So this is an interesting one. The UK government currently finds itself in an appalling mess over the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with Ireland, due to the inconvenient fact of a small part of Ireland being in the UK, and has no idea what to do about it.

The closest thing Westminster has to a plan – and it has to be said that it’s not VERY close to a plan – is the so-called “backstop”, which isn’t a backstop at all and merely kicks everything down the road a couple of years, and which the EU has already said is a non-starter.

The fallback on the backstop, as announced last December, is “regulatory alignment” on the island of Ireland, which would effectively mean Northern Ireland staying in the EU and a border coming into existence in the Irish Sea (or to be more geographically accurate, the North Channel).

This would be, um, bitterly opposed by the DUP, on whom Theresa May’s government notionally depends, but given the absolute trainwreck of Labour’s position on Brexit it’s not at all clear that the DUP’s opposition would be enough to scupper any vote, so it could happen anyway, opening a simply massive can of worms.

That’s about the shortest rendition of the situation we can manage. But of course, in reality it’s much more complicated than that.

Because since Northern Ireland and Scotland both voted to stay in the EU – Scotland by a particularly large margin – then any deal which effectively kept NI in Europe would be a huge benefit that Scottish people and businesses would want too.

The downside is that if such special status would necessitate customs and immigration checks in the North Channel – as it would have to – then obviously it would mean the same thing on the land border between Scotland and England.

But how would Scots feel about that? The answer surprised us a little.

According to our recent Panelbase poll, it turns out that a hard border at Berwick and Gretna is a price that Scottish voters are – by a margin of more than two to one – willing to pay to stay in the EU.

As we found yesterday, this is another question where Tories are isolated from the rest of Scotland. While SNP voters (even including the third of them who voted Leave) are absolutely overwhelmingly prepared to tolerate a hard border – presumably since it’d plainly be a further big symbolic and practical step towards independence – Labour and Lib Dem supporters also back the idea by more than 2:1.

Only Tories would be against the idea of Scotland having the same special status as Northern Ireland, and they’re only a quarter of Scottish voters and a fifth of MPs.

And the most intriguing thing about that is this: were it to happen, there’d clearly no longer be any need for a sea border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

That’s because NI would no longer be shut off from the rest of the UK, the situation that’s so intolerable to the DUP – instead it would be England and Wales that were effectively quarantined. The need for a hard land border on the island of Ireland could be avoided, replaced with one between Scotland and England which would have no implications for the Good Friday Agreement.

(Also, at just 96 miles the Scotland-England border is a lot shorter than the NI-Ireland one at 310 miles, and has many fewer crossings, so it’d be far easier to manage.)

Now, to say that such an arrangement would be controversial is like saying relations between Israel and Palestine are “a little tricky”. But remarkably, it appears to be the LEAST problematic of the solutions currently open to the UK government.

It would – we’ve just learned – be acceptable to the people of Scotland. It would, at a minimum, be LESS unacceptable to the DUP than any other option is. We know the English would go along with it, because we already know they’d happily cut Scotland and NI loose entirely to secure Brexit, never mind give them a half-and-half status.

And let’s be honest, nobody much cares what the Welsh think.

So there it is. We’ve solved the most unsolvable problem in British politics. Northern Ireland and Scotland get what they want – to basically stay in the EU as part of a Celtic substate with one foot in both camps. England and Wales also get what they want – to leave the EU. We don’t need to have a hard land border in Ireland, destroying the GFA, because the border between the EU and the UK will now be a much shorter and less bloodsoaked one located just north of Hadrian’s Wall.

(If, as pro-Brexit UK ministers keep claiming over Ireland, there’s an easy technological solution which can all but eliminate border friction and delays, then all the better.)

Pretty simple stuff, this politics lark, if you give it a moment’s thought.