LET BRITAIN THINK IT’S GREAT

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Fintan O'Toole
• Published date: 19 December 2020

In his post-match interview, our hapless manager, Big Ron Atkinson, a football equivalent of Boris Johnson, said: "We said beforehand that we'd be bright and attractive, and there you are: a nine-goal thriller."

The Brexit game has been, from a British point of view, just such a nine-goal thriller. One side has been getting hammered over and over again. Yet it may be in everybody's interests to allow Big Boris to claim a moral victory. And, after all, it sure has been a thriller.

It seems so long ago now that it is hard to remember that Britain was already one-nil down when the talks between its then Brexit supremo David Davis and the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier began on June 19th, 2017.

Theresa May's government absolutely insisted that the only reasonable way to conduct the negotiations was to start with the trade deal that would define future relations and then work in parallel on the terms of Britain's withdrawal.

This, Davis said, was going to be "the row of the summer" of 2017. He told ITV's Robert Peston in May: "How on earth do you resolve the issue of the border with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unless you know what our general borders policy is, what the customs agreement is, what our trade agreement is? It's wholly illogical."

What happened? There was no row. Britain just capitulated to the EU's firm insistence that the Irish issue, the divorce bill, and the mutual rights of expatriate citizens, must be settled before a future trade agreement could even be broached.

This was, not incidentally, a crucial achievement for Irish diplomacy. The sequencing of the talks may sound like a technical issue. It was actually definitive, especially for Ireland.

Frictionless trade In a way, Davis had a good point. It is a lot easier to say how borders, including the Irish one, would work, if you know whether or not you have frictionless trade.

But, politically speaking, this sequence would have been a disaster for Ireland. If you get everything agreed and there's only the awkward Irish business standing in the way of a grand settlement, we all know who would get squeezed: come on Ireland, we've done our best for you, but you can't hold everybody to ransom over your petty squabbles.

By helping to persuade the EU to be so firm on the sequence of the talks in June 2017, Ireland set the course for pretty much everything that has followed.

And by capitulating on that same issue, Britain also set its course, which has been, behind all the...