It is now a given of Northern Ireland issues that mainlanders cannot be expected to understand them. (Arguably, it was ever thus.) So we know that late on Monday night the DUP was finally persuaded to take part in governing Northern Ireland after a two-year gap, but we still do not really know what it will involve. The agreement is treated by most London-based media as good news, because that is always how any concession by Unionists is treated. Boredom and obscurity allow the case of Northern Ireland to be used by our main political parties, officialdom, the Republic, the EU and the US administration as the exemplar of virtue. Having established the untruth (the opposite of the truth, in fact) that Brexiteers wanted a ‘hard border’ between North and South, these forces have combined to use the North as the means to weaken Brexit as a whole. Expect Sir Keir Starmer and his nationalist Northern Irish chief of staff, Sue Gray, to propose, if in government, an exciting new constitutional settlement for the entire United Kingdom, invoking the Good Friday Agreement.
Professor Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, is a respected figure, partly because she is, as she puts it, ‘made in Oxford’.
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