Usually when John Humphries interviews somebody on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he does much of the talking. Not so this morning. He had an interview with the Tánaiste Simon Coveney, and it was Coveney who grabbed the conversational reins.
No prizes for the subject under discussion. Coveney put a slab of gelignite against the talk of a temporary backstop and set it off: the backstop has been agreed, no time-limit, finished, done, over, except something better can be agreed, let’s move on to the next item. It was written, he said, “in green ink”. No doubt to distinguish it from Arlene’s red lines.
It was important that Coveney take that fact and hammer it home. The British government and the DUP have lately been inserting a time-limited backstop, the horror of a backstop in the Irish Sea, the redundancy of a backstop at all. Say things like that often enough, and people will begin to wonder “Maybe that’s what it always was – a limited backstop. Or maybe backstop refers to a border in the Irish Sea.” Coveney made that quite clear: the backstop refers to the border in Ireland, it means that come what may, the present open border will continue. The only thing he didn’t say was how that would be achieved.
So far, the only possibility anyone can think of are enhanced checks in the Irish Sea – or at Irish and British ports, to be exact. (No, Virginia, they will not have customs men in aqua suits strolling the sea bed.) The DUP, with its usual implacability, sees that as rupturing the link between the Six Counties and Britain. If they really believe that, how is it they ever agreed to checks on animals and agri-foods that are made routinely in goods travelling between Ireland and Britain? They don’t weaken the union with Mother Britain, it seems. But other checks, that’d cut the “Gordian knot” of the backstop, would do terrible harm to the Britishness of our green tormented corner.
As things stand, the DUP will be responsible for a train-wreck Brexit, and the British people will be unlikely to thank them. And as things stand, if there were a general election in the south, Fine Gael, with Coveney and Varadkar playing a blinder, would be a shoo-in. Let’s light a candle that neither of those two outcomes are realised.
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