THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 23
“ You were talking to Terry Gross in your sleep again.”••
Blair’s chief negotiator in Northern
Ireland, concluded that Johnson’s pro-
posal would “undermine the basis on
which the Good Friday Agreement
was built.” Irish officials had a simi-
lar response. “We have taken down
barriers,” one said. “Why would we
put up a new one?” The problem of
Northern Ireland occupied the heart
of the Brexit crisis because it asked,
in the starkest terms, what kind of
new relationships were really going to
be feasible with Britain’s closest neigh-
bors—given the constraints of trade,
geography, and bloodshed. It also
contained the biggest risk of going
wrong. In a no-deal scenario, both
sides agreed, a hard border would be
inevitable, and violence would likely
return. “That’s where we are,” the for-
mer senior civil servant said. “That’s
the bugger of the situation.”
A
t moments, the talks seemed cer-
tain to collapse. On October 7th,
a senior government official—widely
believed to be Cummings—sent a
long text message to The Spectator,
Johnson’s former outlet, blaming op-
position M.P.s for their attempted
“sabotage” of the Prime Minister’s
efforts to make a new deal. “They’ve
probably succeeded,” the official wrote.
“History is full of such ironies and
tragedies.” The next morning, John-
son spoke to Merkel from Downing
Street. Within minutes, an anony-
mous source leaked an account of the
call to the British media; the German
Chancellor was alleged to have de-
manded that Northern Ireland stay
permanently in the E.U.’s customs
union. “It means a deal is essentially
impossible, not just now but ever,” the
source said.
I arrived in Westminster a few
hours later. Climate protesters had
blocked streets around Parliament
Square, making it still and desolate.
I met Nigel Dodds, the Parliamen-
tary leader of the Democratic Union-
ist Party, in his office, next to the
House of Commons. We sat by a
brown-tiled fireplace, under a large
portrait of Winston Churchill. The
D.U.P. is one of the most hard-line
pro-unionist parties in Northern Irish
politics. It opposed the Good Friday
Agreement, for the concessions that
it made to Irish nationalists, and was
the only party in the territory to cam-
paign for Brexit. Since 2017, the ten
M.P.s of the D.U.P. have been nom-
inal allies of the Conservatives in Par-
liament, but they broke with May and
worked closely with the E.R.G. to
defeat her deal.
Dodds was much happier to have
Johnson in office. Before he became
Prime Minister, Johnson had courted
the D.U.P. “He’s been very, very clear
on the fact that the breakup of the
United Kingdom is not a price that
he’s prepared to pay,” Dodds told me.
The Party approved of Johnson’s plan,
but Dodds worried about the intran-
sigence of the Irish government and
the E.U. I asked him if he trusted
Johnson to stand by the D.U.P. as
the crisis intensified. “I’m asked this
question a lot,” Dodds replied. “‘Do
you trust Johnson?’ All I can say is, I
can only trust ourselves. I can only
trust myself.”
Johnson abandoned the D.U.P. two
days later. On October 10th, he met
Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, at
Thornton Manor, a mock-Elizabethancountry pile near Liverpool. They were
photographed, deep in conversation,
walking in the gardens. Varadkar came
away smiling. The two leaders spoke
of “a pathway to a possible deal.” The
pathway required secrecy and diplo-
matic legerdemain. For several days,
no one knew quite what Johnson had
conceded. Then the shape of the com-
promise emerged: to keep the border
open, the E.U. would allow Northern
Ireland to leave its customs union—a
symbolic win for Johnson—and, in
return, the territory would abide by
many E.U. regulations, with the U.K.
enforcing any resulting customs checks
on the British side of the Irish Sea.
“Northern Ireland would de jure be in
the U.K.’s customs territory but de
facto in the European Union’s,” an
E.U. diplomat told the Guardian. The
arrangement would require approval,
every four years, from the Northern
Ireland Assembly.
The draft deal bore a heavy resem-
blance to the European Commission’s
initial version of the backstop, which
May had rejected as unthinkable. In
Brussels, officials quipped that the