Boris Johnson accuses Sunak of putting Brexit at risk with the agreement reached with the EU

Boris Johnson has been unable to resist Boris Johnson.

Barely three days after the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced an agreement with the EU on Northern Ireland's difficult fit in the post-Brexit era, the main cause of that problem has decided to crash his successor's party.

"I am aware that they are not going to thank me for saying this, but I think my job is to do it: we must be clear about what is happening," Johnson announced when speaking this Thursday at the Global Soft Power congress, which was held in London.

“What has been achieved is not that the United Kingdom takes back control [

, the slogan with which the Brexit campaign triumphed in the 2016 referendum].

And although there have been some improvements, it is simply a version of the solution that was proposed to Liz Truss when she was my foreign minister ”, the former prime minister has scorned what was agreed this week in Windsor between the United Kingdom and the EU .

“It is about the European Union bowing down gracefully to allow us to do what we want in our territory, but not with our laws, but with theirs”, she concluded.

The moment chosen by Johnson is especially delicate for Sunak.

After announcing last Monday, together with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen —who wanted to travel to the United Kingdom for this purpose to reinforce the prime minister's triumphalist message—, the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, sought to throughout the week to accumulate support, and increasingly corner the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP, in its acronym in English).

Relevant voices from the field of conservative eurosceptics, such as Steve Baker or David Davis, had praised the pact reached by Sunak, which put an end to two years of bitter confrontation with Brussels.

The prime minister had even indicated his willingness to push the pact forward and put it to a vote in the House of Commons, although Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the DUP,

Shankill Road, the main street in the Protestant section of Belfast, is a good indication of the pressure on Donaldson's shoulders.

Posters with the slogan "Peace or Protocol" [in reference to the protocol for Northern Ireland signed with the EU by Johnson, and now recomposed by Sunak] give a clear idea of ​​how heated the spirits are.

The hardest and most recalcitrant part of unionism continues to consider the protocol, or the amendment that the new Windsor Framework Agreement supposes, a betrayal by London.

If the DUP, which has kept Northern Ireland's self-government institutions blocked for almost a year, gives in and accepts the new pact reached with Brussels, Sinn Féin - for years the political arm of the IRA terrorist organization - will occupy the position Chief Minister of the Autonomous Government,

The message launched by Johnson gives a break, and a certain escape, to a unionism that was already very cornered.

"It's going to be very difficult for me to vote for this deal, because I think we could have done it very differently, and we shouldn't have cared about the damage we caused in Brussels," Johnson said.

Sunak has promised to put the agreement reached with the EU to a vote in the House of Commons, but had not yet set a date for that parliamentary debate.

The words of Johnson, who still has a good handful of followers, may encourage the rebellion that the prime minister was trying to quell this week.

Johnson is clinging to a flimsy argument to oppose the deal.

The current government has made a commitment to the EU to allow the parliamentary processing of the law that allowed British ministers to unilaterally contravene fundamental parts of the Irish Protocol to die.

It was an idea that emerged precisely during Johnson's tenure, and nurtured by his successor, Liz Truss.

It irritated Brussels considerably, which interpreted the challenge as a declaration of war and launched its own legal response mechanism in the form of future sanctions.

Sunak and Von der Leyen agreed to bury the hatchet.

And now Johnson, the main person responsible for the mess of the Irish Protocol - he signed it without blinking, in exchange for carrying out his long-awaited Brexit - accuses Sunak of having resigned, by letting such a provocative law die,

It escapes no one, either among his rivals or among his allies, that Johnson's motives are less noble than he pretends to appear.

The UK's most popular politician in decades has not given up the idea of ​​returning to the front line, despite the humiliating way in which he was ousted from the leadership of the Conservative Party and Downing Street by his own comrades.

And, above all, he cannot bear the idea that Sunak, the promising young man whom he incorporated into his government as economy minister, and whose resignation was key to Johnson's fall, would succeed where he failed precisely.

The Conservatives remain clinging to power, despite already having their third prime minister, thanks to an election victory in December 2019. On the back of Brexit, Johnson achieved historic results, sweeping even traditionally Labor strongholds in the center and Northern England.

"This is a Brexit government, but Brexit will be nothing if we don't do things differently in this country," the former prime minister said on Thursday, who claimed that way, without saying it openly, as the guardian of some essences that Sunak, according to his mentor, would have forgotten.

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