The government must press ahead with this bill to protect the UK internal market

The prime minister must salvage what he can from the disastrous deal that he agreed with Leo Varadkar last October.

Unfortunately, he cannot tear up the agreement. But it is often the case, as Dermot Nesbitt observes opposite, that one set of laws clash up against another one.

Joe Biden, who has lectured the UK about a trade deal if it presses ahead with this bill, should know about such clashes because the US Supreme Court is always adjudicating on clashes between internal US laws: constitutional, federal and state.

There must be no prospect of the EU ever being in a position to threaten internal movements of goods within the UK. As Boris Johnson has said, he would never have agreed to that. The possibility must be outlawed.

Meanwhile there has been a lamentable failure in London and Belfast to defend the Belfast Agreement against the distortions of nationalists.

That 1998 deal above all enshrined the principle of consent. It did not establish Northern Ireland as a place of joint stewardship.

It is regrettable that the government has already been pushed into watering down its mild Internal Market Bill.

It needs to ramp up its explanations of what is going on, after the great damage done by Brandon Lewis’s misleading comments about breaking international law.

As Dominic Raab has been telling Americans, this is an essential precautionary measure against the EU.

Let us hope that that point resonates with the White House.

For all Donald Trump’s many, many failures his Republican party are less susceptible to Irish blandishments, and always were, back in the days of the Troubles when Democratic politicians echoed nationalist grievances.

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