Boris Johnson should call the DUP’s bluff and create a border in the Irish Sea | Simon Jenkins

Only a separate, soft-Brexit status for Northern Ireland can resolve the backstop conundrum

As Boris Johnson journeyed back from this week’s desperate trip to Germany and France, he might have reflected on his hero Churchill and those “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone.” Somehow those totems of Britain’s archaic colonisation of Ireland refuse to release their stranglehold on British politics. And here was Johnson at their mercy, being lectured by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on how...