Editorial: The prime minister visits Northern Ireland but won't finish his agenda here due to his calling of the election

​The prime minister of the United Kingdom was in Northern Ireland yesterday as part of a 48-hour tour of his nation.

​Rishi Sunak visited England, Scotland, Wales and NI within days of announcing a general election for early July.

These are important gestures, not to be sniffed at, because they sub-consciously remind people that that UK is a country, at a time when separatists in Scotland, Wales and here try to undermine the idea of it as a nation state.

Similarly, when the BBC on big occasions such as royal secessions or the recent pandemic go to reporters in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast it helps send out a signal that the UK is a four-country entity.

It was good therefore to see Mr Sunak in Belfast, and flagging up some of the economic potential of a UK city that less than a century ago was an industrial leader.

All is not well in Great Britain and NI, however, and the outgoing Conservative and Unionist government in London has been struggling to deal with those forces that want to break apart the UK. Whether it has been effective in that is something that historians will judge.

The News Letter put it to Mr Sunak recently that for all his government’s proclaimed unionism, it had presided over an Irish Sea border that has separated Northern Ireland from the mainland. The prime minister strongly rejected that notion (the web version of this editorial will link to a story that has a video which shows our question and his answer).

There is though, in the surprise of recent days, a question that has yet to be answered, and will have to be explained at some point.

It is agreed that key planks of the government’s agenda, including safeguards to NI out of the Stormont restoration deal, that will not now come to fruition. Why then was the election brought forward by a few months so as to make that impossible?