TALK of a deal with the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol is premature while the text of a proposed agreement is kept under wraps, according to the prominent Eurosceptic MP Bill Cash.

Asked if a breakthrough was on the cards, he told GB News: “Well, I don’t really think that it is actually and I’ll tell you why. First of all, there is no text at all.

“There’s zero paper to look at. Nobody really knows what the ingredients, what the details are. That’s number one.

“And the second thing is that the issues are so huge…I’m reading that somehow or other people could be bounced into an agreement on Tuesday which is absolutely ludicrous, because if that was to be attempted that would set up a whole chain of reactions, which would not be helpful.

“We obviously want to have a solution to the problems of Northern Ireland. We had The Troubles, there has been civil disorder, stability is absolutely essential.”

Mr Cash added: “To put all this at risk by trying to rush it without any documentation so that nobody can actually see what’s been happening – I’ve been talking to some of the DUP people over the last couple of days.

“They did have a meeting, but as far as I’m aware, they haven’t seen any text and it’s the written word that really matters as well as the objectives and you can’t trust the EU.”

He told Mark Dolan: “It looks like a deal to those people who don’t necessarily know how these things work in practice.

“The bottom line is without the detail about these green and red lanes, we haven’t seen the text as I’ve said, I wouldn’t put any money on being certain that that would work in the first place.

“The second thing is that regarding the European Court and regarding the number of EU laws that have been made behind closed doors by majority vote, by the Council of Ministers in Europe, without any involvement whatsoever from anybody, either from the UK or indeed from Northern Ireland.

“That is an absolutely massive democratic deficit, as we call it. It’s a massive democratic vacuum.”

He added: “Imagine we’ve got two million people in Northern Ireland. Imagine if you take for example, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and put them together, that’s two million people.

“Imagine if they all had laws passed over their heads by this system, behind closed doors by majority vote and they weren’t involved in it whatsoever.

“This is a massive problem. And it can’t be resolved just by waving some magic wand and saying, ‘oh, well, there’s some means of trying to ensure that the Court of Justice is somehow not going to be involved’.

“All the evidence is that the way in which the EU always ultimately makes its mind up is that they will stick by the European Court of Justice as being the key factor in the decisions that are taken.”