Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
It’s better than anyone expected. Brussels has lifted its foot from the Union’s windpipe. EU law is withdrawn from traffic between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Goods can flow freely across the Irish Sea. Ulster will have the same tax rates as the rest of the UK.
There is no more nonsense about supermarkets holding back certain products, nor about seeds and seedlings being prohibited.
(This last point might not seem central – other than to the most likeable of men, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, the former Lords Chief Whip, who is in the bulb business – but the thought of English soil being banned from Ulster soil offended me more than I can easily express).
Once again, bangers can move freely from Bangor (Gwynedd) to Bangor (County Down).
The Democratic Unionist Party’s refusal to seek office while such outrages were in force has been vindicated. The greatest fear of Unionists, namely that dynamic alignment would drag Northern Ireland away from Great Britain, has been addressed. The party’s seven tests have, by any reasonable interpretation, been met.
I have been speed-reading the legal text looking for nasties and, so far, I haven’t found any. Yes, the EU can take action if the Unionist veto on divergence is deployed, but that was always the case. Looked at from any angle, the deal is a victory for Rishi Sunak.
Why did Eurocrats suddenly concede on a series of issues that they had previously said could not be reopened?
The line from Brussels is that it had to do with personalities. Ursula von der Leyen, we are given to understand, felt that she had a reliable negotiating partner in Sunak, something she had never felt about Boris Johnson. Her speech at Windsor was lathered with references to “dear Rishi”. “The two of us were honest with each other,” she said. “We knew we needed to listen to each other’s concerns”.
Now personal chemistry can play a part in negotiations. In Brussels, Johnson is still loathed as a class traitor. Fluent in French and Italian, the son of a sometime MEP, an old boy of the school for children of Eurocrats, he was supposed to have been a Davos Man.
That he instead campaigned for Brexit, and probably tipped the result, was seen as unforgivable.
But the bigger reason why Eurocrats proved flexible was that, in reality, they were not surrendering anything. When von der Leyen says that the EU has preserved the integrity of its single market, she is right.
Does the VAT rate in Northern Ireland prevent goods flowing freely from Greece to Italy? Of course not. And even if we accept the claim that the whole single market would have been wrecked had one of those bangers from Bangor (Gwynedd) found its way via Bangor (Down) to Bangor Erris (County Mayo), that terrifying eventuality is no more likely now than it was before the agreement.
Critics might complain that, this being so, the deal is no big deal. Why, they might ask, should we celebrate simply because the EU has climbed down from positions it ought never to have occupied in the first place?
The integrity of single market depends only on the information exchange and other light invigilation agreed under Monday’s framework. All the rest – the checks on ferries, the tax harmonisation, the nonsense about medicines – was a way to give Britain a kicking on its way out.
That, though, is not how human psychology works. As a species, we anchor our expectations to the status quo. The original Protocol might have been a consequence of the 2017 general election result, and the subsequent Benn Act.
But, having wrung concessions out of a weakened British government (weakened, remember, by the same MPs who went on to moan about what bad terms ministers had struck), Brussels was not going to surrender them easily.
Yet now the EU has scrapped 1700 pages of law, on everything from the customs code to taxation. It has rewritten a deal that it had said could never be reviewed. It has given up on the attempt to create an all-Ireland economy.
Why? Presumably because it is finally overcoming its pique about the 2016 referendum and starting to look at the UK as an ally rather than as a recalcitrant province.
There is now an opportunity for movement on several other issues, from collaboration on defence procurement and scientific research to visas for performing artists and equivalence in financial services.
Who could object to working more closely with our nearest neighbours and largest trading partners? It is a horrible measure of the polarisation that followed Brexit that hardliners on one side were positively willing the EU to be as unreasonable as possible, while hardliners on the other side came to see intergovernmental co-operation as surrender.
I’m pretty sure, though, that most Leavers meant it when they said that we should be good neighbours rather than grudging tenants. And I’m pretty sure that most Remainers meant it when they said that, however much they regretted the result, they wanted to work productively with the EU from the outside.
Nearly seven years after the campaign, we are finally moving towards the kind of deal we might have had all along had we never joined.
Johnson’s strategy was said to be to sign whatever was needed to effect Brexit, and then improve the terms once we were out. If so, he has succeeded spectacularly.