Thursday 10 June 2021

Biden steps in to NI protocol row

I think it's been obvious for months that Biden would make his presence felt in Ireland and the Irish have been working hard in Washington to get maximum leverage but even so, the intervention, which came a week ago on June 3rd was far stronger than anyone expected. The US Charge de affairs (they are still waiting to appoint an ambassador),  Yael Lempert, had a meeting with Lord Frost and delivered a demarche, a formal diplomatic representation of a government’s official position, usually reserved for adversaries, about the NI situation.

The Times have obtained a memo detailing the conversation and have published a report which could be decisive: Joe Biden accuses Boris Johnson of 'inflaming' Irish tensions

It is an extraordinary moment in the crisis.  The report says:

"Government minutes of the June 3 meeting reveal that Frost was told of Biden’s “great concern” over his stance in a tense encounter at which Lempert was said to have “slowly and gravely read her instructions [from Washington] aloud”.

"She [Lempert] warned that the increasingly bitter dispute between Britain and the EU over the protocol was “commanding the attention” of Biden before his first bilateral meeting with Johnson today.

"The memo said that the US 'strongly urged' Britain to come to a “negotiated settlement”, even if that meant 'unpopular compromises'. It added: “Lempert said the US was increasingly concerned about the stalemate on implementing the protocol. This was undermining the trust of our two main allies. The US strongly urged the UK to achieve a negotiated settlement.”

More than that she told Frost and John Bew, No 10’s senior adviser on foreign affairs, that Biden intended to raise his objections to Britain’s “increasingly heated rhetoric” and threats to unilaterally suspend the protocol both in talks with Johnson and in public at this weekend’s G7 summit in Cornwall.

This is big stuff.

In what The Times says is an olive branch but will seem more like a stilletto in Downing Street, she apparently said that "if Britain accepted demands to follow EU rules on agricultural standards, Biden would ensure that the matter “wouldn’t negatively affect the chances of reaching a US/UK free trade deal”.

I bet Frost bridled at that.

He appeared on TV yesterday in what seemed like the first press interview and he looked decidedly uncomfortable, and now we know why. Britain is the nut in the nutcracker jaws between the US and the EU.

We are already at loggerheads with China and the EU, to add the US is going to look like the supreme folly. I think we can safely assume that Frost's plan, hatched with Johnson, to negotiate and sign up to the NI protocol but with no intention of abiding by it, is over.  It is just a matter of time.

Frost is starting to look like the same sort of liability as Cummings, a square peg in a round hole. He looks a bit stupid now, considering he swaggered into Brussels in February 2020 and delivered his 'lecture' to an assembled audience of EU diplomats in which he said:

“But, in brief, all these studies exaggerate – in my view – the impact of non-tariff barriers they exaggerate customs costs, in some cases by orders of magnitude.”

Last week he wrote an article where he admitted: “We underestimated the effect of the protocol on goods movements to Northern Ireland, with some suppliers in Great Britain simply not sending their products because of the time-consuming paperwork required.”

Lot's of people on Twitter wanted to know who the "we" were. It turns out it was only him and Johnson as confirmed by Theresa May's former chief of staff, Gavin (Lord) Barwell in The Independent yesterday. 

Barwell, is quoted saying the prime minister had “perfectly well understood” the impact of trade checks in the Irish Sea – and the EU would not believe the claim now that it was “underestimated”.

“He and David Frost [the chief negotiator] are intelligent people,” Lord Barwell said, ahead of crisis talks with the EU.

“I find it inconceivable that they didn’t understand what they were signing up to. They would have been advised very clearly by the civil service about that.”

I think Frost may have known but I'm not convinced about Johnson. Jim Pickard at the FT posted this video again to remind us all of Johnson's utter stupidity:
So, I would venture a guess that in the next feewdays we will see some sort of agreement on aligning, standards. This post by Seamus Leheny of Freight NI explains what might the options are it's the best explainer I've seen:

I wonder which humiliating option they will go for?


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