Editorial: Far from taking over the NIO, Heaton-Harris and Baker are now talking up the protocol deal in an unhelpful way

When Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker were appointed Northern Ireland Office ministers there was uproar.

Irish nationalists talked about a takeover of the NIO by the ERG (the European Research Group of eurosceptic Tory MPs).

For all the sound and fury, the critics didn’t seem that exercised and soon fell silent. They must have sensed that London would not allow NIO ministers to be meaningfully unionist.

While Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs is nationalist, has an institutional memory that is such, and seems more influential in outlook than Irish ministers themselves who come and go, the NIO has a neutral culture. Sure enough, Mr Heaton-Harris and Mr Baker seem to have absorbed that.

Mr Baker, who naively apologised to Dublin for not paying enough respect to its interests after the UK quit the EU, then gave an interview to this newspaper has now urged the Foreign Office to pay close attention to the DUP stance against the Irish Sea border. He said that he had formerly been "betrayed" by government officials in his bid for a full Brexit split from Europe.

Citing Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s speech to the DUP conference, and its call for an end to EU law dominance over NI, Mr Baker says: “It needs to be heard in the Foreign Office by officials who might otherwise do a tech mini technical negotiation.”

That interview was eye brow raising at the time, a junior NIO minister instructing the Foreign Office. It looks ridiculous now. Mr Baker, who days ago was said to be on resignation watch, has been glowing about a deal which patently does not end EU law dominance.

Mr Heaton-Harris insists the new deal is “unbelievably different and novel in just about every way". Such talk takes people for fools and is unhelpful as unionists try to figure a way out of the disaster of recent years.