Letter: Theresa May and then Boris Johnson put the UK on a path to its disintegration

She should have done that in 2019, and if she had tried to carry on next time I would have been forced to vote for a Liberal Democrat as the candidate with the best chance of getting her out of Parliament.

Why this apparently rather personal antagonism? Because between them she and Boris Johnson have unnecessarily set our country on a course which may well lead to its disintegration. I find that Sammy Wilson MP explained this a year ago (News Letter, March 26 2023, ‘Sammy Wilson blasts former PM Theresa May amid post-Brexit complications’)

“First of all, the box that we're placed in was clearly the responsibility of Theresa May,” Mr Wilson said. “She made an agreement with the EU that there would be no hard border and no checks at all. And no arrangements put in place to monitor trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

“Once she had done that and once we were in that box, then it was always gonna be impossible and very difficult for future prime ministers to get that changed.

“So Theresa May put us in the position. Boris Johnson didn't fight hard enough to get us out of that position. And of course, Rishi Sunak has tried to change it, made some minor changes to it, but the fundamentals are what Theresa May agreed."

From February 2018 it had been repeatedly pointed out to her that there was an easy solution to the supposedly intractable 'conundrum' of the Irish land border, namely the introduction of UK export controls to protect the EU single market from unsuitable goods crossing the border, but while she acknowledged my letters arguing for this alternative approach she never evinced any interest in exploring it.

But then I have to say that the same has proved true of the leaders of the two main unionist parties in Northern Ireland, and if it is now the case that there is a broad cross-party and cross-community consensus that the best future for the province will be as a kind of 'condominium', with sovereignty shared between between the UK and the EU, then it is not for somebody living elsewhere to question that.

Dr DR Cooper, Maidenhead, Berkshire