Good morning. If your response to news that a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol could be on the verge of being struck is a sudden urge to take a long-term lease on a flotation tank, fair enough. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to tune this all out until something is signed and delivered, and grapple with what exactly it means then.
Unfortunately, there are quite good reasons to get your head round it now. Already, battle lines are being drawn over the significance of such a deal, with three obvious camps: Brexit is progressing; Brexit is a mess; Brexit is being betrayed. (Boris Johnson, inevitably, is looming in the background.) The contours of that phoney war are likely to have significant consequences for the final outcome, for the UK and EU alike – and especially for the residents of Northern Ireland.
