Rees-Mogg attacks Sunak's handling of NI protocol talks, saying it's 'very similar to Theresa May'

 

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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2023/feb/21/rishi-sunak-brexit-northern-ireland-protocol-ministers-resign-threat-uk-politics-latest

 

Rees-Mogg attacks Sunak's handling of NI protocol talks, saying it's 'very similar to Theresa May'

 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary and a former chair of the European Research Group, which represents hardline pro-Brexit Tory MPs, has used his “Moggcast” podcast to criticise Rishi Sunak’s handling of the Northern Ireland protocol negotiations.

 

Rees-Mogg accused Sunak of being like Theresa May (not a compliment in Tory Brexit circles). Referring to the way No 10 has handled the talks with the EU on rewriting the protocol, with Tory MPs being kept in the dark, he said:

It’s quite surprising, because this is very similar to what happened with Theresa May.

 

So a story would appear in the Times and Downing Street would say: ‘No, this isn’t quite right, it isn’t at all right’.

 

And then a week or two would go by and it would turn out to be completely right and they would hope that people would just conveniently fall in behind the announced policy.

 

And life doesn’t work like that. It’s important to get support for it first before you finalise the details and that doesn’t seem to have been done here.

 

He said there would be no point having a deal that was unacceptable to the DUP – implying that No 10 was at fault for not accepting this. He said:

There seems to me to be no point in agreeing a deal that does not restore power-sharing.

 

That must be the objective. If it doesn’t achieve that objective, I don’t understand why the government is spending political capital on something that won’t ultimately succeed.

 

Sunak definitely wants the DUP to back the deal because he wants power-sharing restored in Northern Ireland, and that won’t happen until the DUP lifts its protocol-inspired boycott of the institutions. But it has been reported that Sunak would be willing to strike a deal without DUP support if he thought it was in the interests of Northern Ireland as a whole. And, while Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, said at the weekend that any deal would have to pass the DUP’s seven tests, No 10 is not taking this line in public.

 

As Raoul Ruparel, an adviser to May when she was PM, pointed out on Twitter yesterday, in 2019 Rees-Mogg also argued that any Brexit deal would have to be acceptable to the DUP – before he backed the Boris Johnson deal opposed by the DUP because it created a GB/NI customs border in the Irish Sea.

 

Rees-Mogg defended the Northern Ireland protocol bill, which No 10 seems happy to shelve, saying it has the support of “the person who had a mandate from the British voters” – ie, Boris Johnson. The bill would allow the UK government to unilaterally abandon parts of the current protocol (even though some lawyers say this would be against international law).