Avoiding hard border is the first step to diminishing the threat to the Union

DUP leaders need to reflect very carefully, lest in their current intransigence they contribute to destroying the thing they love.

Avoiding a hard border is only the first step to putting the Union back on course.

A more liberal and inclusive Northern Ireland needs to emerge, more welcoming to gay people and Irish speakers or learners, to give just a few examples.

Watching the debate about Ashers Bakery and that cake, from the other side of the Irish Sea, was embarrassing and frustrating. But these are debates for another time.

Firstly, we must avoid mishaps during Brexit that could contribute to the tectonic plates shifting under the Union itself.

The horizon is not entirely gloomy. Theresa May, it seems, is trying to control the extremists within her own government.

Increasingly, one feels, an international deal will be done by May, Macron and Merkel, to keep the UK closely aligned to the EU.

But Mrs May needs the parliamentary arithmetic to support her. Most of her MPs are moderate, including the Scottish contingent, who clearly see the threat to their own place in the Union, from hard Brexit.

The DUP should embrace fresh thinking and support her as well, towards a sensible customs solution for the entire UK

I am, at least geographically, fairly close to concentrations of right-wing English Tory opinion. I think I know what makes some of them tick.

Sadly, one nation Conservatism has withered, but it can be revived. A new, selfish and entirely deluded English nationalism has emerged, allied to simplistic notions of sovereignty, liberal economics and free trade.

The current right-wing fantasy of “trade deals” is instructive. It is bizarre, to say the least, and in due course will be exposed as largely illusory.

People in Northern Ireland should be wary.

The likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Iain Duncan Smith, and their nameless foot soldiers care little about keeping the United Kingdom together.

It is possible that some of them may actively wish to be “rid” of Northern Ireland and Scotland, and be “left” with England and Wales.

This is the cynical and unpleasant nature of the thinking.

We all need to support Theresa May as she tries to put these myopic people back on the margins, where they have always belonged, and revive the spirit of the great and pluralistic nation that we know we ought to be.

John Gemmell, Wem, Shropshire