Liz Truss: ‘We opted for Northern Ireland Protocol with expectation of greater flexibility from the EU’

When asked if she regretted voting for the protocol, she said: “No, I don’t. We needed to deliver on Brexit and to get Brexit done.”

Ms Truss also said that her government’s legal advice is that triggering Article 16 cannot achieve much more than the current situation where swathes of the protocol have not been implemented. That undermines her continued threats to use Article 16, although Ms Truss again said that was still possible.

Her comments came as MPs debated and voted for the first time on the bill which would neuter much of the protocol which just two years ago Prime Minister Boris Johnson was trumpeting as a “fantastic” deal and denying that it would involve an Irish Sea border.

However, there is deep scepticism on all sides as to whether Mr Johnson really intends to see the bill into law – something likely to take over a year – in the face of accusations from the EU and many lawyers that it breaks international law.

When Ms Truss announced the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill last month, she said that she was willing to negotiate with the EU, but only if it would secure the same result as the bill.

That message was heard by some unionists as indicating that regardless of whether the protocol was largely dismantled through the bill or – far less likely – through talks with Brussels, much of it would be going.

However, when Ms Truss published the text of the bill two weeks ago, there was a subtle change of language. The Foreign Secretary, who is widely thought to be see herself as a likely successor to Mr Johnson, instead just talked about securing “changes” to the text of the protocol through negotiations – still highly unlikely, given the EU’s position, but no longer referring to the need for those changes to deliver the same outcome as the bill.

However, speaking yesterday, Ms Truss appeared to move back towards her earlier rhetoric, saying the bill means that businesses in Northern Ireland now have “certainty” about what is going to happen. She said that the UK government’s actions mean that “people know that by next year this solution will be in place”, describing it as a “durable and robust long-term solution to stop the sense of drift...with people in Northern Ireland not knowing what’s going to happen”.

When asked if she would accept some change to the protocol rather than all the changes the bill would make, she said: “Well, these issues – and there are four key issues, namely customs and SPS, VAT and state aid, governance and regulation… we need to fix those four issues. Now, if there is a slightly different way of doing that that delivers the result of restoring the balance of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, we would be prepared to look at it.

“But what we’ve seen from the EU so far are solutions that are worse than the current standstill, that would actually mean more bureaucracy.”