Morning View: London handling of impasse puts 1998 deal in peril

Politics in recent days in Northern Ireland has taken a disturbing twist.

Nationalists and republicans, with some help from the Alliance Party, have been talking up joint authority.

Alliance says that it does not support shared London-Dublin rule in Northern Ireland, but it does want an enhanced say for the Irish government if Stormont is not resumed.

This could mean a form of joint stewardship of the Province. If so, the Belfast Agreement would not need to be torn up, as it would to enable formal shared sovereignty of Northern Ireland.

But even joint stewardship would be a constitutional outrage.

The often weak Northern Ireland Office's response to this speculation has been alarming. It has declined to bat it away as it rightly did during the long Sinn Fein collapse of Stormont from 2017 to 2020, when devolution was kept down until republicans got their long-cherished sectarian goal of an Irish language act.

The failure makes you wonder: is there any residual unionist thinking in the NIO at all now?

Northern Ireland's former first minister Peter Robinson has written on Facebook a scathing summary of where things are: pointing out how the NIO and Alliance did not after 2017 put the pressure on Sinn Fein that they are now applying to the DUP.

Also that SF boycotts Westminster and the Tories are denying an election that tests their own mandate.

The Belfast Agreement is in grave peril.

And a Conservative and Unionist Party, that at times insists it shares unionist concerns over the Irish Sea border and at others defends that frontier legally and politically, is actually bullying unionism with a Hobson's choice of an election or an Irish say in NI affairs – both outcomes that will satisfy nationalists.