Boris Johnson meets DUP for secretive dinner as they prepare to demand new cash

Boris Johnson met his DUP allies for a secretive dinner last night as the hardline MPs prepare to demand millions more for Northern Ireland.

The 10 Democratic Unionists were given special treatment just hours before Mr Johnson meets all five main parties today in Belfast.

Arriving at Stormont – which has been deadlocked without an Assembly for more than two years – he said: “My prime focus this morning is to do everything I can to help that get up and running again.”

But Downing Street refused to say what he discussed last night at the private dinner – whose guests included DUP leader Arlene Foster.

It’s two years since Theresa May gave £1bn to Northern Ireland in exchange for DUP votes to prop up her government. Now the “confidence and supply” agreement will expire within months – and today Ms Foster flatly refused to rule out demanding more cash.

Ms Foster said the arrangement was not discussed at last night’s dinner.

But she told the BBC: “We will of course review that confidence and supply agreement to see how has been implemented and whether we need to make changes to it at the end of this parliamentary term and that’s what we will do then.

“Obviously we will talk about the confidence and supply agreement in the weeks and months to come.”

Boris Johnson needs to keep the DUP’s backing in Parliament otherwise he will face being ousted in a no-confidence vote this Autumn.

Technically the Prime Minister has a working majority of just two – including the DUP – which will drop to one if the Lib Dems win tomorrow’s Brecon by-election.

Mr Johnson’s trip to Northern Ireland is the last step of his tour to all four nations of the UK in his first week in office.

After being booed on arrival in both Cardiff and Edinburgh he rocked up to Stormont House just after 8am today for meetings on restoring power-sharing with the DUP, Sinn Fein, UUP, Alliance and SDLP.

Despite last night’s dinner he insisted he was “completely impartial” in the power-sharing talks.

He told reporters: “It’s all there in the Good Friday Agreement. We believe in complete impartiality and that’s what we are going to observe.

“But the crucial thing is to get this Stormont government up and running again.”

Ms Foster said the dinner discussed three topics – restoring devolved government, “delivering on Brexit” and strengthening the Union.

It comes after the new Prime Minister clashed with Irish PM Leo Varadkar over the border question in their first phone call yesterday.

Mr Johnson insisted the UK would “never” put physical checks or infrastructure on Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic.

But he also demanded Mr Varadkar “abolish” the backstop clause of the Brexit deal – which is designed to avoid those checks, but involves following EU rules and is vehemently opposed by the DUP.

Despite no clear solution in sight, Boris Johnson “made clear that the UK will be leaving the EU on October 31, no matter what.”

DUP chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson today warned the chances of a no-deal Brexit are “significant”.

Asked about warnings of 40,000 job losses in Northern Ireland, he said that was at the “very high end of the scale”. But he told the BBC: “We do recognise that no deal is not good in the short term for our economy in Northern Ireland.”

And Fianna Fail foreign affairs spokesman Niall Collins said the “hardening” of Mr Johnson’s rhetoric “concerns us”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The backstop is necessary for a number of reasons as we know.

“It’s necessary to protect the all Ireland economy, it’s necessary to protect the Good Friday Agreement to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland and all the consequences that would flow and will flow if we have a border on the island of Ireland, including the potential damage to our peace process and potential return to violence.”

Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald branded Brexit a “piece of astonishing political and economic self-harm”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think it’s very important that the British system sets out very clearly for all of us what it and they would understand to be the point of threshold, the trigger point at which a border poll or a referendum would be called … Well, I think some of the thresholds have been met.”

On no-deal, she added: “In the event of a hard Brexit and a crash Brexit, I don’t know for the life of me how anybody could sustain an argument that things remain the same…

“I don’t know how Britain could crash this part of Ireland out of the EU with all of the attendant harm and damage economically and politically and, with a straight face, suggest to any of us who live on this island that we should not be given the democratic opportunity as per the Good Friday Agreement to decide our future.

“I think that would be quite scandalous.”