Very cool, if true

The new Northern Ireland agreement has the marks of something produced by competent negotiators on both sides.

Specifically, the UK.

This is an astonishing break from expectations and the well-established practices of the regime in Brexitstan.

So what's happening in Whitehall and Westminster?

On the one hand, we have to confront the unlikely possibility that all of the following miracles have happened:

1. Sunak has called his party and the ERG to order, so that a workable approach isn't immediately sabotaged by populist grandstanding and unreasonable demands from Euroskeptic extremists;
2. Experienced negotiators from Trade and the FCO are no longer regarded as Eurotraitors and excluded from decision-making;
3. The ministers involved are actually listening to sensible advice and engaging in an intelligent conversation - a laughably-improbable suggestion in any cabinet since the Referendum;
4. The Department for Exiting the European Union have been excluded, silenced, and walled-up in a cellar with candles, turnips, 'Sunlit Uplands' propaganda posters, psychiatric medications and a crack team of media experts telling them that Brexit is going swimmingly well;
5. The media are onside, including the Murdoch Empire, the Barclay brothers, and the UKIP PR executives who have been firmly entrnched at BBC News & Current Affairs for over a decade.

On the other hand, we could speculate that the EU designed the whole agreement from the ground up - both sides of it - with an in 'ghost team' acting as internal 'negotiators' for a failed state deemed incapable of participating in First-World diplomacy. Effectively, treating Brexitstan as a protectorate with no near-term prospect of developing effective indigenous government, being given pre-written treaties by their betters to sign for their own good.



Also... This is, actually, a border in the Irish Sea, an agreement predicated on a high degree of compatibility (or conformity) in Northern Ireland's regulatory regime and EU standards, and submission to the European Courts as final arbiter in all disputes.