Theresa May’s Democratic Unionist Party allies will back her Brexit deal if she gains modest concessions from Brussels over the Northern Ireland border backstop, according to senior Tory Right-wingers.
They believe the DUP will not want to be seen to be blocking Brexit and that it will sign up to an agreement at the last minute.
DUP Westminster leader Nigel Dodds fuelled suspicions at Westminster that his party could soften its demands to clinch a deal.
Previously, it has called for the Withdrawal Agreement to be “reopened”.
However, Mr Dodds stressed in the Commons yesterday that Mrs May had committed to binding legal changes in terms of the backstop, “effectively” reopening the Withdrawal Agreement.This appeared to fall short of demanding that the “divorce” settlement from the EU be actually reopened.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the hardline Eurosceptic European Research Group, is also no longer demanding that the backstop be axed.
“I can live with the de facto removal of the backstop,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“I mean that if there is a clear date that says the backstop ends, and that that is in the text of the treaty or equivalent of the text of the treaty, if it were to be an appendix to the treaty.”
He added that the time limit should be “a short date, not a long date, then that would remove the backstop in the lifetime of Parliament and that would have a reasonable effect from my point of view”.
The backstop aims to stop the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
