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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Max Jeffery and I'm joined by Isabel Harman and Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for

European Reform. Rishi Sunak is in Northern Ireland today meeting with senior DUP officials. Isabel,

can you give us the latest? Yes, so Rishi Sunak travelling to Belfast last night was

understandably seized upon as a sign that this deal that has been imminent for some weeks

really was imminent now because the Prime Minister is wanting to try to sell this deal on the

protocol the details of which we don't yet have to the DUP in particular ahead of hopefully

bringing it before the cabinets next week. So the latest on that is that there have been meetings

between the Prime Minister and senior members of the DUP including obviously the party's leader

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and he has come out saying that this is you know a big moment and that he

hasn't seen the final text of an agreement but I think it is safe to say and I'm quoting him here

that progress has been made across a range of areas but there are still some areas where

further work is required and he's hopeful that an agreement can be reached. Now this is

more hopeful I think from the DUP than a lot of people were expecting there had been talk.

I mean I interviewed Arlene Foster who's obviously not in the leadership of that party anymore

but I interviewed her last week where she was really talking down the prospect of getting a deal

on the protocol signed off before the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in April suggesting

that that was a sort of artificial deadline. That's still very much a serious deadline for Joe Biden

for Sunach and for lots of other people for the obvious symbolic reasons. So what Donaldson

...