This Bombardier row could be the end of Theresa May’s deal with the DUP

All of Theresa May’s schmoozing with Donald Trump was for nothing – and now over 4,000 jobs in Northern Ireland are at risk

Theresa May has declared herself “bitterly disappointed” by the decision of the US Department of Commerce to slap a 220 per cent import tariff on aircraft, notably the C-series airliner, made by Bombardier. The Canadian firm employs more than 4,000 workers in Northern Ireland and one imagines they will not only be “bitterly disappointed” but also fretting for their livelihoods.

Also “bitterly disappointed” will be the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which agreed to prop up May’s government after June’s disastrous election in return for a billion quid and, more broadly, help from Downing Street to ensure Northern Ireland’s economic prosperity.

In the immediate term, it is the DUP relationship which will concern the Government most. After all, let’s not forget that the party’s small phalanx of MPs can at any time pull the rug from beneath May and co. The failure of the Prime Minister personally to persuade the Americans to back down in the Bombardier-Boeing dispute might easily start alarm bells ringing in Belfast, where the DUP will be wondering if Theresa May is spending too much time trying to find a way through Brexit negotiations and not enough thinking about a key part of Ulster’s industrial output.

True, the Prime Minister faces a tricky dilemma. Boeing, for its part, employs over 16,000 workers elsewhere in the UK, as it recently and pointedly reminded May. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Boeing could shift its supply chain elsewhere. But ultimately parliamentary mathematics mean that the Conservatives are more reliant on the DUP than on Boeing, which goes some way to explaining quite why the PM’s reaction to the Department of Commerce’s ruling was so strong.

Yet for Arlene Foster, the DUP’s leader, tough talking from her compromised chum in Number 10 may not be enough. Sure enough, the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has already hinted that Boeing’s future defence contracts with Britain could be in jeopardy if it does not back down. Foster will surely press the government to ramp up such threats if necessary. That could leave Theresa May with an unenviable choice between the continued support of the Democratic Unionists and a tit-for-tat trade war with the United States.

In any event, the decision by the American authorities is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who made a personal appeal to Donald Trump on the issue during their recent meeting in New York. For one thing, Britain is presently engaged in the most important series of diplomatic and trade negotiations in its modern history, as ministers grapple with the realities of EU withdrawal. If Theresa May is unable to bring her influence successfully to bear on a single corporate wrangle, however significant, then it hardly inspires confidence that her Government will bag a good deal from Brussels over a vast range of essential and complex questions.

Secondly, May has done her utmost to re-energise talk of Britain’s “special relationship” with America. Yet it is surely now quite clear – if it was not already – that when the man in the White House is as protectionist in his outlook as President Trump, the relationship is unlikely to be evenly balanced. The idea beloved of Brexiteers that the UK would be able to line up a preferential trade deal with the US once we had extricated ourselves from the EU increasingly looks like pie in a Boeing-filled sky. For Trump, it is America first, second and third.

There are certainly strong arguments against Boeing’s pursuit of its complaint against Bombardier over the question of subsidies. There are good arguments too against the decision of the US authorities to impose such a whopping tariff on the company’s imports. But none of that will undo the impression that the Prime Minister should have been able by her personal intervention to persuade the Americans to take a different course. That she could not may have serious consequences for her Government; for with Bombardier’s C-series grounded, there is more space for the circling crows.