Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss show more concern at the Northern Ireland Protocol than the NI Tories do

A strange thing happened at the hustings of the Northern Ireland Conservatives yesterday.

The local Tories did exactly what this column and others urged them not to do yesterday — they came very close to ignoring the Northern Ireland Protocol, asking only two questions about it over the course of an hour and otherwise acting as if the Irish Sea border was not the threat to the Union that it so obviously is.

But that was not the strange thing — in fact it was depressingly predictable. Rather, the strange thing was the way in which the two visiting candidates seemed far more concerned about the internal UK trade barrier – ironic, given that unionists have long had concerns about indifference to the unionist position in NI among the Conservative top brass.

Now of course cynics would say that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were only pretending to be concerned about a border about which they are actually not particularly bothered.

Certainly the Tory leadership campaign so far has confirmed the fact that few of the Conservative rank-and-file in England consider the NI Protocol to be a matter of concern.

And yet Ms Truss and Mr Sunak, even if they were genuinely troubled by the Irish Sea border, arrived in NI to find that local Tories were no more interested in the matter than Conservatives in the home counties. After all, Mr Sunak did not get a single question about it. Not one. Ms Truss got two, a small percentage of the queries that were put to her.

Does it not occur to people in the Northern Ireland Conservative Party, many of whom voted for Brexit, that influential people in the EU have sources who brief them on events such as the hustings, and delight in any news that suggests that there is little concern over the Irish Sea border?

And that people in London notice these things too, and add it to all the other snippets they have, such as poll findings that sometimes seem to be based on leading questions, that announce to the world that in truth unionists don’t care about the fact that they can no longer trade freely within their own nation?