An important thing to watch in final days of Brexit talks is whether UK drops contentious parts of Internal Market Bill

Close observers think a deal is now likely. Yet the two sides are said to be far apart on a few contested issues. If events follow previous patterns, Britain will concede the most at the end, after talking tough.

The UK is not in a strong position. Brexiteers were adamant that the transition period, which ends at the close of next month, would not be extended because it would prolong our period of being, in effect, under EU control. Yet there is a powerful case to be made that it would have been better to extend by six months or more until the worst of Covid is over.

Brussels clearly wants a deal, but it is less vulnerable if there is not one than the UK, because trade with Britain is a much smaller share of the overall EU economy than EU trade is of the UK’s. So London has never had quite the cards it said it had. This helps explain why, at almost every showdown since 2016, tough talk on Northern Ireland has been followed by concessions that give Ireland and the EU what they want.

A few things have been retrieved, the most notable of which is the possibility for Stormont to exit the NI Protocol, but that won’t happen unless the make-up of MLAs changes radically. Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr have been celebrating the fact that NI will benefit from UK trade deals. But much more has been lost, as the emerging scale of the internal UK border has shown.

From a unionist perspective, a key thing to look out for in this last stage of the talks is that London agrees to ditch disputed aspects of the Internal Market Bill. There has been a hugely overblown reaction to that modest legislation to make impossible the worst potential outcomes of the Protocol, that would breach existing UK obligations. If it is indeed set aside, then it is yet another Boris Johnson capitulation.

This matters, because the extent of the barrier between here and GB is of far greater consequence than whether or not NI benefits from a Canada trade deal.

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