What has Rishi Sunak actually achieved with the Windsor Framework?

The ‘Stormont brake’ is a highly significant concession by the EU, writes John Rentoul

This is a mark of the difference Rishi Sunak has made (PA)

The prime minister has achieved something that looked, if not impossible, then highly unlikely: he has persuaded the EU to allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to block future EU law from applying in Northern Ireland, and the treaties will be amended to make this happen.

That is a big concession by the EU, and a mark of the difference Rishi Sunak has made. EU leaders like and trust him – Ursula von der Leyen even called him “dear” at their news conference.

The Democratic Unionist Party will no doubt make the most of its moment in the limelight, but its leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, who did not say “No” today, must know that it is in his interest, his party’s interest, and the interest of the people they represent to accept this unexpectedly good deal.

It should come as no surprise that the DUP did not get all that it wanted, given that it was asking for the moon. Its demand that Northern Ireland be freed from any vestige of the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU was simply incompatible with its other positions: it supported Brexit, but refused to support Theresa May’s compromise that would have kept the whole of the UK in the EU customs union. Therefore, the only way to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland was to keep Northern Ireland inside some elements of the EU single market.

Unless Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr, who have been the most vocal in demanding the impossible, are going to say that they want checkpoints on the border with the Republic, they should accept this deal. It fails to give them the impossible, but it gives them the best possible deal, which is compatible with most of what they said they wanted.

The “Stormont brake” is a remarkable concession by the EU. It could lead to all sorts of problems in the future, if the Northern Ireland Assembly exercises its right to block new EU law, because then the single-market rules in Northern Ireland will start to diverge further from those in the rest of the EU.

The brake looks as if it could lead to the UK government – at the behest of the devolved government of Northern Ireland – influencing EU law, because the EU might in some cases choose not to proceed with a law rather than impose it in the EU but not in Northern Ireland. What an irony if the DUP’s demands lead to a kind of reverse Brexit, in which the UK dictates EU law from outside the European Union. “Take back control” indeed.

But the EU has decided that it can live with such inconsistencies, in the same spirit of pragmatism that allows it all sorts of ad hoc arrangements with Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and the scattered tiny territories, each of unique status.

The EU has given ground in other areas, too, even if some of this involves admitting that it drove too hard a bargain the first time. There was never any need for the EU to retain the right to interfere in tax rates in Northern Ireland, but it is nevertheless an important retreat to concede the point.

If the deal goes through, the red and green channels should make life a bit easier for businesses delivering to and from Northern Ireland. If the Northern Ireland Assembly is back up and running, that too will matter greatly to the 2 million people in Northern Ireland.

But the deal matters to the rest of the UK as well, not just because it shows that Sunak can solve difficult problems and make government work, but because better relations with the EU are very much in the interest of the whole of the UK.

This is not just about science cooperation in the Horizon programme, but about issues such as the war in Ukraine, asylum seekers, and the problems with checks on EU-UK trade generally. Many of the rules supposed to govern those checks have been postponed, and need to be sorted out in the spirit of calm reasonableness that Sunak has brought to EU-UK relations in place of the state of mutual exasperation and distrust that existed under Boris Johnson.

Today’s agreement is a big achievement for Sunak, but it is also significant because it has been handled with such discipline. Most of the deal was negotiated weeks ago, and yet it has remained under wraps, with the details only beginning to seep into the public domain in the last few days – and the big concession, the Stormont brake and the treaty amendments required to enact it, kept quiet until today.

The DUP may be bruised by its exclusion from the negotiations; critics may find some problems in the small print; other critics may worry about bringing the King into politics. But these negotiations seem to have been conducted with a seriousness that did not seem possible under Johnson – the potential leader of a rebellion that may now simply fade away.