Biden raises pressure on johnson to solve Northern Ireland impasse

The president will use a bilateral meeting with the prime minister to explicitly express America’s support for the protocol.

Joe Biden enters Washington’s Holy Trinity Catholic Church. Picture: AFP

US President Joe Biden will warn Boris Johnson not to renege on the Northern Ireland Brexit deal when they meet for the first time at the G7 summit this week.

He will use a bilateral meeting with Mr Johnson before the gathering of world leaders in Cornwall to explicitly express American support for the Northern Ireland protocol.

Mr Biden is expected to tell Mr Johnson the US sees the deal, agreed by the British Prime Minister in 2019, as an integral part of maintaining long-term peace in Northern Ireland and in particular the Good Friday agreement, of which America is a guarantor.

He will also say the prospects of the US trade deal with the UK will be damaged if the situation remains unresolved.

However, the President is expected to make it clear to Brussels he expects the EU to stop being “bureaucratic” and adopt a more flexible approach to the implementation of the agreement.

The protocol was designed to prevent a hard land border in Ireland by effectively keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market and Customs union. This has imposed new restrictions on trade between Britain and Northern Ireland and angered Unionists, who see it as a threat to the province’s place in the United Kingdom.

Sources in London and Washington said the administration was increasingly nervous about the impasse. Last week, the EU accused Mr Johnson of “taking them for fools” and said Brussels was drawing up plans to impose trade sanctions on the UK if progress was not rapidly made on implementing the agreement.

Privately, Brussels diplomats think Mr Johnson may want to “deliberately collapse the protocol” under the pretext of Unionist opposition and the threat to the Good Friday agreement.

Senior government sources reject this. Brexit Minister David Frost on Sunday accused the EU of being insensitive to the protocol’s “real-world impacts on lives and livelihoods”.

“Because we are operating under the EU’s legal framework, we have very limited discretion to operate the rules in a way which makes sense on the ground in Northern Ireland,” he wrote in the Financial Times.

Mr Biden is understood to have been lobbied by the Irish government to intervene. “The administration is now convinced that the protocol has to be made to work and is integral to the peace process,” a senior diplomatic source said.

The UK and EU sides are to talk on Wednesday but expect­ations are low.

Joao Vale de Almeida, the EU ambassador to the UK, told Times Radio: “What our British friends asked from us was pragmatism. And we have proven that we want to be pragmatic, but pragmatism requires trust. If you don’t have trust and if you create frustration, then these are not the best conditions to find consensual solutions.”

THE TIMES