It isn’t every day that former prime ministers set old party enmities aside to deliver a unified message on a matter of national urgency. When John Major and Tony Blair did it in June 2016, warning that Brexit would jeopardise the delicate balance of peace in Northern Ireland, it rightly led the news.
But not for long: the two prime ministers did not grace a single English newspaper front page the following morning. The media caravan moved on briskly. Besides, Northern Ireland was exactly the kind of serious, complicated and historically knotty subject that referendum coverage swerved to avoid. In fact, in a survey by King’s College London, analysing 350,000 articles in print and online across the 10-week referendum campaign, Northern Ireland didn’t register as an issue at all.
