When is enough enough?
It will get little attention at the moment but the EU is offering a compromise on the NIP. If the UK collects and shares the data, then forms and red tape on goods travelling between the UK and NI can be processed while the lorries are onboard ship, and only one or two lorries a day, with suspicious cargoes, will need checking.
Since the maxim, never look a gift horse in the mouth has always made perfect sense to the vast majority of rational people, I expect this cabinet to insist on a full dental examination and then reject the offer.
Liz Truss and the government have set their hearts on destroying the Northern Ireland Protocol, which since it was their idea, their solution and they voted for it, is pretty rich. The EU is bending over backwards to be nice about a problem which the UK created, insisted on and has now reneged on.
It wants to avoid an all out fight on the issue, generated deliberately by a bunch of fantasists and xenophobes, who still see picking fights with Brussels as a vote winner.
Which is why it will probably fail. Either it will be rejected out of hand, or the right wing of the Tory party or the Cabinet as it is now known, will pretend that the EU is cracking under pressure and demand the impossible.
The DUP will doubtless turn up when the handbags are swinging and scream the political equivalent of “kill him” or “he called me a slag”, just to help calm and rational debate.
All of which means that although I hope that common sense and compromise are possible, with this lot it is never a safe bet, in fact the odds are fantastically long.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.