Nothing in Boris Johnson’s post-Downing Street antics has been more cynical than his dodging from the privileges committee hearing on Wednesday to vote against Rishi Sunak’s Windsor framework. That reform was a hard-won attempt to rescue and reorder Johnson’s own hard-Brexit shambles. The least he could do was say thank you and shut up.
Fleeing to Northern Ireland’s extremist wilderness has long appealed to Britain’s political rejects. It offered a bunker to FE Smith and Enoch Powell. If Uxbridge now drops Johnson as its MP, Antrim will doubtless make him an offer, from whose cliffs he can rant and conspire against colleagues to his heart’s content. But the damage done by Brexit to the vexed politics of Northern Ireland does not end there. As its trade protocol sinks below the horizon, Churchill’s “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” are emerging once more in its place.
