For months Brexiteers have been pilloried by Remainer pundits, politicians and broadcasters for suggesting that technological solutions could keep the Irish border open after Brexit. Today The Times has reverse-ferreted to report glowingly that technological solutions for the border are now being secretly considered… by the EU. Brexiteers have always argued that opposition to a tech border was political, not practical…

Remainers are now trying to move the goalposts and insist that they were still correct to mock technological solutions as unworkable fantasies because the EU is currently only looking at applying them across the Irish Sea, rather than on the land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This is desperate special pleading. If the EU accepts technology can work across the sea border, then technology can also be applied to the land border.

There is four times as much goods trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK than there is between NI and the Republic. The vast majority of trade across the land border is local trade between small businesses, most of which is agricultural produce or construction materials. An all-Ireland agricultural regime is a sensible compromise, as the ERG proposed last week with DUP support. A few bricks and bags of cement are not going to pose a grave threat to the “integrity of the single market”…