_RISHI SUNAK was never in danger of reliving Theresa May’s 2019 nightmare of losing parliamentary votes on Brexit deals. Last month, when the prime minister unveiled his “Windsor framework” agreement with the EU to soften the customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland necessitated by Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit, his Labour shadow, Sir Keir Starmer, promised his support. Yet the Commons vote on March 22nd was not all plain sailing for Mr Sunak. Though he did not in the end need Labour’s backing for a majority, all the MPs from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (dup) voted against him, as did 22 Conservative hardliners—including his immediate predecessors, Mr Johnson and Liz Truss.

Mr Sunak is plainly guilty of overselling the deal by claiming that it removes any sense of a border in the Irish Sea. His DUP and Tory critics are right to say that, because Northern Ireland is in effect in the EU’s single market for goods, it will (unlike Great Britain) remain subject to EU law and the European Court of Justice. And there is good reason to doubt if the “Stormont brake”, which Mr Sunak says gives the Northern Ireland Assembly a veto over the application of future EU laws—and which was the subject of MPs’ vote—would work in practice. Norway, which has a similar veto, has used it only once and was later forced to give way after EU threats of retaliation.

Yet neither the DUP nor Tory hardliners have offered a practical alternative to the Windsor framework that would avert a hard border with Ireland. Nor can they deny that it improves the present Northern Ireland protocol. It scraps niggling obstacles to trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and minimises checks on supermarket goods. Most Northern Irish voters support it. Many believe Mr Sunak’s claim that Northern Ireland will be in the “unbelievably special position” of privileged access to both the UK and the EU markets (a position that, until Brexit, the entire UK enjoyed).

There is no prospect of changes to the Windsor framework. Indeed, the government had arranged for it to take effect even before MPs voted on it. Mr Sunak’s success in pushing it through and improving relations with the EU has strengthened his own political position and weakened those of Mr Johnson and Tory hardliners. But it leaves Northern Ireland’s politics in a mess. The DUP, the biggest unionist party, is sure to maintain its boycott of the province’s power-sharing executive, which can operate only if both it and Sinn Féin, the biggest nationalist party, take part.

It will not be easy for the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, to back down now. If he does so too easily, he risks losing support to an even harder-line unionist party. Many in the DUP are anyway leery of returning to power-sharing as, for the first time, it would now mean accepting a Sinn Féin first minister. So it seems all but certain that, when the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is marked next month with a visit to Belfast by Joe Biden, the American president, the devolved institutions will not be functioning. They are, in effect, collateral damage from Brexit.■