Former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage says 'nothing to celebrate' in new deal

He told GB News: “It's very interesting. Monsieur Barnier who was the chief negotiator for the European Union is a clever guy, no question about it.

“He was always with Brexit playing a long term game of chess and by using Northern Ireland, he got Mrs May into a checkmate position.

“Yes, we accepted the principle that because we've left the European Union, goods will be crossing that border.

“But it could mean the introduction of a hard border which would threaten everything that had been in place for the previous 20 years under the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and we accepted that premise from day one.”

In a discussion with Bev Turner, he said: “He had us and so she put forward this deal, Parliament wouldn't wear it, she got kicked out at the European elections.

“And Boris then faced this difficulty, what am I to do? Do I risk the whole of the UK being caught up in Customs Union, single market rules or do I just cynically jettison Northern Ireland?

“That's what he chose to do. It would have been nice to be a bit a bit more honest about it.

“As a situation, it’s literally been unbearable there since the beginning of 2020, but now we're supposed to celebrate this Brexit breakthrough?”

He continued: “The most instructive part of yesterday was the press conference in Windsor, when the RTE, the Irish broadcaster, asked a very specific question about the role of the European Court of Justice, Sunak ignored it completely.

“Ursula von der Leyen responds immediately and instinctively, that the ECJ is the final, ultimate arbiter of any dispute.

“So we will find, as we go through the legal documents in the next few days, that some of the claims that Rishi has made are kind of exaggerated, but no one's going to care.

“No one's going to care because we've reached this point where everyone's happy, it's better than it was and we move on, there'll be no Tory rebellion, we will be stuck inside a system where it still has to accept EU rules.”

Mr Farage added: “We'd have a Labour government in 18 months time, who won't just accept the EU rules for Northern Ireland, they’ll accept them for the whole of the United Kingdom…

“We should have threatened to leave with no deal. We might then have had a proper negotiation.

“We will discover that yes, of course, some of the idiocy has had been removed, maybe we've got some latitude over parts of VAT, or excise duties.

“But the idea that we have a veto over EU law is for the birds.”