The Irish backstop is a monstrosity that wipes out our sovereignty

If the Brexit negotiations continue on this path they will end, I am afraid, in a spectacular political car crash. In the ensuing recriminations the road will be cordoned off. The investigative teams will roam around trying to work out how the British civil service – this purring Rolls Royce – could have come such a cropper. What distracted us? What caused us to swerve? How did Britain end up upside down in the ditch with all four wheels spinning lazily in the air?

To understand the origin of the disaster, you need to go back a few hundred paces to a fatal patch of oil on the road. It is called the Irish backstop. That was where the skid began. If we are to get out of this mess, and get the great British motor back on track, then we need to understand the Irish backstop, and how it is being used to coerce the UK into becoming a vassal state of Brussels.

It was on December 8 last year that the UK government agreed that if the EU was not satisfied – at any point in the future – about the arrangements for the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, then as a matter of law Northern Ireland would have to be part of the EU customs union and large parts of its single market – accepting rules promulgated in Brussels in just the way that Ireland does. Some of us were told at the time (I remember it well) that this was only hypothetical, that it was just a form of words, that it would never be invoked. We were taken in.