When will the DUP realise the truth about the Tory Brexit strategy?

Are the Tories serious about getting rid of the troublesome Northern Ireland Protocol? The latest extension to the so-called grace period – the third in recent months – means that plans for post-Brexit checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland have been suspended again. But this isn’t the good news you might think it is for unionists in Northern Ireland.

In the short term, of course, it avoids a repeat of ‘sausage wars’ and megaphone diplomacy around the Protocol’s Article 16 (which allows Britain or the EU to take unilateral action in certain circumstances). This can only be good news. Yet for nervous unionists there is a disturbing lack of security about what might happen when this grace period does eventually come to an end. What’s more, this limbo period does nothing to help those politicians like DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson who desperately need to reassure voters of what the future holds for Northern Ireland in this post-Brexit era.

But rather than give the DUP security and reassurances they can sell to voters, David Frost and Boris Johnson appear to be condemning unionists and loyalists to the constitutional equivalent of the Hotel California.

David Frost and Boris Johnson appear to be condemning unionists and loyalists to the constitutional equivalent of the Hotel California

Before the summer, the DUP’s former leader and sometime Northern Ireland agriculture minister Edwin Poots spoke of ‘significant movement’ on the Protocol on the part of the Government; instead, as the TUV leader Jim Allister said, this ‘merely delays implementation of further excesses and does not address the fundamental constitutional issue of placing Northern Ireland under foreign jurisdiction, laws and courts’.