Letter: The Windsor Framework is the price we have to pay for Boris Johnson

There's a distant period in English history called ‘The Anarchy’, when the sickening ambition of Empress Matilda and King Stephen devastated the land. Our contemporary ‘Anarchy’ began with the vote to leave the EU in 2016 and ended definitively last Friday, when Boris Johnson left parliament in true Trumpian fashion.

As extreme Brexiteers huff and puff the rest of us should, over the years, seek to realign the UK much more closely with the EU, perhaps even rejoining it. Scandinavian and Baltic countries, the Netherlands and more than half of Eastern Europe want us back. Most others would quietly welcome the balance to France and Germany that only we can provide.

The closer the entire UK gets to the EU in future years, the less will be the pressure for a border poll. This is clear. In the meantime I humbly suggest that it's time to fully accept the Windsor Framework in a positive way. It's not perfect but it is the price we all have to pay for the Boris Johnson experiment.

The test tubes are smashed, poisonous chemicals are splashed all over the laboratory, the key culprit is banished. Sensible people must now tidy up the mess. They should ease the entire country, very slowly, back to where it belongs, at the heart of Europe. In so doing they will undo the narratives that the UK, and Northern Ireland within it, are failed states. Those narratives are currently a gift to nationalism, but it doesn't have to be that way.

John Gemmell, Wem, Shropshire