When I was younger – so much younger than today – I thought of war as something which took place somewhere separate from the rest of the world, somewhere distant and uninhabited, a place soldiers went to settle their differences: a medieval battlefield rural and remote, the First World War’s no man’s land, a duelling ground for honourable men flickering in grainy footage on TV screens.

It was a hopelessly romantic fantasy of military conflict. Nobody bombed schools or hospitals, or burned towns to the ground. Nobody used industrial diggers to dig trenches for mass graves.

But today’s total war is of course totally different. In contemporary warfare, it is the citizen non-combatants who are the first and most visible casualties. A vast amount of the damage done is collateral. As such, this kind of war is virtually indistinguishable from terrorism. It is terror unleashed on a grand scale. The screams of children blast to hell our dreams of the rules of military chivalry.

That is why the situations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe matter so much. And it is also why the current uncertainties which have emerged over the long-term prospects for the continuation of peace on the island of Ireland are so urgently significant. 

For, though it seems absurd to say it, the future of that ongoing Irish peace is now again in question.

But let us for a moment rewind to mildly more innocent times. I once, long ago, had a friend who held a senior position in the Republic of Ireland’s diplomatic service. Late one evening, after several drinks at the counter of our local bar, His Excellency the ambassador turned to me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye.

‘I’ll let you in on a little secret’, he said. I leant forward to catch his whispered words. ‘We don’t want the North. The British don’t want the North. Nobody wants the North’.

But that, of course, was many years ago, and things are very different now. Ulster is no longer the economic disaster, social maelstrom, and political basket case that once it was. At least, not entirely so. Socially and economically, the province has developed at an extraordinary rate since the outbreak of relative peace nearly a quarter of a century ago. Politically, however, there remain untold schisms to bridge and the most treacherous peaks to climb.

Its fortunes have nonetheless certainly progressed since 1844, when a future British Prime Minister defined the Irish question as the conundrum of a vassal state comprising ‘a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien church; and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world’.

The Republic of Ireland formally gained its freedom from Westminster’s yoke a century ago; Northern Ireland chose to remain part of the UK. No longer subject to famine or to English landowners, and enjoying greater religious freedoms, the province nevertheless continues to suffer under one of the weakest executives in the world. And the shadow of sectarian controversies continues to loom.

And now they also face the problems of the unforeseen consequences of Brexit. (Unforeseen? Well, perhaps not wholly so.)

One of the biggest questions on the lips of Remainers during the Brexit referendum campaign of 2016 was what would happen to the land border in Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland and the main political parties of Northern Ireland – which in 1998 had paved the path to peace – has always depended upon the porousness of the border dividing the two territories which comprise the island of Ireland. While both Ireland and the United Kingdom remained in the European Union, that was not a problem: EU membership necessitated arrangements for the free movement of goods and people across its internal borders. The UK’s departure from the world’s greatest trading bloc changed all that. Border controls suddenly became essential again.

Six years ago, the leaders of the Leave campaign said this would not be a problem. But it is now a very major problem (and it obviously was always going to be one); and those same Brexiteers – Boris Johnson chief amongst them – are now having to sort it out.

Mr. Johnson’s solution, reached in the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU in December 2019, was what we call the Northern Ireland Protocol. This required that goods would be checked when arriving in Northern Ireland from Britain, rather than when travelling from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. This permitted the maintenance of free movement across the Irish border. Over the last two years, the Prime Minister has repeatedly threatened to revoke this deal, even though it was he himself who had originally brokered it.

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This Northern Irish problem has lately been exacerbated by the tactics of the Democratic Unionist Party. As uncompromising supporters of their province’s continuing union with Great Britain, this hardline protestant party’s opposition to a united (and predominantly Roman Catholic) Ireland has cemented their position of antagonism towards the Northern Ireland Protocol, which they see as dividing Ulster from its mainland home.

Last month’s elections for their country’s assembly resulted in their republican rivals Sinn Féin for the first time beating the DUP into second place to become the biggest single party in Belfast’s parliament at Stormont. This did not however solve the problem at all.

The issue has intensified because the Northern Irish constitution requires that both parties cooperate to form a power-sharing government, led equally by a First Minister and a Deputy First Minister. The DUP have refused to participate in this executive until the Northern Ireland Protocol is abolished. Although Sinn Féin won the election and supported the protocol, they are therefore unable to appoint a First Minister until the DUP agree to nominate their Deputy.

This situation has resulted in a stalemate – an administrative paralysis – which the UK government is desperate to break. Unfortunately, the only way that they can see it can be broken is to overturn the agreement which they themselves signed with the European Union only two and a half years ago.

Having previously received legal advice that to do so would represent a breach of international law, the British government has now sought and secured advice which suggests it would not. There nevertheless remain many who are highly concerned as to the damage that this reversal would wreak upon the UK’s global reputation.

Boris Johnson’s plan to enact legislation to annul this aspect of his Brexit deal has met with something of a mixed response both in the UK and overseas. The Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for foreign affairs warned of the economic impacts of a potential trade war with the EU. The Tory chair of the UK parliament’s Northern Ireland Committee pertinently observed that he found it extraordinary that a Conservative administration should need to be reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘the first duty of government is to uphold law’ and that ‘if it tries to bob, duck and weave around that duty when it is inconvenient, then nothing is safe’. Sinn Féin’s president suggested that the DUP was holding the nation to ransom.

The chair of the United States’ House of Representatives sub-committee on Europe expressed ‘grave concern’ as to the undermining of the Good Friday Agreement. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly noted that the UK government’s actions threaten to jeopardize that crucial agreement. Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs denounced the prospect of ‘unilateral action, announcing legislation which would essentially breach international law’. A visiting delegation of American politicians agreed that such unilateral action would not work. The European Commission’s Vice-President also advised against the dangers of such ‘unilateral action’. The Irish Prime Minister warned of the risk of a trade war breaking out if the UK tore up its deal with the EU.

Last month, the former Conservative Party leader William Hague had described another volte-face from Boris Johnson’s government (its decision not to proceed with a major health initiative designed to tackle a national obesity crisis) as ‘politically weak, intellectually shallow and morally reprehensible’. This seemed an appropriate enough indictment of the approach of this administration as a whole, whether in relation to the ‘Partygate’ scandal or to this new threat to the UK’s relationship with Europe, its continuing capacity to strike binding international agreements, and the prospects of ongoing peace on the island of Ireland.

In this context, a recent report from parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee censuring the Foreign Office’s ‘fundamental lack of seriousness, grip or leadership’ during the disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan has hardly underpinned confidence in the British government’s chances of resolving this latest crisis.

It was Boris Johnson’s weasel words which, back in 2016, got Northern Ireland into this mess. His continuing acts of duplicity and chicanery may seek to kick the problem further down the road; but, as it rolls through the mire of his administration’s charlatan politics, it only attracts more of such detritus onto itself, swelling its ugly and convoluted form, weighing it down like a millstone hung around the nation’s neck, corrupted with the rot of a disgraced leader’s false promises and lies.

Boris Johnson is no more a Conservative than Donald Trump is a Republican. Neither are motivated by political belief so much as by short-sighted self-interest and personal vanity. Mr. Johnson’s hubris, ambition and shameless dishonesty ripped Britain out of a prosperous economic alliance with its nearest neighbours; his incompetence and inaction led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths during the height of the Covid crisis; his reputation for deal-breaking squandered the opportunity at last November’s climate conference to make meaningful progress in averting global environmental collapse.

This is after all a politician who, at the end of last month, just two days after the publication of an official report which condemned his lack of moral leadership, changed the criteria in his administration’s ministerial code of conduct to make it more difficult to fire serving members of government. Having done so by his own example, he had thereby gone on to compromise standards of behaviour in public life at a formal and regulatory level. As the BBC’s political editor wrote last week, this relentless controversy has corroded his own colleagues’ confidence ‘in whether big policy promises can be kept’ – including, in particular, his pledges on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

And so, as the Irish question emerges again, the peace, security and integrity of the nation may prove to be the latest price that the UK has to pay for its leader’s lazy and craven narcissism, for its choice of a premier whose bloated ego overwhelms his capacity to listen to reason, whose blind and boundless faith in his own infallibility makes him act without any thought for the repercussions of what he does.

One tries to avoid the tendency for one’s arguments to lapse into the easy gambit of the ad hominem attack; and yet it seems inescapably clear that Britain’s biggest problem, once again, comes down to its Prime Minister, Mr. Boris Johnson. Suffice it to say that it would be horribly unfair to suggest that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is both pig-headed and pig-ignorant, an utter pig of a man. It would, of course, be grossly unfair to pigs.

In 2016, fifty-six per cent of the population of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union. A recent opinion poll showed that thirty per cent of people in the province would vote in favour of the unification of Ireland, while forty-five per cent wanted the North to remain as part of the UK. Following the unprecedented success of the republican party in last month’s elections, the threat of the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland might start to sway the views of the undecided quarter of Ulster’s electorate. The prospect of living in a united Ireland within the EU, an enlightened state a world away from the squalor of Westminster, might override many people’s outmoded loyalist concerns. In parallel with the continuing success of the nationalists in Scottish politics, this development might well herald, after more than two centuries of union, the fragmentation of the UK.

Boris Johnson is the first British Prime Minister also to hold the title ‘Minister for the Union’. It is an honour which in 2019 he conferred upon himself. It is a role in which, like so many of his responsibilities, this most desperately ineffective of leaders seems destined to fail.