Opinion

Alex Kane: DUP is right to be spooked over Brexit border deal

Alex Kane

Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an Irish News columnist and political commentator and a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

Alex Kane
Alex Kane Alex Kane

The DUP should have seen it coming. Just over a week ago The Times ran a story suggesting that a deal on the border was 'close.'

Sammy Wilson - easier to wind up than a jack-in-the-box - warned the prime minister that she shouldn't take the DUP's support for granted; while Peter Robinson - wheeled out when circumstances require a bit of old-fashioned verbal knuckle-dusting - told the Irish government to, "wind its neck in." The DUP's parliamentary team were briefing that the prime minister was "well aware of our concerns," but seemed confident that there would be no more nonsense stories, kite-flying or solo runs from London.

Yet, just four days later, Arlene Foster was forced to interrupt Theresa May's lunch in Brussels and tell her to kill off a deal which would have kept Northern Ireland within the single market and customs union, while the rest of the United Kingdom went its own way. The PM's response as to why the DUP hadn't been given sight of the text of the deal left Foster with the very clear impression that the Irish negotiating team had told the British not to let them see it. But instead of giving Sammy Wilson a free hand to drown Theresa May in vitriol - she, after all, is the boss - Foster turned her fire on the Irish.

This is from the agreement reached between the Conservatives and DUP on June 26: ''In line with the parties' shared priorities for negotiating a successful exit from the European Union...the DUP agrees to support the Government on legislation pertaining to the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union.'' The very least the DUP would have expected would have been prior sight of any deal relating to Northern Ireland and the border. Instead, they were made to look foolish. More important, the Conservatives looked as if they couldn't be trusted to either honour the deal with the DUP or stand four square for the Union.

The DUP can deal with foolish. They know how to bite. They know how to exact revenge. They know how to handle themselves in a fight. Theresa May, on the other hand, looked like a ventriloquist's dummy which had just been run over - having been thrown under - by a bus driven by one of the Kray twins. There is no way she could come out of Monday's debacle with even the scintilla of credibility.

If it's true that the Irish asked for the DUP to be blindsided on the text and the British agreed, then either the PM gave the nod of approval, or her negotiators didn't even bother telling her, even though they must have known the story would leak and that she would be badly damaged. On the other hand, if the story about the Irish demand isn't true - and they say it isn't - then it means that it was the British side, with or without May's approval, which did the blindsiding. At the time of writing, late on Wednesday, there is no evidence that the prime minister herself suggested that the DUP be briefed in advance.

The DUP is right to be spooked, by the way. The prime minister was in Brussels on Monday, apparently reasonably relaxed about a deal which would see Northern Ireland treated entirely differently from the rest of the UK. And while I am aware that the DUP is flaky when it comes to pan-UK issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, it is worth bearing in mind that what the British team was discussing was a deal which undermined the constitutional integrity of the UK. Because, as Foster keeps saying, the UK joined the EU as one entity and must leave as one entity.

May managed, in the space of a few hours on Monday, to anger the DUP, the Brexiteers in her own party (now lined up behind Nigel Dodds), the soft remain wing on her backbenches, the Scottish Conservatives (spooked by talk of special status), the Irish and the EU. The events of the day diminished her political stature, which was already not much higher than a garden gnome. Her enemies are emboldened, her friends are in despair and the government payroll members are fearing for their jobs. It's hard to see how she survives for much longer.

Meanwhile, what happens about the border problem? My view remains that it will be a 'soft' landing, not least because London, Dublin, Belfast and Brussels really don't want a hard one. Whatever the truth of what happened on Monday, the fact remains that everyone involved in those negotiations that morning knew that the DUP would not accept any deal that threatened the UK's constitutional integrity. And they also knew that May could not proceed without Foster's nod. A terrible day for May. An even worse day for the art of negotiation. Nothing is kept secret for long.