Good Friday Agreement architect Lord Trimble and Northern Irish constitutional expert Lord Bew have made a fresh intervention in the backstop debate, authoring a new paper, Nothing has changed? It has actually, for Policy Exchange today. Nobel Peace Prize-winning Trimble and Bew conclude that, despite the fact that there has been no textual change to the backstop itself, the Government’s Strasbourg concessions did deliver “substantive changes that will affect and limit the impact of the Irish backstop.” They agree that “the UK Government is now correct in asserting the right, in extremis, to appeal to international law under the Vienna Convention”…

Crucially, the paper explains that the EU has accepted “that the protection of the Good Friday Agreement may be entirely independent from the functioning of the Irish backstop.” Allowing the UK to leave the backstop without breaking its Good Friday Agreement obligations…

Trimble is a committed Brexiteer and Unionist, he has even gone to the lengths of launching a legal challenge against the Government to challenge the legality of the backstop under the Good Friday Agreement. The fact that he is now satisfied that there have been enough changes to limit the potential negative consequences of the backstop may well go some way to reassuring other Unionists and Brexiteers…