Does Rishi Sunak feel the hand of history on his shoulder?

A deal didn’t seem possible in 1998, either, so let us hope that history is indeed about to repeat itself, writes John Rentoul

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For a moment I thought we might be in for another “hand of history” moment when on Thursday, Downing Street announced that the prime minister was on his way to Belfast.

This happened a day after Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform and one of the sharpest observers of EU-UK relations, said he was “getting more optimistic about the chances of a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol”. Could Sunak’s visit be like that time, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when Tony Blair arrived in Belfast, saying that “a day like today is not a day for soundbites” before declaring “I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder with respect to this, I really do”?

Well, not yet. That Blair soundbite was at the start of a few days’ intensive negotiations, which produced the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement. We are not at that stage of the cycle yet. It turned out that Sunak’s visit was a lower-key preparatory one, sounding out the party leaders in Northern Ireland with a view to the deadline talked up by the British government of reaching a deal by the 25th anniversary of the original settlement at Easter next year.