Brexit

Boris Johnson managed to defy his critics today and reach a Brexit deal with the European Union. The new agreement updates the Northern Ireland protocol of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration, which deals with the future relationship. But while the rest of the deal appears to be unchanged, Boris has succeeded in winning some key concessions from the EU. Here are five reasons why Boris's deal is better than May's: 1. The backstop is gone Firstly, the backstop that Theresa May negotiated with the EU has been replaced by a new Northern Ireland Protocol and the UK-wide Customs Union in the backstop has been removed completely.

The Irish backstop and the arrangements to replace it are now the focus of the eleventh-hour Brexit talks. Their importance is not because of Ireland, but because of the battle for the UK’s constitutional freedom to decide the laws that govern this country’s economy and trade. Will the UK’s economic system break free of EU law allowing both an independent trade policy and the UK’s laws to diverge from the EU’s? ‘That is the point of our exit,’ as Boris Johnson told Donald Tusk in August. Or will there be continued subjugation or an eventual UK return to the bloc?

The Brexit talks are at a critical stage as we approach this week’s European Council summit. The rumoured landing zone for a deal – essentially a version of the ‘Chequers’ proposals for customs, but applied to Northern Ireland only – is promising. But to get there, both sides will need to compromise – and that applies to the EU as much as it does to the UK. In the Brexit debate, both politicians and governments in the UK are routinely accused of putting forward 'unrealistic' or 'non-negotiable' proposals. The word 'unicorn' is thrown around and often, the criticism is fair. Simplistic demands from UK politicians to 'simply take out the backstop', for example, have become so commonplace that they have become a semi-ironic meme on Brexit Twitter.

Sadiq Khan has got some front. He is complaining about the government’s voter ID plans, claiming it will lead to ‘voter suppression’. And yet he is engaged in the most explicit and awful act of voter suppression in the living memory of this country — the elitist effort to suppress the votes of the 17.4m people who backed Brexit. Sometimes you wonder if the Remain-leaning elites can even hear themselves. These people have spent almost three years agitating against the largest democratic vote in UK history. Some of them want the vote to be revoked entirely (the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’) while others, like Sadiq, want a second referendum to override the first.

Boris Johnson is now in what's known in cricket as the 'Nervous Nineties', when a batsman becomes so anxious about reaching his century that he takes unusually conservative decisions - or is so nervous he accidentally gets himself out. We are now in what could be the final few days of the Brexit negotiations, and the Prime Minister is trying to be unusually cautious about what's said and done. Ministers are being urged to hold their nerve rather than make comments which could push the talks off course, and No. 10 is remaining very tight-lipped. In a cabinet call this afternoon which a number of ministers described as 'businesslike', Johnson updated his top team but made clear that there wasn't a great deal to say at this time.