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Originally Posted by Chris
HMG’s strategy seems to be to portray the EU as obsessing over trivial rules and to win a PR war, regardless of what the agreement actually says. It won’t be difficult to achieve that within the UK - EU rules on sausages and chicken nuggets is precisely the sort of thing that got the tabloids in a froth time after time when we were in the EU. I suspect they’re also trying to trap any foreign leader who might be tempted to weigh in on EU’s side (I.e. Joe Biden, who shares that strange American proclivity for identifying with the country one of their distant ancestors came from). There’s a very clear attempt here to put the EU’s obsession with sausages on one side and the UK’s concern for peace and harmony in Ireland on the other. If the UK gov is successful at establishing that narrative it will be hard for the EU to get a decent sound bite out of Joe while he’s in Cornwall.
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I think you're right. As a reporter in Brussels, Boris Johnson made his name with well-crafted stories on straight bananas that bent the truth. So he knows how to play the game well here.
Biden's interest in Ireland is entirely logical. There's plenty of Irish ancestry votes in the US to be tapped. And the Good Friday Agreement is seen as a key Democrat success so he will not want to see that achievement harmed.