There is renewed hope over the Northern Ireland protocol

The prosaic, technocratic Sunak may prove to be more palatable to Britain’s European neighbours, writes Sean O’Grady

The meeting between Sunak and his counterpart is a sign that the new prime minister takes the matter seriously (PA)

Rishi Sunak’s meeting with his Irish opposite number, Micheal Martin, in Blackpool may have something of a historic edge to it. Obviously it comes at a time of renewed tension, with the Northern Ireland parties seemingly as far as ever from restoring peaceful self-government to the country, and the threat of fresh – but potentially equally stalemated – elections in the air.

Hopes of a breakthrough shouldn’t be exaggerated. It is not a special summit, which is the kind of thing arranged only when the diplomats have done all the groundwork required to justify such a high-level event. Instead, the pair will be meeting as members of the British-Irish Council, the “east-west” pillar of the Good Friday Agreement.

Representatives from the UK and Irish governments, the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the governments of the crown dependencies of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey get together regularly for a British Isles talking shop. Normally it’s a low-key affair, and a British prime minister hasn’t attended since Gordon Brown in 2007, so it’s a signal that Sunak takes the issue seriously and wants it sorted out. So does the Irish side, and so does the EU.

Although the power-sharing executive can function whatever the status of the border, or the Northern Ireland protocol, the Democratic Unionist Party has refused to engage until the protocol is scrapped. Provocative legislation relating to the protocol has been going through the UK parliament, while Liz Truss broke off talks about the matter some months ago. Now things have thawed. The joint UK-EU liaison committee is running again, and there are moves in Westminster to get the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill paused.

The hope is that Sunak and Martin will establish the kind of personal trust and rapport that some of their predecessors have in the past, such as John Major and Albert Reynolds, or Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald – or, indeed, a much more recent (if short-lived) “bromance”, which blossomed about 70 miles down the road from Blackpool.

A little over three years ago, the prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, and the Irish prime minister at the time, Leo Varadkar, met for crisis talks at a hotel in the Wirral. Their aim was to break the political deadlock over the most intractable facet of Brexit – the status of the Irish border. After a friendly walk around the grounds, the pair came to agree on the outline of a new approach to the problem. A few days later it was revealed, and some weeks later it was agreed and ratified.

They had found a way to avoid a hard economic border on the island of Ireland. Instead there would be some minimal customs checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was something the EU viewed with suspicion, and an idea Johnson had previously vowed never to contemplate. That was the genesis of the Northern Ireland protocol. It was supposed to be the end of the matter.

Although the protocol was oversold, detested by some unionists, and arguably entered into in bad faith by one side or another – or perhaps both – it has always been possible to reform it, with some compromises on both sides and yet more constructive ambiguity, as tends to be the case in Irish affairs. Sunak and Martin are coming to the problem relatively fresh (albeit that Martin is in a coalition job share with Varadkar), and both seem to be pragmatic, managerial types with little patience for sentiment or pedantry if it gets in the way of a lasting agreement that would remove much of the poison from UK-EU relations.

It follows an apparently new entente cordiale between Sunak and Emmanuel Macron. The prosaic, technocratic Sunak may prove to be more palatable to Britain’s European neighbours. He will be more trustworthy and less clownish than Johnson, and friendlier than Truss. There’s cause for hope, at least.