Varadkar deserves everything coming to him if there's a no deal Brexit

If the UK leaves the European Union without a deal, the chief architects of that outcome will be Theresa May, Michel Barnier and Leo Varadkar. The Irish prime minister turned forty last week, and this inexperienced politician will probably deliver the most serious blow to his country’s economy for decades, well before he reaches his forty-first birthday.

In the aftermath of the government’s Draft Withdrawal Agreement defeat, the Financial Times reported that “Varadkar has made clear to Berlin and Paris that he would prefer no deal to a time-limited backstop.” His strategy is to “blame the Brits for the mess”, according to one of the newspaper’s sources, who was privy to these conversations.

In the short-term at least, this message is likely to be received sympathetically by Irish electors. However, the consolations of raging at ‘perfidious Albion’ are likely to wear thin quickly if living standards in Eire drop, thanks to the Dublin government’s brinkmanship.

As negotiations between the EU and the UK progressed, the idea became established that the Irish backstop was an unavoidable consequence of Brexit, that its supporters failed to foresee. By this way of thinking, the circumstances of Northern Ireland, and even the Belfast Agreement that underpins the peace process, are somehow incompatible with leaving the single market and the customs union.

That contention has only ever been supported with vague allusions to the ‘context’ or ‘spirit’ of the Good Friday accord, rather than references to its content. It’s also worth remembering that, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, discussions about Ireland were focussed on maintaining a seamless land border rather than any apparent requirement for a frontier in the Irish Sea.

That a debate around customs posts, bar-codes and tracking technology was allowed to turn into a bid to keep Northern Ireland under the control of Brussels and Dublin, is testament to Theresa May’s disastrous negotiating strategy, as well as the aggressive position adopted by the EU Commission and the Irish government.

There is no serious dispute that under the previous taoiseach, Enda Kenny, the authorities in the Republic of Ireland were cooperating with their British counterparts and preparing to monitor the border electronically. These preparations stopped after June 2017, when Varadkar replaced Kenny as leader of Fine Gael and Irish prime minister.

Dublin’s emphasis switched to pushing for a ‘special status’ for Northern Ireland, that would keep the province closely aligned with the EU and create an internal UK border in the Irish Sea. Whether Varadkar and his new administration were solely responsible for this change of tack, or whether they were responding to the demands of Barnier and the European Commission will probably become a matter for historians to debate.

The proposal has been tweaked and resprayed repeatedly, to make it more acceptable to unionists in Ulster and the Westminster government, but its fundamental features have not changed significantly. Eventually, they were effectively accepted by the British prime minister, in the guise of the Draft Withdrawal Agreement backstop.

There was always a risk that Brexit could create problems on the island of Ireland. It would be misleading not to admit that it has increased tensions between unionists and nationalists, damaged relationships between Dublin and London and encouraged the notion that an all-Ireland state is an achievable aspiration. None of which means that things could not have been very different.

Theresa May and her advisers could scarcely have made a bigger mess of negotiating the Irish question. The government made a basic error right at the start of the process, by promising unilaterally that a hard border could not happen – irrespective of how badly Brussels’ behaved.

Then, after the UK and the EU signed off the negotiators’ ‘joint report’ back in December 2017, the British side waited until the following June to explain how it interpreted paragraphs 49 and 50 of the document, which dealt with border commitments. Meanwhile, the EU Commission had published its draft legal ‘text’, demanding a “common regulatory area” on the island of Ireland.

By the time May was prepared to admit that her interpretation of the ‘joint report’ meant the UK would have to maintain “full alignment” with many aspects of the single market, Dublin and Brussels’ version of the backstop had become a shibboleth for Irish nationalists. She spent months insisting that ‘no British prime minister’ could ever agree to the EU’s plan, before accepting all of its most salient features, as soon as she had secured a veneer of deniability.

As a consequence, the government suffered the biggest meaningful defeat in parliamentary history, when it finally allowed a vote on the Withdrawal Agreement. Astonishingly, May’s still seems to believe that she can tart up the backstop enough that it will eventually become acceptable to Tory Brexiteers and the DUP.

This bull-headed refusal to accept parliamentary arithmetic means the British prime minister cannot avoid responsibility if we leave the EU with no agreement, on the 29th of March. Equally, Varadkar and his government have ignored repeated warnings that their tactics were destroying the chances of a constructive, mutually beneficial deal. Now, they’re preparing quietly to implement the border checks they claimed it was their priority to avoid.

Rather than protect the Republic’s economy, the Irish prime minister chose instead to court domestic approval for sticking it to the Brits and preen in the international spotlight. Varadkar deserves everything that is coming to him when a ‘no deal’ Brexit affects his country most of all.