British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has consolidated support in his own party after striking a deal with the European Union (EU) on the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol.
Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reached agreement on Monday on the annexe to the UK's 2020 withdrawal agreement from the EU — sweetened by a royal audience with King Charles III at Windsor Castle for the unelected Brussels chief.
The so-called Windsor Framework sees the EU drop its insistence on customs checks on goods shipped from the British mainland to Northern Ireland, which remains in the European single market under the protocol on the grounds of maintaining the 1999 Good Friday peace agreement between sectarian terrorist groups.
It comes amid greater unity between Downing Street and Brussels than when the UK was still a member of the bloc, as Western nations rush to arm Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
Von der Leyen, who dubbed the PM "dear Rishi" at a press conference, had flatly refused to renegotiate the protocol with his predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
Conservative peer Robert Hayward, an elections pundit, said the protocol deal was the "first significant event" since Sunak took office. He added that it had put those lobbying for Johnson's return to Downing Street "heavily on the back foot."
"It hasn’t pushed Johnson away but it has diminished his potential influence," Hayward said, adding: "I can’t think in recent years of any politician for whom there has been such a battering in absentia."
Parliamentary Defence Committee chairman Tobias Ellwood, a strident opponent of Brexit who has also called for direct British military intervention in Ukraine by sending Royal Air Force fighters to enforce a no-fly zone, hailed the Windsor deal.
"Our standard of statecraft has moved up a couple of gears," Ellwood claimed. "Bombastic populism may rally a small base but does not appeal to the wider electorate whose support is needed to win elections," he said in a clear jibe at Johnson's election-winning style.
Under Sunak, Conservative polling support has slumped to trail the opposition Labour party by more than 20 percentage points.
But even Johnson ally and former Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees Mogg told his fellow MPs to "calm down and live with the leader we’ve got" — at least until after the next election.
"If we’re a grown-up party we cannot change leader again between now and an election," Rees-Mogg said in a TV interview.
Johnson dropped out of the autumn Tory leadership contest despite winning the nominations of more than 100 Tory MPs — the unusually-high threshold set by the back-bench 1922 Committee which runs the process — and being more popular than Sunak among grass-roots members.
He has now thrown his hat into the ring to replace former Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of US-led military bloc NATO, having played a pivotal role in persuading the leaders of France, Italy and von der Leyen's native Germany to arm Ukraine and impose sanctions on Russia regardless of the cost to their own economies.