Don’t laugh, but Boris Johnson would genuinely prefer a Brexit deal to no deal.
And that should make Northern Ireland’s DUP and the Brexiter purists in the Tories’ European Research Group very nervous indeed.
Because the EU has made it clear that it thinks a deal could be done if the backstop arrangement, designed to keep open the border in the island of Ireland, was remade as a Northern-Ireland only backstop rather than a hybrid of customs union for the whole UK and some NI-only arrangements.
There is evidence of Johnson moving in that direction, with his initial concession that there could be a single market for agriculture for the Republic and Northern Ireland that would be bossed by Brussels.
Which to some unionists will look like the thin end of the wedge towards that regulatory border in the Irish Sea they regard as toxic.
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