Northern Ireland

Deirdre Heenan: Johnson has no game plan and the North can only lose

The people of Northern Ireland were always going to be collateral damage in the Brexiteers’ endless, deceitful game of brinkmanship with Europe

Protesters at Hillsborough Castle: Boris Johnson visited the North last week to try to calm the political turmoil that has followed the Assembly elections and the ongoing dispute over the protocol. Picture: Getty

Predictably, Boris Johnson’s much-hyped visit to the North last Monday left no one any the wiser on how he intends to resolve the issues around the protocol. It is impossible to make sense of his contradictions, flip-flopping and mixed messaging.

There isn’t a hint of any strategy or plan to address the mess entirely of his own creation. The goalposts keep shifting, his rhetoric and tactics are all over the place. What the British prime ...