The UK government needs to challenge claims as to the scale of support for a united Ireland

The frontier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which is causing so much problems for businesses, is above all the responsibility of Boris Johnson, and the flagrant way that abandoned his 2018 pledge to the DUP.

Undermining his prime minister in a bid to take her job, he mocked her plan for such a border. He specified that internal UK customs and regulatory checks were both unacceptable. Then, when he got her job, he promptly agreed to both.

It was a betrayal of his own remarks, of DUP MPs who kept Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street, and of NI. Yet as Owen Polley writes opposite, some people who you would expect to be appalled at this unforgivable opportunism have defended the border, seemingly because they like Mr Johnson.

But while he will always be most to blame for separating the UK, Theresa May established the idea that placating Ireland was London’s main Brexit aim in Northern Ireland.

She is said to have cited in alarm to Tory MPs poll findings showing rising support for a united Ireland.

But the News Letter has queried this for several years. We ran stories seeking more detail about Lord Ashcroft’s polls, which found such rising support. We asked who carried out the polls for him, so we could grill them. We were not told.

Now the investigative journalist Marcus Leroux has done vital new work on such polling (see page 20, to be put online later, news report below).

He finds that the polls that have most success in finding the border poll intentions of non voters also find lowest support for the UK. And such non voters could are key to the outcome.

Has this Conservative and Unionist government done its own detailed studies of the available polling? If not it needs to. After all, past UK weakness led to the provision that one border poll will (in effect) be followed by one every seven years.

London needs to be alert to this evidence that the grounds for calling a border poll in the first place are far from being met.

• A united Ireland could be much less popular than some polls say, an analysis of opinion surveys suggests

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