Fantasy flight  - May and the border

HAVING spent so much time in Brussels recently, Theresa May thought what she needed this week was an eight-hour, four-nation, Brexit-boosting tour of the entirety of the United Kingdom. If it’s 12.30pm, it must be Belfast!

HAVING spent so much time in Brussels recently, Theresa May thought what she needed this week was an eight-hour, four-nation, Brexit-boosting tour of the entirity of the United Kingdom. If it’s 12.30pm, it must be Belfast!

It was, of course, an exercise in symbolism, and a spectacularly pointless one. She said nothing we haven’t heard before, and nothing new during her Northern Ireland visit about the border. It’s the Brexit question that has been swathed in fudge but not yet answered by a prime minister who says an Anglo-Irish frontier in the middle of the sea is unacceptable, yet who tells us that a frictionless border between Ireland and a North outside the single market and customs union is possible.