News Letter Morning View: Not too late for Heaton-Harris to delay election

This is a collection of Tory MPs who are strongly pro Brexit. The ERG notoriously let down unionists in the autumn of 2019 by supporting Boris Johnson's betrayal of the DUP via the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The ERG can say that the DUP had endorsed Mr Johnson's first iteration of the protocol (it says it did so on the grounds that it kept NI fully in UK customs territory and that NI's (effective) inclusion in the EU single market would be subject to a Stormont lock).

Whatever the retrospective justifications of the ERG/DUP decisions back then, that first iteration of the protocol would have led to most of the problems in the Irish Sea that currently pertain.

The ERG can also say that if it had not backed such a deal with the EU, Brexit would not have happened at all.

This history is important context for the grim situation in which unionism finds itself.

But the ERG has again presented itself as a friend of unionism.

Much of this might be real in that they know they owe NI something, after the constitutional damage the protocol has caused the Union.

Yet Mr Heaton-Harris and his junior minister Steve Baker (also from the ERG) have done little in office of substance to support unionism.

They know an election would be bad for unionism and good for Sinn Fein, because they keep citing it as implied pressure on the DUP to go into Stormont ahead of a resolution of the Irish Sea border.

It is not too late to row back from this course, by cancelling a poll that will bolster a party that is determined to fracture the UK.