EU chief flies in to seal Brexit deal as Tory revolt brews

The European Commission president will fly to London on Monday to finalise a new Brexit deal with Rishi Sunak, despite warnings from Tory MPs that they will revolt if European judges retain a say over Northern Ireland.

The Prime Minister will hold face-to-face talks with Ursula Von der Leyen on Monday afternoon, and the pair are expected to hold a press conference to announce the deal before it is presented to Parliament.

However, Tory Eurosceptics and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) warned on Sunday night that they will not back a deal unless EU law is “expunged” from Northern Ireland – something they fear Mr Sunak’s agreement will fail to do.

There is also concern over the fact that Downing Street has yet to explicitly confirm that MPs will be given a vote on the deal. The frustrations are being fuelled by the fact that Brexiteers feel they have been left in the dark during the talks.

One Eurosceptic MP said Downing Street had kept them and colleagues out of the loop because it wanted to “set everything up” and present the deal to MPs as “a fait accompli”.

Another said that even members of the Cabinet appeared to be unaware of the details of the deal, comparing Number 10’s approach to the secrecy of Theresa May’s administration.

Mr Sunak is expected to unveil the proposals without the explicit endorsement of the DUP, whose lawyers will scrutinise its text line by line before deciding whether it meets the seven tests they have laid out, including the protection of UK sovereignty.

On Monday, Lord Howard, a former Tory leader and a leading Brexiteer, urged Tory MPs to back the deal, even if it is rejected by the DUP and contains some limited role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) going forward, to help make Brexit a success.

He said it would “ease the problems that are causing so much frustration in Northern Ireland, remove one of the main obstacles to an improved relationship with the EU and help to make Brexit the success we all want it to be”.

Monday’s talks mark the culmination of two years of negotiations on how to reform the Northern Ireland Protocol, which prevented a hard border between the province and the Republic of Ireland post-Brexit but created a border in the Irish Sea, with thousands of inspections and document checks on goods coming from Great Britain.

Mrs Von der Leyen and Mr Sunak are expected to meet in Windsor, following reports that the revised deal could be called the Windsor Agreement. The meeting was agreed after talks between Mr Sunak and Ms Von der Leyen on Sunday.

It emerged on Friday that Mrs Von der Leyen was originally going to have tea with the King over the weekend, but the plan was dropped.

The Prime Minister also met Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister and a leading Eurosceptic, after he was said to be ready to quit if he was not convinced by the deal. He was photographed giving the thumbs up as he left Number 10, but refused to comment.

Following Monday’s meeting with Mrs Von der Leyen, Mr Sunak – along with James Cleverley, the Foreign Secretary, and Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary – will update the Cabinet.

Number 10 said that “if a final deal is agreed” the Prime Minister and Mrs Von der Leyen would hold a joint press conference in the late afternoon before Mr Sunak headed to the Commons to make a statement.

Downing Street said the talks aimed to ensure the deal fixed “practical problems on the ground”, made trade flow freely within the UK, safeguarded Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and returned sovereignty to people in the province.

Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, insisted on Sunday that the deal would “substantially scale back” the role of the ECJ, slash regulatory checks on trade across the Irish Sea and give the Northern Ireland assembly a bigger say on new EU laws.

However, his comments indicated that oversight of the ECJ would not be abandoned as leading Brexiteers and the DUP have urged.

Mr Raab suggested goods destined for Northern Ireland from the UK would not undergo regulatory checks and would instead be subject to “market surveillance”, where the EU has live access to a database of consignments.

“If we can scale back some of the regulatory checks that apply and some of the paperwork that applies, that would in itself involve a significant substantial scaling back with the role of ECJ,” he told Sophy Ridge on Sunday, on Sky News.

Mr Raab also appeared to confirm suggestions that Mr Sunak has negotiated a means by which the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast will be given pre-legislative scrutiny of new EU laws so that they can be disapplied if necessary.

He said the UK was looking for a “democratic arrangement” where Stormont would have the “last word” on new EU rules, adding: “We need to make sure that, if there are any new rules in the future, there’s a proper democratic check and a proper democratic check coming out of the institutions in Stormont.”

The DUP and eurosceptics MPs suggested on Sunday that Mr Sunak’s deal looked unlikely to go far enough to assuage their concerns. Sammy Wilson, a DUP MP, said it was a “red line” for his party that “no EU law” should continue to apply in Northern Ireland.

“Not only are we given those laws and have imposed those laws on us at present, but they’re imposed without any say either by British ministers or by politicians in Northern Ireland,” he said.

Iain Paisley Junior, a fellow MP, said there should be no rush for a deal to hit a deadline as he warned Mr Sunak that “if his plan involves keeping any part of the protocol, the DUP will not be going back into power-sharing… This is about who governs, who makes the laws – us or the EU? There must be no surrender.”

Priti Patel, a former Home Secretary, said: “It’s not about green and red lanes, it’s about fundamentally the efficacy and integrity of the UK in ensuring Northern Ireland is absolutely free of EU law and EU regulations.”

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader and ex-Cabinet minister, said: “What isn’t happening is that there is literally no change to the fact that Northern Ireland is going to be forced to be under the ECJ and EU law and regulations. I don’t see how the DUP can come into power-sharing.”

Mark Francois, the chairman of the hardline European Research Group (ERG), said it wanted EU law “expunged” from Northern Ireland.

“Less of a role is not enough. Just putting a couple of intermediate phases in but in a situation where you still end up with the ECJ is effectively sophistry. I mean, we’re not stupid,” he said.

The ERG has circulated a legal document setting out its “red lines” and warning that “some kind of fudge won’t cut it.”

“We need to look at the hard-edged legal effect of the deal. If it keeps in place EU law and the European court, with just window dressing like some ‘duty to consult’ Stormont, then it isn’t really changing anything,” the document said.

It said the best course was “to keep negotiating and drive a hard bargain” rather than creating an artificial deadline. “The US will put pressure around the Good Friday Agreement anniversary, but don’t play their game – they are not neutral observers. Letting the Protocol Bill progress increases leverage,” it added.

Mr Sunak will also have to face down Boris Johnson if he goes ahead with plans to ditch the Bill, which gives the Government the power to unilaterally rip up parts of the protocol.

The Prime Minister’s allies are said to believe he has secured legal changes that render the Bill no longer necessary as a bargaining chip, but Mr Johnson has said it is the “best way forward”.

Mr Raab refused to confirm that MPs would be given a vote on the new Brexit agreement, saying only that Parliament would get a chance to express its views.

Senior figures in the ERG warned that they would seek to force a vote if the Government refused one, saying Tory MPs could even engineer one through an adjournment debate, a route used to bring down Neville Chamberlain in 1940.