Boris Johnson cannot afford a head-on clash with Emmanuel Macron over Brexit

The prime minister will be looking to do deals with his fellow leaders to avoid his gamble over the Northern Ireland protocol ending in disaster, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson has his work cut out for him in Cornwall (Getty)

One line from Tom McTague’s celebrated profile of Boris Johnson for The Atlantic this week struck me as telling: “He is lively and engaged, superficially dishevelled but in fact focused and watchful.”

That is the truth about the master of ceremonies at the G7 show being staged in Cornwall this weekend. The prime minister will be cheerful, artfully disorganised but all the time “focused and watchful”. These summits are mostly about the photos and the platitudes, but there is serious business to be transacted in the gaps in the official schedule.

The problem of the post-Brexit rules in Northern Ireland is one of those items of serious business. Johnson needs the goodwill of Ursula von der Leyen, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden to make this work, and here they are, by chance, all in the same place.

Biden and Macron approached the summit with some pre-match trash-talking. Biden did it with some two-faced diplomacy, telling Johnson not to mess with the Good Friday Agreement and then half-denying that he had done so. A report in The Times was “wrong”, a US spokesperson said, without denying that the US had issued a “demarche”, a formal diplomatic warning. Perhaps what was wrong about it was that there was no accent on “demarche”.

Macron was rather more direct. “I think it’s not serious to want to review in July what we finalised after years of debate and work in December,” he said of Johnson’s wish to renegotiate the Ireland protocol, which came into effect on 1 January this year. “If after six months you say we cannot respect what was negotiated, then that says nothing can be respected. I believe in the power of treaties. I believe in seriousness. Nothing is renegotiable. Everything is applicable.”

Fortunately for Johnson, these were tough words aimed at a French domestic re-election audience, and they are not as uncompromising as they seem. Johnson does not in fact want to scrap the protocol and negotiate a new treaty: he wants to negotiate the way in which the protocol operates – something for which the withdrawal agreement and the trade treaty both explicitly provide.

That may require some finessing of unionist opinion in Northern Ireland, which is hardening behind the demand that the protocol be “abolished”. But David Frost, the prime minister’s trusted negotiator, made it clear in his meeting with the EU side this week that it was the interpretation of the protocol that was the problem, rather than the protocol itself.

Johnson knows that if EU leaders, with Biden standing behind them, really care about respecting the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, they will try to make the protocol work. If it fails, the only options in the end are EU rules applying to all food in the UK or checkpoints on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. As Doug Beattie, the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, the voice of pragmatic unionism, said: if EU leaders don’t help make the protocol work, it will prove they are “more interested in stopping a sausage roll from getting into their single market than they are in protecting the Belfast Agreement”.

It is too easy to assume that Johnson is deliberately escalating this dispute in order to play to a section of his domestic audience, just as Macron and Biden are doing. Portraying the EU as intransigent may help to wind up Brexit sentiment – but it is very much in Johnson’s interest to avoid a head-on clash with Macron.

We saw that with his expression of exasperation reported this morning about Priti Patel’s failure to stop people crossing the Channel in small boats: “What is the Home Office doing? When is she going to sort this out?” Johnson knows that “sorting this out” requires the cooperation of the French authorities. Bluntly, the only way to prevent people setting off for the UK from the Pas-de-Calais on hazardous inflatables is to pay the French government to intercept them.

Johnson has to appeal to Macron’s self-interest in tackling people-trafficking. That is hard enough to do without going to war over sausages in Northern Ireland.

We also shouldn’t be too quick to assume that Johnson is slapdash, and that his problems with the Irish protocol are the product of carelessness. I don’t think so: they are the product of a calculated risk he took, knowing he had to secure a deal to get Brexit done.

At the summit this weekend, beneath the bluster and bonhomie, there lurks the “focused and watchful” prime minister, looking to do deals with his fellow leaders to avoid his Brexit gamble ending in disaster in Northern Ireland.