Owen Polley: The election will be held before the Tory deal with the DUP has been fully delivered

​Last week, political pundits were struggling to work out what Rishi Sunak was thinking, when he called a snap election for the 4th of July this year.

Gavin Robinson told the BBC last month that the deal removed the Irish Sea border for UK goods. He now says the new government will have much more to do about the barrier yet the DUP had said it had removed key difficulties

​The Conservative Party is still in a mess, having endured recent defections and scandals. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s popularity ratings remain low, whereas Labour’s lead in opinion polls seems resilient, or even insurmountable, at some 20 per cent.

Admittedly, there has been some relatively positive news for the government on the economy recently. Inflation is at its lowest rate for three years and the UK is experiencing modest economic growth.

Sunak argues that this progress, however underwhelming, will be at risk if Labour comes to power. In addition, he claims that Keir Starmer cannot be trusted to keep Britain safe, in the face of threats from China and Russia. And he says that flights to Rwanda will soon take off, removing failed asylum seekers, which is a policy that Mr Starmer opposes.

Whether the public finds these arguments convincing, we will soon see. Perhaps the strongest case for holding an early poll is that the prime minister cannot be sure things will improve by the autumn.

At least now, the Labour Party’s campaign machine is not fully in election-mode. And Reform UK, which the Tories worry may lose them seats at Westminster, is still relatively disorganised. Whatever Sunak is thinking, unionists in Northern Ireland will have to make the best of his decision, in circumstances that are not ideal.

Perhaps the most pressing question, for the DUP at least, is what happens now to its Safeguarding the Union deal?

Last month, the party’s new leader, Gavin Robinson, told the BBC’s TalkBack programme that, by the autumn, the government would remove checks on British goods moving to Northern Ireland. Now, the general election will intervene before that pledge is fulfilled.

In response, the TUV’s leader, Jim Allister, tweeted that ‘none of the promised legislation which (the) DUP and Jeffrey Donaldson banked on (has been) delivered’. ‘They jumped,’ he said, and the ’government didn’t follow.’

On a similar theme, two recent court cases, on the Troubles Legacy Act and the Rwanda migrants scheme, found that the protocol still prevents Westminster legislation from being enacted in Northern Ireland when EU laws prevail. The government planned to appeal these judgments, claiming that the judges got it wrong.

In the first instance, these appeals will be considered by the Court of Appeal in Belfast, but they could have ended up at the Supreme Court in London. If Labour wins the election, as now seems almost certain, will it push these cases to the highest court in the land, if necessary, or will it quietly drop them before a definitive view is given?

For many unionists, the prospect of Keir Starmer as prime minister has become more appealing, thanks to their experiences of the Tory administration. The argument is that a Labour government would align the UK more closely with the EU, meaning that Irish Sea barriers, in the short-term, become less noticeable and significant.

That makes some superficial sense, but it won’t properly solve the main issues with the protocol and Windsor Framework. Northern Ireland will still be subjected to EU law, while Great Britain is free to move away from Brussels, so any change in policy at Westminster means all the old problems could come back.

When the election was called, the DUP leader’s statement suggested some cognitive dissonance on these matters. Gavin Robinson claimed that the new government will have, “much more to do to ensure Northern Ireland benefits as an integral part of the UK rather than remaining subject to European laws…”

The implication was that unionists needed his party’s leadership to achieve these aims. Yet, the DUP previously claimed that it had removed the main difficulties with the protocol, including ending an ‘automatic pipeline of EU law’. The party will probably not put the message, ‘Send us back to Westminster so that we can solve the problems we said we’d solved last time,’ on its leaflets, but that statement is closer to Mr Robinson’s pre-election rallying call than he will find comfortable.

The DUP could have avoided this pickle, of course, if it had not joined the government in making outlandish claims about its deal. However, it may yet get away with its overselling, largely if not completely unscathed, because its chief rival, the Ulster Unionist Party has been reluctant to challenge these claims properly.

The UUP has, at times, critiqued the DUP’s failures in Safeguarding the Union accurately. But it mixed those messages with implications that the protocol and the sea border were matters only of secondary importance.

All of this puts unionist voters in a predicament. Many of them are angry that the DUP has made such inflated claims about its deal, but that does not mean that they are willing to see unionism lose seats to nationalists or Alliance. The party’s strategists will look to build their campaign upon that reluctance, alongside the idea that it has somehow taken ‘difficult decisions’ for the greater good of Northern Ireland.

At the same time, if pro-Union voters do not register their unhappiness with the weaknesses of Safeguarding the Union, then their silence will be interpreted as acquiescence by unionism’s enemies and those who just want the issue to go away. In that scenario, expect opponents to claim that even unionists are prepared to accept the protocol, the framework and, ultimately, the Irish Sea border.