland Assembly up and running, adding that “not a single one” of the five parties he spoke to liked the protocol. He did not point out that many of these worries were first raised by politicians back in 2019.

Johnson continued: “Yes, I agreed it, but I agreed it on the basis that it protected the Good Friday Agreement, it protected the East-West strand of the agreement.”

The Good Friday Agreement is the 1998 peace deal which ended the violence in Northern Ireland by ensuring the devolved government could only operate by giving a voice to Unionists and Nationalists.

He said that he was also under the impression that it would protect the UK internal market, and “that was the reason I went for it, because it seemed to me like those were things that our friends in the EU would mean sincerely”.

McNamara replied: “But you can’t be surprised by any of the bits you don’t like at the moment.

“Pretty much all of them were in the impact assessment papers.”

Johnson said “of course” he read them, but added: “I hoped and believed that our friends would not necessarily want to apply the protocol in quite the way that they have.”

Johnson’s diplomatic attempts in Belfast on Monday have not gone down well either.

The nationalist party Sinn Fein, which just took a majority in the recent elections, said they had a “fairly tough meeting” with the prime minister and received “no straight answers” about the protocol’s future.

The party also expressed concern that abandoning elements of the protocol would “amplify the bad faith with which the Tory government has conducted itself from the beginning of the entire Brexit debacle”, while claiming Johnson was just trying to placate the DUP.

Meanwhile, the DUP said that “the idea the prime minister is taking sides is for the fairies”, while claiming that its mandate to see the protocol replaced with arrangements that restore our place within the UK internal market “will be respected”.

Alliance, the third largest party in the Assembly which is centrist, also said the meeting with Johnson was “robust and very frustrating”.

They explained: “We were giving him a very clear warning that if he plays fast and loose with the protocol and indeed the Good Friday Agreement, that he is going to be adding more and more instability to Northern Ireland.

“On the one hand, he is coming here with a certain set of states outcomes, but all his actions belie what he is notionally trying to achieve.”