Boris Johnson was prepared to cut NI loose, says ex-advisor to Theresa May – but we also failed Northern Ireland over Brexit

Denzil Davidson, who for three years was at Mrs May’s side as a special advisor, said that Northern Ireland had not been given enough consideration until 2017 – the year after the UK voted to leave the EU.

In a lengthy interview for the think tank UK In a Changing Europe, Mr Davidson said: “We had a kind of collective failure in government at the time properly to understand the implications for Northern Ireland, for which I must share the guilt.”

He went on: “The only guy at the time on our side who really understood the Northern Ireland Brexit problem, and I didn’t listen to him enough, was David Lidington, and he went off to be leader of the House of Commons.

“And I feel at fault that I didn’t confer more with him to think these things through.

“And officialdom also fell collectively short. That was a failure on the whole of the government’s part.”

Having denounced the idea of a trade border in the Irish Sea, Boris Johnson quickly pivoted once in power to accept such an outcome.

When asked if he was surprised by what Mr Johnson eventually agreed to over Northern Ireland, Mr Davidson said: “Kind of yes and no.

“Because I personally am a patriotic unionist, I had wrongly hoped that genuine unionist commitments were held more widely in the Conservative Party than they now are.

“But no, because I knew that Northern Ireland was not a priority for him, and that he was willing to cut them loose. I was surprised that the Conservative Party accepted what he agreed to so readily.”

However, while sharply critical of Mr Johnson, he said that “in retrospect, one thing compared to the original EU draft that the Johnson administration got was the Stormont consent mechanism” which allows MLAs to vote down the protocol in 2024 on a simple majority vote, rather than a cross-community vote, thus making it harder for the protocol to be rejected.

When asked if Mrs May could have negotiated that arrangement, Mr Davidson said: “I think we wrongly thought that that was not negotiable. We could have been wrong about that. But you’re right, too, that it’s a more natural fit with a Northern Ireland-only construction of the protocol.”

Mr Davidson, who had been an advisor to William Hague and then Philip Hammond when they were foreign secretary and who was then advisor to the UK’s European Commissioner, Jonathan Hill, until the Brexit vote, was with Mrs May for three years from September 2016.

In the interview, which was conducted last September but has only now been published as part of a wider archive of interviews with those at the heart of how the UK’s departure from the EU unfolded, Mr Davidson spoke candidly about multiple errors and problems throughout his years in Downing Street.

When asked about what representations he was getting in Downing Street from the Irish government over Northern Ireland in the early part of Mrs May’s tenure, the former advisor said: “I wasn’t. This is something that I have, with hindsight, found puzzling.

“It would have been really helpful at that stage if someone from the Irish Embassy had said, ‘Let’s go for a drink and talk about this,’ but it never happened.”

He went on: “It was March, or February at best, of 2017, that I really began to clock the extent of the problem. And I think all of us were too slow in waking up to the extent of the difficulty, which we shouldn’t have been.

“Because we knew about the single market and the customs union and trade. So I don’t know why we didn’t put what was certainly obvious to the Irish government together.”

The interviewer put it to him: “It’s interesting that the Northern Ireland Office, the Northern Ireland secretary [James Brokenshire until January 2018, and then Karen Bradley], wasn’t raising it.”

Mr Davidson replied with one word: “Yes.”

He said that in late 2017 “it became very hard in the autumn and the Irish took a hard line and I think we were far too often far too optimistic about what was required”.

Recalling the December 2017 Joint Report – which had to be altered after Arlene Foster rejected its proposal for ‘regulatory alignment’ between Northern Ireland and the EU – Mr Davidson said: “On the Northern Irish question, with hindsight, we spent far too little time on the text.

“And, obviously famously, things didn’t work for the DUP. And then we had long conversations with the DUP and came back with something which I think was materially better. But I think we made mistakes in the whole way that was handled.”

He added: “And certainly the EU made very little effort at that stage, and I don’t think have made much effort since, to earn the unionist community’s confidence.”

He said that “the process with the DUP was obviously corrosive of trust between us and them which is not entirely perhaps surprising”.

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