The DUP has belatedly taken right stance against the Northern Ireland Protocol

Boris Johnson is being blamed for various political crises, such as a collapse in confidence in the government’s authority on Covid rules.

The prime minister certainly has much to answer for in the current crisis in Northern Ireland.

He travelled to the DUP conference in Belfast in November 2018 and, in a bid to undermine his then leader Theresa May, said that no Tory prime minister could accept a border in the Irish Sea between parts of the UK. He specified that neither a regulatory nor tariff border was acceptable. In under 12 months, Mr Johnson had done just that: agreed a regulatory (standards of goods) and tariff (customs) border in the Irish Sea (albeit the latter now minimised by the EU trade deal).

At the time of the October 2019 agreement with Leo Varadkar (which had the then Taoiseach beaming in joy and apparent disbelief at the UK ceding control over a key part of policy making with regard to Northern Ireland) there was little uproar about it. The implications were not widely understood.

The DUP agreed to an initial version of Mr Johnson’s plan, only relating to regulatory checks, and subject to Stormont pre approval. Even so, it is now clear that this was a major mistake and helped encourage to the full concession.

Mr Johnson’s handling of the matter since then has been appalling. First he said there as no border, then his government came to (in effect) concede that it had made a disastrous concession, and under Lord Frost’s negotiation leadership tried to overhaul the Northern Ireland Protocol.

As recently as November 2021, London seemed determined to use Article 16 of the protocol to suspend it. That determination seems to have evaporated.

The DUP was at first too pragmatic about the protocol but has latterly taken the right approach to it. As Peter Robinson wrote on these pages, “safeguarding the Union is a call of duty for any and every unionist”. Edwin Poots has now made the right decision on the scandal of internal UK trade checks. As his leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson says, “enough is enough”.

Today we should know if agri checks will in fact stop.

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