The ‘premier’ Rishi Sunak and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will foreseeably seal the agreement of the Protocol of Ireland tomorrow in the United Kingdom, the “thorn in the side” of Brexit. The two leaders are confident that they can make a joint announcement and thus put an end to two years of tense negotiations, against the background of political instability and the threat to the peace process in Ulster.

According to a joint statement, issued late on Sunday, Sunak and Von der Leyen have agreed to “work in person for practical and shared solutions to the complex challenges of the Irish Protocol”, which is interpreted as a last meeting to close the fringes of the final agreement.

The pact between London and Brussels would include the almost total elimination of customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Sunak has apparently yielded to pressure to accept a limited role for the Court of Justice of the EU in disputes over the application of the agreement. The ‘premier’ could have also agreed to renounce the so-called Protocol Law, promoted in his day by Boris Johnson to unilaterally “rewrite” the rules.

Sunak’s concessions in the final stretch of the negotiations have alerted the eurosceptics of his own party, spurred on by Boris Johnson himself, and the Northern Irish unionists, who demand the same status for Ulster as for the rest of the United Kingdom . Sunak practically stakes his “to be or not to be” as a conservative leader with this challenge.

“I am a Brexiter, I am a unionist, and everything we do will serve to check those boxes,” Sunak stressed in statements to ‘The Sunday Times’. “I will not reach any agreement that does not solve the problems and that does not comply with Northern Ireland and with our precious union,” the conservative leader simultaneously wrote in ‘The Sunday Telegraph’, in a message addressed to the hard wing of the ‘tories’ .

The die is cast and the Conservative Party has called its deputies in Parliament to the chapel this Monday, in a clear sign that Sunak could make the announcement public at the start of the week, with the controversy still hot over the alleged and failed attempt to involve King Charles in the final agreement.

Sunak faces two possible scenarios before his particular D-day. The ‘premier’ could run into frontal opposition from up to one hundred Conservative deputies to his agreement, in a ‘remake’ of the revolt that led to the fall of Theresa May in 2019 Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatens to lead the rebellion, after criticizing Sunak for his anticipated resignation from the Protocol Law -currently pending in the House of Lords- with which the British Government intended to unilaterally rewrite the subject pending Brexit.

Sunak’s allies accuse Johnson of seeking personal vendetta and attempting to weaken Sunak’s position as leader to enable his own return to Downing Street, in time for the 2024 general election. having said before witnesses “Fuck the Americans!”, in response to Washington’s wishes to finally resolve the issue of the Protocol to preserve the Ulster peace process (Johnson himself has acknowledged that he did say that, but in a “jocular” tone).

The second scenario is much more propitious. A significant number of eurosceptics have lowered their guard in recent days and have anticipated that they could ultimately support Sunak for the sake of pragmatism and not to reopen the ‘civil war’ of the ‘tories’. Resistance to the agreement with the EU would in this case be reduced to 20 or 30 “Tory” deputies and the “Premier” would get away with overwhelming support that would reinforce his condition as a conservative leader.

At the forefront of the constructive current is precisely the former Brexit minister David Davis: “If Rishi Sunak reaches an agreement with the Protocol and presents a less austere budget in March than anticipated, they may be the first signs that it is coming out of the storm,” Davis told The Observer. “If that happens, we would still have at least a one in three chance of winning the next election.”

Martin Vickers, another historical eurosceptic and current member of the executive of the 1922 Parliamentary Committee, also appealed to his co-religionists: “People have left the Brexit battles behind, and the time has come for us to move forward too. We have reasons to be positive, and if the economy improves we may be in a very different situation politically in 18 months.

“As someone who believes in Brexit, who voted for Brexit and who campaigned for Brexit, I want to show that Brexit works and I want to finish the job,” Sunak told The Sunday Times. His deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, meanwhile told Sky News that the agreement with the EU was “on the cusp” and that it will be a matter of days. According to the information leaked to date, these would be the main lines of the agreement:

Almost all of the controls currently in force for the movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be eliminated, which according to unionists is equivalent to an internal customs office in the Irish Sea. A “green lane” would be created to differentiate them from products destined for the Republic of Ireland that would enter the single market. The return to the hard border on land is also avoided.

It was for months the other major obstacle between London and Brussels: the role of a European court in possible disputes over the application of the Protocol. Sunak would have agreed in the end to a “limited” role and as a last resort, if the cases are not resolved in the first instance in the Northern Irish courts themselves. It is one of the points most questioned by the unionists and by the members of the European Research Group (ERG) of the “tories”, who consider respect for British “sovereignty” essential.

Sunak has apparently acceded to pressure from Brussels to bury the law (promoted at the time by Liz Truss and Boris Johnson) by which London reserved the right to unilaterally “rewrite” the rules of the Protocol. As Sunak himself explains in the Sunday Telegraph, “this law was the only way forward when the EU refused to reopen negotiations and fulfilled its role as a last resort, but a negotiated solution is a better result.”

Under the new deal, EU laws that could affect Northern Ireland in the future would have to be consulted and have the consent of the Stormont Assembly and the British government. It is not yet clear whether London reserves the right to control fiscal policy and the application of VAT in Ulster.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project