We are still paying the price of Boris’s Brexit blunders – and now the union is in peril…

Sinn Fein is right, writes Andrew Grice, a united Ireland is in touching distance as the party’s vice-president Michelle O’Neill prepares to become Northern Ireland’s first minister

As Sinn Fein won the most seats in the last assembly elections, its vice-president Michelle O’Neill will become first minister later this week (PA Wire)

Rishi Sunak has cleared up yet another bit of Boris Johnson’s mess. The deal announced in the Commons today to reduce checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland could and should have been part of Johnson’s Brexit deal. Incredibly, the then-prime minister either didn’t understand the detail, as one senior civil servant told me at the time, or knew he was creating a trade border in the Irish Sea while lying about it.

Indeed, the whole of the UK is still paying a price for Johnson’s threadbare EU deal. Checks on imports of plant, meat and other animal products from the EU, which have been delayed on five occasions, finally take effect today – exactly four years after Brexit. There could be higher prices and shortages in supermarkets as a result.

Another Johnson triumph. Sunak doesn’t have the strength in his own party to clean up that disaster, even though it harms the UK economy. The job will likely fall to a Labour government, which would align with EU rules.