Michael Gove always said there would be ‘bumps in the road’ after Brexit – turns out they are vertical and roughly a mile high

Large numbers of British businesses have already given up entirely on any attempt to sell their products to their fellow Brits in Northern Ireland – but there were always going to be ‘bumps in the road’, right?

Gove arrives at the Whitehall entrance of the Cabinet Office in central London (Getty )

Michael Gove was always clear that we wouldn’t, as a nation, get to the good bit of Brexit without a few “bumps in the road”.

And so, now that the bumps have arrived, who are we to complain? Large numbers of British businesses, from Scottish cheese producers to English plant nurseries, have already given up entirely on any attempt to sell their products to their fellow Brits in Northern Ireland. But there were always going to be bumps in the road. And Michael Gove never said how big those bumps would be. Now it turns out that the ban on UK shellfish being sold into the EU won’t expire in April, and will in fact be indefinite, forcing an entire UK industry into permanent ruin. Well, that too is a bump in the road.

At no point, for example, did Michael Gove deny that the bumps in the road would be entirely vertical, roughly a mile high, and occupy the entire width of the road. That there would be no going round them, through them, under them or over them.

And it turns out that is precisely the case with the Northern Ireland protocol, and the impossibility faced by exporters trying to send goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which one occasionally has to pinch oneself to remember is actually the same country as this one.

Since the bumps in the road appeared, on the stroke of midnight one month ago, Boris Johnson has liked to write them off as “teething problems”, to the intense annoyance of all of the exporters involved, who did absolutely everything they were told to do to prepare. And also to the intense annoyance of Northern Irish business people, whom the prime minister was filmed, just prior to the 2019 general election, telling bald faced lies to.

Now, at the dispatch box of the House of Commons, Gove has admitted that they are not “teething problems”. That they won’t just go away. That, actually, the Northern Ireland protocol fundamentally does not work and will need to be looked at again. “We do need to make sure grace periods are extended so that supermarkets can continue to provide consumers with goods they need,” Mr Gove said, smiling as he did so.

These things scarcely get noticed these days. After all, it’s only a government accidentally stripping the shelves of the supermarkets in its own country for absolutely no discernible benefit whatsoever, then quietly admitting that, actually, we were bang wrong about it from the start, and everything we said has turned out not to be true. But, you know, I’ll have a look at it, and we’ll see what can be done.

Naturally, no other country has ever done anything quite so absurd. Spain has never accidentally made it impossible to fill up the supermarket shelves in Ibiza. Portugal has never run into the unforeseen administrative error of having made it impossible to send food to Madeira. The Italian government, to the best of my knowledge, has never blockaded Sardinia by mistake.

But, hey, times change. There will be bumps in the road. They may last forever. The road may be blockaded, and the people on the other side may decide their future lies elsewhere, and there may require a certain amount of sectarian violence before they can get there. But no one can say that they haven’t been warned.