In honour of John Humphrys, the Today programme has retired the question

Was it the ‘Today’ programme or ‘Just a Minute’? Ireland’s foreign minister speaks for almost a quarter of an hour without interruption

A real touch of class from the producers of Radio 4’s Today programme who, presumably in honour of the now departed John Humphrys, have retired the question.

Either it was that, or the launch of a new segment, the 8.10 political soliloquy, a sort of hyper-extended thought for the day, where a politician just gives his or her opinions, uninterrupted, for around a quarter of an hour.

And it could hardly have got off to a better start than with the Irish foreign minister, Simon Coveney.

For a moment, those waking up on Friday morning might have imagined themselves to have accidentally hibernated all the way through to May, and were instead listening to the Reith lectures on the Irish backstop.

Whatever happens, this was a highly refreshing approach. It was the BBC’s Justin Webb who had introduced him, before hanging up his microphone and, presumably, getting on with a fiendishly difficult sudoku for the next quarter of an hour or so.

This is not to criticise the man. Not in the slightest. For it turns out, if a politician actually intends to answer a simple question with the simple honest truth, they really can go on forever almost without interruption.

At one point, at the end, Coveney spoke for a full 256 seconds without interruption. We presume Nicholas Parsons has already put a call in.

And, frankly, why would you need to interrupt? For the last few days, murmurings from Westminster and indeed from Brussels have intimated that an actual deal between the UK and the EU might be forthcoming. Or, at least, that is how those murmurs have been interpreted in the UK.

And here was Simon Coveney, patiently, forensically and honestly explaining why such talk is utter rubbish.

“We’ve got to be honest,” he said. “There are serious problems that emerge because of the change of British prime minister. He is asking to remove a significant section within the withdrawal agreement, that solves many of the Irish issues, without any serious proposals as to how you solve those problems. This is not going to be the basis for an agreement.”

Oh. So that’s that then. He was saying this stuff on what would be morning 31, after the 30 days Angela Merkel gave Boris Johnson to come up with some workable solutions for the backstop. No such solutions have been forthcoming.

“The backstop works,” he said. “What we are being asked to do is replace a guarantee around that border question with a promise that somehow we’ll do our best to try and solve that issue in the future but we don’t know how yet.

“We cannot allow Ireland to be the collateral damage. That is an unfair request and it won’t be the basis of a deal.”

It wasn’t so much a pouring of cold water on the situation as a dawn raid by one of those planes that sweep over the sea, picking up hundreds of tonnes of ocean then dumping them on top of forest fires.

What he said was exactly what Jean-Claude Juncker and the rest have been saying for days, weeks, months and years. That the backstop can go, just as soon as something that can replace it turns up. That is, quite literally, the entire point of the backstop.

“We’ve been looking at it for three years,” said Coveney. “There have been a number of proposed solutions. When they’ve been tested they haven’t stood up to scrutiny.”

Arguably, all this was very unfair. Who does Simon Coveney think he is? All this telling the truth, explaining that there’s a problem. Why can’t he just do the decent thing and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie?

Why can’t he, for example, just say that the chances of no deal are “a million to one”, as Boris Johnson did when campaigning for the leadership, knowing the whole time that his intention would be to pursue a policy that would make no deal inevitable?

Why can’t he just think of these things in terms of pure politics, and narrow electoral interest, and not get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of the real lives of little people?

Why does he have to stick, for example, to this kind of nonsense:

“What we won’t do is pretend we’re solving a problem to get over a political obstacle, and then say, in a few months’ time, actually it doesn’t work at all.”

What a spoilsport. Does he not get this isn’t how Brexit works at all? It’s easy. You lie yourself into a corner, then you lie your way out of it.

There was, in fairness, one slight problem. The backstop works for Ireland, it even has majority support in Northern Ireland, but as yet, it doesn’t quite have the approval of the Northern Irish unionist community. You don’t have to have paid too close attention to the last two, three, 10, 20 or 50 years to know that you don’t get much done in Northern Irish politics without the consent of both sides.

Still, one of the unfortunate realities of Brexit, is that, having voted to “take back control”, the UK finds itself, for the first time ever, being told what to do by little old Ireland. On this evidence, thank goodness for that. There would at least appear to be one or two grown-ups over there.