Since May 2016, Leo Varadkar has led a minority government made up of his party, Fine Gael, and a number of independent members of parliament, or TDs. Its survival depended on a “confidence and supply” agreement with Fine Gael’s main rival, Fianna Fail, so the administration lasted considerably longer than many pundits expected.

The Republic’s prime minister might have called an election in December 2017 or early 2018, when he was perceived to have manoeuvred Britain into accepting a “backstop” that meant seamless trade was expected to flow across the Irish land border. Or he could have chosen a date the following spring, after supporting a successful referendum campaign for abortion reform that was portrayed as a symbol of Ireland’s emergence as a modern, progressive nation.

On both occasions, the Taoiseach seemed to dither, before announcing last week that a poll will be held on February 8th.

Fine Gael strategists must have felt that Varadkar was running out of chances to pick a favourable date for the election. Another pre-Christmas Brexit deal, which apparently confirmed that customs checks will take place at Irish Sea ports rather than the land border, and the restoration of power-sharing in Northern Ireland, provided a final opportunity.

Fianna Fail was widely regarded as the party responsible for the Republic’s banking crisis throughout the last decade. But it’s been steadily rebuilding its reputation under the leadership of Micháel Martin, whose style is notably less republican and less populist than his predecessors.

Martin was new to the job in 2011 when Fianna Fail suffered an unprecedented humiliation at the polls. The Republic’s traditional party of government was reduced from 71 seats to 20 and beaten into third place by Irish Labour. He led them to a modest recovery in 2016, winning 44 seats. And the latest polls give Fianna Fail a lead over Fine Gael, with anything between 25% to 32% of the vote.

These surveys also suggest that Sinn Féin is performing well, with the Irish Times’ Ipsos MRBI poll showing 21% support, up from 14% in October.

Varadkar expected to bask in some of the reflected glory, when his deputy, Simon Coveney, co-published a deal to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland, with the province’s UK secretary of state, Julian Smith. However, Sinn Fein’s numbers will also have benefited from Stormont’s revival and there is a confused, even hypocritical, attitude to the party among southern Irish politicians.

After its strong polling results, the Taoiseach reiterated his opposition to forming a coalition with Sinn Fein on the basis that it is “not a normal political party”. Micháel Martin offered similar commitments that Fianna Fail will refuse to share power with Sinn Fein, noting that it makes decisions by consulting “shadowy figures” and “unelected officials”.

These are oblique references to the IRA army council and other remnants of that terror organisation, which they believe still has a pivotal role in running Sinn Fein. Yet, neither man has any qualms about demanding unionists govern Northern Ireland in conjunction with the nationalist party, even though its links with paramilitaries are even more clear cut north of the border.

While there is widespread distaste for IRA gangsterism, Ireland’s attitude to violent republicanism is complicated and contradictory. Sinn Fein’s poll success coincided with a row over commemorating the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, pre-independence police forces that were targeted viciously during the Anglo-Irish War. After a public outcry, the Dublin government was eventually forced to abandon plans for a service to remember these men, who were mostly working-class Catholics killed by separatist paramilitaries.

Varadkar has lurched between portraying himself as a moderniser, detached from nationalist tribalism, and surfing a tide of anti-English feeling, one that has been intensified by the UK’s decision to leave the EU. At an internal Fine Gael meeting, just before the election announcement, he told activists that it was half-time in Brexit and Ireland was ‘1-0 up’. The image of a sporting contest between Britain and the Republic was a useful insight into his approach to negotiations so far.

The Irish prime minister is fighting the election on the basis of these apparent Brexit achievements and on Fine Gael’s claim to have guided the country out of an economic crisis and into a buoyant recovery.

Unfortunately for Varadkar, the “second half” of Britain’s negotiations with Brussels will determine whether there is a comprehensive trade deal that protects the Republic’s access to the UK market. Any failure to reach such an agreement will hit Ireland far harder than any other EU country.

And the voters seem stubbornly focussed on practical problems like the high cost of living, lack of affordable housing and an impending crisis over pensions, rather than revelling in positive macroeconomic statistics.

Owen Polley is a freelance writer and commentator. He was formerly manager of the Conservative Party campaign office in Northern Ireland (2011-2015). 

That pretext was quickly forgotten and the “cash for ash” RHI scandal merits just one line in the latest document, New Decade, New Approach, which runs to sixty-two pages. Julian Smith, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Simon Coveney, the Dublin government’s foreign minister, must now wait to see whether Ulster’s political parties sign up to their proposals.

Since the Good Friday Agreement established power-sharing in 1998, Northern Ireland has suffered a series of political crises that culminated in hot-house talks, but the resulting texts were always agreed before they were announced. Though the process this time seems to have been choreographed, officially, the parties are still consulting with their members about the acceptability of the deal.

If there is a breakthrough, it will come after three years of Sinn Féin insisting that its demands must be met, if it is to retake seats in the province’s devolved government. The republican party’s main “red line” was its insistence on an Irish Language Act, which it sees as a way of promoting “Irish national identity” on the basis that “Northern Ireland is not British”, to quote its northern leader, Michelle O’Neill.

New Decade, New Approach falls short of satisfying Sinn Fein’s demand that this legislation should be “free-standing”, opting instead to change the Northern Ireland Act at Westminster. But it does establish an Irish language commissioner, with powers to promote and police provision of Gaelic. It also grants the language “official” status and facilitates its use in court proceedings.

In an attempt to balance these provisions, the deal creates another commissioner for the “Ulster Scots / Ulster British” tradition and establishes a rather Orwellian sounding “Office of Identity and Cultural Expression”. These posts are unlikely to ease unionist concerns that a language commission will generate endless demands, impose costly legal obligations on public bodies and promote divisive policies around signage aimed at eroding Northern Ireland’s sense of being part of the UK. In a province obsessed with culture and identity, the deal makes sure that this preoccupation will become an even more central part of its political life.

The Conservative party used to believe that many of Northern Ireland’s worst problems were caused by a massive, overfunded public sector that crowded out private enterprise. Now it proposes to solve Ulster’s difficulties by creating a raft of new commissions and government offices. Naturally, Julian Smith has also promised the obligatory “financial package” from the Treasury to coax the province’s politicians back to work.

These shortcomings might be easier to overlook if the other main strand of the agreement – which aims to stabilise the devolved institutions – was more effective or meaningful. The deal was supposed to ensure that no party could crash power-sharing again or cause Northern Ireland to go for years without regional government.

New Decade, New Approach claims to contain a package of measures to deliver “institutions that are more resilient”, but these are among the document’s weakest provisions. They require the parties to sign up to principles of “good faith, mutual respect and trust”, tweak Stormont’s ministerial codes a little and participate in some new committees aimed at encouraging understanding.

Conspicuously, no sanctions are mooted for pulling down the institutions, nor are there any provisions that allow the remaining ministers to govern if one party walks away. In fact, there is nothing to prevent Sinn Féin, and it is Sinn Féin that repeatedly uses this tactic, from collapsing the Executive in a year’s time and issuing a fresh set of demands.

Despite some glaring problems, if a deal is struck, there will be relief in Northern Ireland. The latest round of negotiations have taken place against the backdrop of NHS strikes and lengthening hospital waiting lists. The document promises to settle the pay dispute and provide nine hundred new nursing and midwifery undergraduate places.

Hospitals and schools in Northern Ireland have been in crisis due to the political vacuum in Northern Ireland, as decisions on their budgets have been delayed and badly needed reforms have been postponed. Yet, despite including some aspirational passages about revamping the public sector, there’s little in the document to suggest that, if Stormont is rebooted, it will tackle the difficult and sensitive issues it previously ignored.

After three years in cold storage, it would be churlish not to welcome the possibility that power-sharing in Northern Ireland might be restored. That doesn’t mean that the Assembly and the Executive will govern the province effectively, if they do return. And it certainly doesn’t mean that Stormont won’t be in crisis again a few years or even months down the line.

The Withdrawal Agreement requires the province to apply EU customs rules after Brexit and keeps it aligned with the single market’s regulations on goods and agriculture. Unionists say these arrangements create an effective border in the Irish Sea and consign their part of the UK to membership of an “economic united Ireland”.

Their worries intensified during the election campaign when Johnson’s claims that “unfettered trade” between Northern Ireland and Great Britain could continue without checks, paperwork or the payment of tariffs were challenged robustly. But while there is still deep foreboding about the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, the Conservatives’ decisive victory means most Unionists are resigned to the fact that it will pass swiftly through the House of Commons.

Under the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement, firms in Northern Ireland have to pay tariffs on goods they buy from the British mainland that are ‘at risk’ from being moved on into the Republic of Ireland or elsewhere in the single market. Initially, this classification includes any materials that are to be processed – effectively this covers anything intended for manufacturing.

The prime minister and other Conservative ministers claim that most goods will eventually be excluded from the “at risk” category, leaving only particularly sensitive products such as exotic animals or components of firearms. A “joint committee”, established to oversee the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement, is empowered with exempting goods from tariffs and checks.

The government no longer needs the support of Northern Irish MPs to win important votes in the House of Commons, so the DUP cannot rely upon political influence to hold Boris Johnson to his promises. The party will have to repair its damaged relationships with the Conservatives and hope that the prime minister pays attention to the Union’s wellbeing, as he embarks upon a new round of negotiations with Brussels.

Northern Ireland will be the part of the UK most directly affected by the Withdrawal Agreement, so there’s a strong case for the involvement of Northern Irish representatives in the joint committee charged with its implementation.

There was a rare example of unanimity among the province’s MPs on Monday when they tabled a joint amendment to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill asking the government to enshrine its commitment to “unfettered access” in the legislation. If Boris Johnson believes genuinely that his deal creates no barriers for Northern Ireland businesses trading in Great Britain, and he was quite explicit about that during the election campaign, then there seems little reason why he cannot support this change.

The prime minister’s large majority also potentially gives him more flexibility in negotiations with Brussels. Unlike Theresa May, he should have fewer problems managing his party and, if he favours reasonably close alignment with EU rules, the more purist Tory Brexiteers will be aware that opposing a trade deal could exhaust the public’s patience. At the same time, the EU is now talking to a leader with a healthy mandate. It may show a greater willingness to listen to British concerns.

If it doesn’t care about the viewpoints of London, then surely it will be influenced by interests in Dublin, where the Irish government has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove its loyalty to Brussels over the past three and a half years. The Northern Ireland component of the Brexit deal has been analysed at length, but its likely effects on the Republic haven’t been discussed so fully.

During the early stages of negotiations, it was often assumed that Leo Varadkar and his government were using the border question to ensure the whole UK remained tied to the single market and customs’ union. Many commentators believed the Irish prime minister was more concerned with protecting trade between the Republic and Great Britain than avoiding potential checks on the comparatively small volume of goods moving between his country and Northern Ireland.

Viewed from that perspective, the Withdrawal Agreement does very little to address the problems that Brexit creates for the southern Irish economy. More than any other EU government, Dublin badly needs a wide-ranging trade deal with the UK, because its economic success depends upon access to the British market.

Indeed, you could argue that unionists in Ulster and ministers in the Irish republic now have a shared interest in reaching the same Brexit outcome. A favourable free trade deal is the best chance of avoiding a border in the Irish Sea that undermines Northern Ireland’s place in the UK. It’s also the best hope for the Republic of protecting its economy after Britain leaves the EU.

The province’s devolved assembly and executive have not functioned since January 2017, when Sinn Féin collapsed the institutions at Stormont. That decision was supposedly taken as a protest against Arlene Foster’s refusal to step down as first minister while her role in the failure of a renewable heating scheme was investigated. Subsequently, the RHI scandal was scarcely mentioned, as republicans issued a series of “red line” demands they insisted must be met if they were to share power in Northern Ireland.

The latest talks are the most serious attempt to restore Stormont since February 2018. Back then, the DUP decided it could not accept a deal that included a far-reaching Irish Language bill. Unionists were suspicious that the legislation would be used to justify “affirmative action” to boost the number of Irish speakers in the public sector and impose costly, divisive dual-language signage.

This year, negotiations take place against a backdrop of NHS strikes and hospital waiting-lists that are by some distance the worst in the United Kingdom. In the absence of ministers at Stormont, wages in Northern Ireland’s health service have fallen seriously behind those in the rest of the UK. The Westminster government and civil servants, currently in charge of the public sector budget, are unwilling to make explicitly political decisions to resolve the dispute.

The DUP and particularly Sinn Féin lost thousands of votes in last week’s election, despite remaining the province’s two biggest parties. The perception is growing that people have lost patience with politicians’ failure to settle their differences. It’s difficult to defend the idea that a minority language and other so-called “rights issues” are critically important when voters’ friends and relatives are dying as they wait for an appointment with a doctor.

None of which necessarily means that Stormont will be restored, or that the health service’s issues will be addressed if the Assembly does come back. When the parties spoke to the press on Monday, the only consensus seemed to concern the need for a “big cash injection” from London, as described by Sinn Fein leader, Mary Lou McDonald.

Among Northern Ireland’s politicians, there is an expectation that each time they overcome a crisis in power-sharing and get back to work they’ll be rewarded with a windfall from the Treasury. And the belief seems widespread that profound social and political problems can best be tackled by spending copious amounts of taxpayers’ money.

The immediate health emergency in Ulster probably will necessitate a cash injection. However, things have deteriorated so badly because the Executive was not in place to respond to short-term pressures that worsened over three years of non-activity. More damningly, when power-sharing operated, a succession of Stormont health ministers failed to reform the province’s version of the NHS, despite commissioning a series of reports that spelt out exactly what needed to be done.

Successive policy reviews in 2011, 2014 and 2016 made broadly the same recommendations; fewer acute hospitals with a greater concentration of expertise and a shift of resources from hospital care to community care, so that more patients could be looked after at home or in half-way houses.

Far from planning to implement these changes before its suspension, the Executive was arguably further than ever from taking action. The Donaldson Review, published in 2014, gave specific advice about which services and hospitals needed to close, causing understandable consternation in some of the communities affected. When Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill became health minister in 2016, instead of putting it into practice and risking alienating some supporters, she commissioned a new report.

The document, written by Professor Rafael Bengoa, made largely the same points as Donaldson, but replaced concrete suggestions with more general statements of principle. Rather than overcoming local objections and political sensitivities, which was supposed to be the purpose of the report, the Executive used it to dodge making difficult decisions.

Back to the present day, and while Sinn Fein prioritises the Irish language, other parties are demanding institutional reform that will make it more difficult for one party to collapse the Assembly. The Alliance Party, which has been the main beneficiary of voters’ disillusionment with the DUP and Sinn Fein in recent elections, wants to change the ‘petition of concern’ mechanism, that ensures majorities of both unionist and nationalist MLAs are required to pass votes on sensitive issues.

That’s also been a long-term demand from moderate unionists, but it causes anxiety at a time when it looks like an Irish Sea border will be introduced against the wishes of pro-Union politicians in Northern Ireland.

Very typically, after nearly three years of arguments, Sinn Féin is trying to add yet another demand to the talks’ agenda. It now wants nationality law changed so that people born in Northern Ireland are not granted automatic British citizenship. It’s difficult to think of a suggestion calculated to be more offensive to unionists, whose entire outlook is shaped by a desire to be treated like the rest of the country. It’s an attack on the very building blocks of Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.

With the parties still divided by issues of that importance, there’s little optimism that there will be a deal that tackles the underlying issues that have caused Northern Ireland’s devolved government to stumble from crisis to crisis. The best voters in the province can hope for, is that taxpayers’ money buys another agreement to agree further down the line, and that approach has been proven always to contain the seeds of the next impasse.

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, he claims he will negotiate a new deal with Brussels that results in “close alignment” with the single market and a customs union that spans both the EU and the UK. The manifesto doesn’t divulge any further detail, but the theory is that a soft Brexit bypasses the need for checks on trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

This offer, from a Labour leader whose sympathies with Irish Republicanism have been recorded at length, seems more appealing to unionists in Ulster than the deal negotiated by a Conservative and Unionist PM who makes a great noise about his support for the Union.

Nevertheless, the DUP maintains it will not negotiate with Corbyn, in the event of a hung parliament. “He would destroy the economy,” Arlene Foster told an interviewer at the weekend. “He would wreck the defence of our nation as well and more than that it would lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom.” She can imagine “no circumstances” under which the DUP would support the Labour Party, while Jeremy Corbyn is still in charge. The new Ulster Unionist leader, Steve Aiken, was even more categorical. Speaking to the BBC’s Nolan Show he said, “under no circumstances will anybody from the Ulster Unionist Party be supporting Jeremy Corbyn”.

It may seem surprising that Northern Ireland’s two main unionist parties have so explicitly limited their options ahead of an election where a tight result is possible. After all, their biggest priority currently is to prevent a border in the Irish Sea. Sam McBride, the political editor of Belfast’s unionist newspaper, the News Letter, argued in Saturday’s edition that the decision amounted to a “tactical mistake”.

It’s true that, since becoming Labour leader, Corbyn has spoken about Northern Ireland in a strikingly moderate tone, considering his closeness to senior members of Sinn Féin.

Last year, he visited the province and confirmed his preference for a “united Ireland”. But Corbyn denied that he was calling for a border poll to decide Ulster’s future and said he would not campaign for a 32 county state if a referendum were called.

When Sinn Féin and the Dublin government called for the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference to make decisions about Northern Ireland in the absence of a devolved Assembly, Corbyn rejected this demand for joint authority. He noted that the BIIC “can’t do that constitutionally”. It was a logical and accurate response, but it was at odds with republicanism’s looser interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Most significantly, the Labour leader has consistently ruled out creating an “effective border” in the Irish Sea, even while his nationalist and republican allies agitated for a “special status” for Northern Ireland that would compromise its place in the UK and protect its links with the Republic.

Corbyn has been careful not to provoke unionists in Ulster, but his history of activism means that they can never trust him. Boris Johnson might be regarded as a slippery character who quickly abandoned his promises to protect Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, but he was never an apologist for IRA terror. The Labour leader now uses more diplomatic language, but he’s never renounced the view that the British state is an occupying force in Ireland.

If the numbers are right after the election, unionist MPs could find themselves in a position to forge a pragmatic alliance with Corbyn for long enough to kill Boris Johnson’s deal and replace it with something they find more amenable. In theory, they could always withdraw their support and collapse his government, if they felt he was acting contrary to the national interest in other policy areas.

It is unlikely, though, that this strategy would offer anything more than a short-term, tactical victory. The Union is built on laws and institutions, but it also requires a degree of social solidarity between its nations and regions.

If unionists in Northern Ireland inflicted a Corbyn government on the rest of the UK – and potentially derailed Brexit – they would risk destroying any goodwill from the people who, in theory at least, have been most supportive of their position. There is already alarming evidence that Tory voters care more about leaving the EU than preserving the Union. It’s exceptionally unlikely that Ulster unionism will find long-term support for its place in the UK from Corbyn’s Labour party.

The Conservative party’s manifesto also contained a short section on Northern Ireland. It promised, “we will never be neutral on the Union and (that’s) why we stand for a proud, confident, inclusive and modern unionism.” It’s tragic that these fine words are undermined by a Brexit deal that threatens to create an economic and political border that hives off one part of the UK.

Unionists in Northern Ireland are in a deeply uncomfortable position. However badly they’ve been treated by Boris Johnson, they’ve decided they can’t risk an inveterate supporter of Irish republicanism like Jeremy Corbyn getting into Number 10.

The DUP leader was unequivocal. “That has been our one red line,” she insisted, “we cannot have either a customs border or a regulatory border down the Irish Sea because that would make us separate from the United Kingdom. That doesn’t work from a constitutional perspective and it doesn’t work from an economic perspective either.”

One year later, Foster’s party spectacularly dropped its “one red line” and accepted, in theory at least, checks down the Irish Sea. Boris Johnson’s proposals for replacing the backstop, which the government submitted to the EU Commission last week, are quite explicit about creating an internal-UK border for goods in transit between the British mainland and Ulster.

According to section 9 of the government’s explanatory note, “traders moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland would need to notify the relevant authorities before entering Northern Ireland in order to provide the appropriate information to undertake the appropriate checks.”

The province would leave the EU customs union with the rest of the UK, avoiding the need for an Irish Sea customs border, but, effectively, it would remain in the single market. Remarkably, Arlene Foster offered wholehearted support for this plan, describing it as a “serious and sensible way forward”.

The DUP’s main unionist rival, the UUP, has no doubts that this amounts to a momentous U-turn. “I have no idea what threats have been made or promises offered to persuade the DUP to accept these proposals,” the party’s former leader, Lord Empey, observed, “but I am very clear that they represent a complete abandonment of the DUP’s previous position that there should be no border in the Irish Sea. I am shocked that anybody describing themselves as a unionist would be not simply accepting but advocating a border up the Irish Sea.”

In mitigation, the DUP points to provisions in the explanatory note that require the Stormont Assembly to consent to Northern Ireland remaining in the single market for agriculture and goods. According to the text, the devolved institutions, which haven’t operated since January 2017, after a row between Sinn Féin and the DUP, would get their say “before the end of the transition period and every four years afterwards.”

Arlene Foster and her colleagues believe this process must involve a cross-community vote, meaning they can veto the arrangements. Without Stormont’s consent, they understand regulations in Northern Ireland would stay in line with the rest of the UK. This is a risky and confusing position, for a number of reasons.

The text states only that “the UK will provide an opportunity for democratic consent”. It doesn’t describe the method by which it might be sought and it doesn’t stipulate that it would involve the “petition of concern” mechanism that gives Northern Ireland’s two main communities vetoes over controversial legislation.

If the Assembly is still not sitting by the time a vote is required in 2020, it cannot vote on the matter and its rules will not apply. The prime minister had an opportunity in the House of Commons to explain in more detail how the “consent” paragraphs might work, but he declined to do so.

Before its publication, the government briefed energetically that its backstop replacement comprised a “final offer” to the EU, with the implication that the only alternative was “no deal”. After Brussels received the letter, Boris Johnson quickly started talking again about a “landing zone”. There is a shared understanding between the EU and the UK that these documents are the basis for a final negotiation rather than an ultimatum.

Brussels will ask for more and it seems likely that the British government has not quite reached the limit of what it’s prepared to give. For the DUP, that is ominous, because these plans already have the potential to drive an economic, political and social wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Might Brussels demand that the requirement for consent is balanced the other way, with the province staying aligned with the EU, unless Stormont decides otherwise? The Brexit Secretary, Stephen Barclay, told Andrew Marr yesterday that the government wants intensive negotiations, during which it “could look at” and “discuss” the mechanism for providing consent.

Leo Varadkar and other European leaders spoke about changing the deal, with a view to removing the prospect of customs checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Could elements of a customs border in the Irish Sea make a comeback? Many well-informed commentators say that customs is Boris’s new red line, but now that the government has made its offer and compromised its principles, who can say what it is prepared ultimately to accept?

For unionists, whether they’re in Ulster or Great Britain, the most dangerous aspect of these proposals is that they demolish the idea that Northern Ireland must leave the EU on the same terms, or very close to the same terms, as the rest of the country. They destroy an important part of the rationale for opposing the backstop in the first place.

The province buys six times more goods from the mainland that it buys from the Republic of Ireland. Yet, the government and the DUP are volunteering to create trade barriers between two regions of the UK, to protect the Irish nationalist fantasy that there is an “all-Ireland economy”. And it’s a sign of how detached the debate has become from reality, how much it is grounded in the assumptions of the EU, that this extraordinary concession is cast by some commentators as a sop to the DUP.

On a superficial level, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that compromise is required by both sides to reach an agreement. But the government is proposing to damage the Union in the knowledge that even this capitulation is unlikely to satisfy Dublin or Brussels.

The clear implication, from both Boris Johnson and the DUP, is that Northern Ireland’s place in the UK is up for negotiation.

Let us know your view. Send a letter for publication to letters@reaction.life

In his book, We Need to Talk About Putin, Mark Galeotti tackles western commentators’ habit of caricaturing Putin, based on “hype and hysteria”. He takes on each of these clichés in turn and portrays the man in the Kremlin as the leader of an ‘adhocracy’, where pragmatism and opportunism are at least as important as ideology and geopolitics.

Hillary Clinton famously said that while Donald Trump was “playing checkers”, Vladimir Putin had mastered “three dimensional chess”. Galeotti’s first target is this perception that Putin is outwitting the West by implementing a devilishly clever strategy that only he truly understands.

Instead, he compares Russia’s approach to international affairs to the president’s favourite sport, judo. A competitor in this martial art aims to use his opponent’s movement and momentum against him, to “seize the moment when it appears”. Galeotti rejects the chess player metaphor, preferring to liken Putin to a ‘judoka’, who takes any opportunity to put his adversary on his back.

He emphasises that Russia’s exploits on the world stage are primarily reactive and not part of a grand plan to dominate its rivals or rebuild the USSR. The notion that Putin is the figurehead in a KGB takeover of government is dismissed as not credible. The president’s intelligence career was inglorious and relatively marginal.

Putin was briefly in charge of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, during his rapid political ascent under Boris Yeltsin. However, Galeotti believes that, though the President identifies heavily with ‘Chekists’, he is not the calculating spymaster depicted in western media. Rather, he is a ‘spook fanboy’ who starts each day with a series of intelligence briefings “that aim to enthral rather than educate him”.

This interpretation echoes one of Galeotti’s recurring themes. Many of the shadier aspects of Russian government are driven, he contends, by “policy entrepreneurship” among officials, who jostle to please Putin and attract his attention. This leads, for example, to some outlandishly one-sided election results in Russia’s southern republics. It also explains instances of alleged interference in the West’s political process, like the Kremlin’s apparent support for Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign and its low-key role in backing Brexit.

Lately, western commentators who want to provide a supposedly deeper insight into Putin’s mind are drawn to the theory that he is motivated by a Russian nationalist ideology called Eurasianism. In essence, this philosophy theorises that Russia is a unique civilisation, shaped by influences from the two continents it spans, with a mission to draw together the regions that once formed the Tsarist empire and the Soviet Union.

Newspapers like to make alarming references to the book Foundations of Geopolitics, by ‘Putin’s favourite philosopher’ Alexander Dugin, which they claim is a manual for rebuilding the USSR. This interpretation has led to some interesting work, like former Financial Times’ journalist Charles Glover’s history of Eurasianism, Black Wind, White Snow, which was sold as a glimpse into the president’s worldview. This esoteric subject is fascinating, but it’s of limited use as a guide to Moscow’s current motivations.

Putin, or at least his speechwriters, have used Eurasianist quotes and phrases from time to time, but Galeotti says that there is little ideological consistency to his outlook. He is happy to use bits and pieces of philosophy where it suits, but he doesn’t read philosophy. Dugin, while he enjoyed brief notoriety, is a marginal, eccentric figure, whose influence in the Kremlin has waned drastically.

Putin is not a nationalist mystic, but he is, according to Galeotti, “a gut level patriot who believes that Russia should be considered a great power.” His pugnacious behaviour is explained by the perception that, when it was at its weakest, his country was shown a basic lack of respect by western countries. Other writers who have taken the trouble to look beyond the myths around Putin, like the University of Kent academic Richard Sakwa, have drawn similar conclusions about the effects of an historical failure to listen to Russia or understand its perspective in the 90s and early 2000s.

In the West, we are always on the lookout for signs of dissent against the Kremlin. Recently, media reports have focussed on protests in Moscow and elsewhere, alleging that candidates have been unfairly prevented from standing in local elections. The idea that there is an uprising of feeling against the current government has, Galeotti believes, been overstated, but not invented.

Putin’s personal popularity remains relatively high, but Russians are not necessarily happy or contented. Low level protest is often channelled into localised campaigns, focussed on issues like the environment. The author points out that “Russians can be unhappy but loyal” and, while they might believe their president has revived the country’s fortunes after the troubled 90s, they may not be happy to support him in perpetuity.

It’s a balanced assessment of a political landscape that currently offers no viable alternative to Putin. Though Galeotti does not dismiss the theory that the president, who will be 67 next month, may step down, if he can find a worthy successor. The worry for the West, he implies, is that Russia’s next leader may be no more pliant or less formidable than Putin.

We Need to Talk About Putin manages to be authoritative without including irrelevant detail. Galeotti’s argument is concise and punchy – the book is only about 140 pages long – and he doesn’t burden the reader with reams of references and footnotes. The author is clearly no fan of Putin, but he is frustrated by sweeping, misleading analyses and offers a highly readable, occasionally rather funny antidote.

There is an almost insatiable appetite for books that portray Russia and its leader as inscrutable, threatening and sinister – Russia as Mordor, as Galeotti puts it. They may address a demand, but they don’t enrich our understanding of a country whose future will be critical to geopolitical stability in Europe and beyond. We need more authors who challenge the caricatures and received beliefs that shape our ideas about Russia.

The “Battle of the Bogside” began when nationalist protesters threw stones at police and marchers, as the Apprentice Boys of Derry held its annual parade to celebrate the relief of the city in 1689 from a siege by Jacobite forces. Rioting continued for several days and spread to Belfast, where seven people died in fierce fighting, before the army was sent in to restore order on the 14^th August 1969.

This “temporary” deployment in support of the RUC eventually lasted until 2007, as troops became targets of a murderous IRA campaign to destroy British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. Ironically, they were welcomed initially in nationalist communities, where Ulster’s police service was perceived as a partial force that favoured loyalists whenever sectarian trouble broke out.

The August riots were the culmination of a tense period In Northern Ireland. A civil rights campaign, set up to address Catholic claims of discrimination, had descended into inter-communal violence, thanks to counter-protests led by Ian Paisley’s followers and the increasing involvement of paramilitaries.

The unionist government at Stormont deserved its share of blame. The authorities allowed legitimate grievances to fester that were then used by republicans to cultivate wider disenchantment with the state.

In Irish nationalist mythology, some of these complaints became grossly exaggerated over the years. Catholics were never denied the vote in Northern Ireland, despite a widespread perception to the contrary. In local government elections, the franchise in the province was based on property ownership, while that system had been reformed in the rest of the UK after the Second World War. Some unionist councils distributed social housing unfairly but, equally, there’s evidence that discrimination was rife in nationalist controlled areas too.

Yet, as David Trimble acknowledged many years later in his Nobel Prize winner’s speech, Northern Ireland had become a “cold house” for Catholics.

The violence in the Bogside was fuelled by anger that a previous civil rights march had been banned, because it clashed with an Apprentice Boys parade. In the end, neither event took place, on the basis that together they posed a risk to public order, but nationalists believed the loyalist organisation invented its demonstration as a pretext to stop their protest. Unionist attitudes to the civil rights movement had hardened after the IRA declared support for its aims.

As these controversial events are remembered in Northern Ireland, they raise particular sensitivities because they coincide with a relentless campaign by Sinn Féin to justify republicans’ role in the Troubles and portray the British state as the main cause of violence.

BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback programme featured one contributor this week who spoke about feeling “liberated” by throwing her first stone at the Battle of the Bogside. She regarded it as a missile targeted at “my boss who paid me £3 a week”, among other members of the unionist establishment.

On Twitter, the author and journalist Malachi O’Doherty, who this week published a book about the Troubles called Fifty Years On, asked whether the interviewer “could not think of one hard question for a self-confessed rioter, like: how would you feel if you had killed someone?” He detected “smug nostalgia” for the violence that “needs serious challenge”.

The republican take on history forgets that civil rights leaders warned ahead of the march that the movement’s message would be undermined by violence. John Hume appealed for the loyalist parade to be allowed to pass the Bogside peacefully.

Indeed, most of the civil rights campaign’s demands were conceded within a relatively short period of time. As early as November 1968, Ulster’s reformist prime minister, Terence O’Neill, introduced a five point programme addressing complaints about housing allocation and the Special Powers Act, among other measures. In 1970, the Macrory Report recommended sweeping changes to local government, including universal suffrage and the formation of twenty-six new district councils.

The IRA’s campaign lasted for almost another thirty years and its aims were, not as its apologists now try to claim, human rights and equality, but driving the British forces out of Northern Ireland and coercing the unionist majority into an all-Ireland state. Alongside Paisley and loyalist extremists in the UVF, it created an atmosphere of sectarian paranoia that pushed the province into ever greater convulsions of violence.

Operation Banner, as the army’s deployment was known, aimed initially to stop rioting in Ulster sparked by the disorder in Derry and perpetuated at flashpoints in Belfast. It remained in place to protect the lives and property of everyone in Northern Ireland, as republican terrorists and their loyalist counterparts tore at the fabric of society and attempted to drag the place into outright civil war.

For the most part, it was successful, though the use of troops in a civilian environment and the misbehaviour of a small number of individuals encouraged fresh grievances that fed more terrorism.

Last week, the Tipperary-born academic, Professor Liam Kennedy, told the West Cork History Festival, “the provisional IRA proved the dynamic for three decades of paramilitary violence and as such was primarily responsible for the Troubles – the PIRA was not about civil rights or protecting Catholic communities, it was about achieving a 32 county republic by force of arms.”

Subsequently, the republican movement has tried to recast the conflict as a struggle for “equality” and “parity of esteem” against British and unionist oppression. Professor Kennedy is disdainful of this narrative, noting that the IRA was responsible for 60% of 2,636 deaths during the Troubles. “In some instances,” he argues, “there is such a thing as an oppressive minority and, in that sense, the republican community…. can be categorised as an oppressive community.”

By giving former rioters, agitators and paramilitaries the opportunity to present their version of events unchallenged and in a glow of sepia-tinged nostalgia, the BBC and other broadcasters give weight to the IRA’s gross distortions of history.

Nevertheless, it’s important enough to Conservatives to portray themselves as a UK-wide party that one of the leadership hustings was held yesterday at the Culloden Hotel, just outside Belfast. The future of the Irish border is still the chief obstacle to parliament voting for a Brexit deal, so the event attracted substantial interest from journalists both local and national.

In front of an Ulster audience, Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson were scathing about the Northern Ireland backstop, which they said is unacceptable and cannot form part of a final withdrawal agreement. Hunt told Tory members that the arrangement “has to change or has to go”. “We are never going to have a deal with the EU that involves the backstop.”

Boris Johnson promised that “under no circumstances…. will I allow the EU or anyone else to create any kind of division down the Irish Sea.” He described Theresa May’s draft withdrawal agreement as a “dead letter” and claimed the backstop forces the UK to make an “unacceptable choice” between “abandoning the ability to govern ourselves” and giving “up control of the government of Northern Ireland”.

A recent YouGov poll suggested most grassroots Conservative members see delivering Brexit as a more pressing priority than protecting the Union, but the leadership candidates were keen to emphasise their commitment to keeping the United Kingdom together.

“The Union is something we have taken for granted for too long,” Jeremy Hunt asserted, “it’s absolutely essential that the prime minister… puts a lot of time and thought into nourishing the bonds of our Union.” “Some of that is through symbolic things, like coming here frequently and supporting the Northern Irish Conservative party but some of it is in the approach we take to policies and Brexit, if we get it right, can massively strengthen our Union.”

The foreign secretary believes that a positive EU deal, “will allow our great country to plough its furrow in the world in a way that is distinctly, uniquely British and makes all four parts of the UK proud to be British.”

On a similar theme, Boris Johnson pledged that if he is successful in the leadership contest he will act as “Minister for the Union, in which I passionately believe”. “There will be a special unit in Number 10,” he claimed, “to make sure every policy is sense and stress tested for the benefits it will bring to the Union.”

One such policy might have been a “fixed link” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, otherwise known as a bridge across the North Channel between Ulster and Scotland, which some Johnson backers were sure would form part of his pitch to Tories in the province. He spoke positively about the project’s potential and said “finance is not the issue”, but implied that, ultimately, it was a matter for the Stormont executive.

That was another theme common to both candidates, who expressed support for same-sex marriage and abortion reform in Northern Ireland, but emphasised that devolved institutions needed to take the final decisions. They promised to energise efforts to restore the Assembly, which hasn’t sat since January 2017, after Sinn Féin pulled out of the power-sharing executive.

There were mixed views about whether the hustings resulted in a clear winner or provided a clear insight into what Northern Ireland can expect from its next prime minister. On most of the big issues, the two men took almost identical positions. The differences were largely in tone and style. One senior Conservative member said that Jeremy Hunt, was “well-prepared and managerial”, while Boris Johnson “made it up as he went along”.

They’re both now equally adamant that the backstop is unacceptable, even though both supported it as Theresa May tried to force her withdrawal agreement through parliament. Johnson held out until the third meaningful vote, but eventually reached the “sad conclusion” that backing a “bad deal” was necessary to avoid watering down or losing Brexit altogether. It was a curious rationale for an aspiring “Minister for the Union”.

In Northern Ireland, Conservatives and other unionists can fairly ask whether Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt is likely to make a similar calculation, if there’s a direct choice between delivering Brexit and protecting the Union.

Boris Johnson supporters were quick to condemn Hunt’s remarks, while both of Ulster’s main unionist parties criticised the idea that soldiers and paramilitaries were equivalent.

During the hustings, the foreign secretary claimed, “the peace in Northern Ireland was hard won and under the Belfast / Good Friday Agreement, there is a need to treat both sides the same way, however angry we may have felt about what happened.”

On Twitter today, Hunt appeared to backtrack, or at least qualify his comments, writing, “as someone who grew up in a military family, there is no moral equivalence between the actions of terrorists who seek to kill and soldiers who act to protect the public. We must end the injustice of historic prosecutions of brave veterans, and in a way that supports peace in NI.”

Both candidates are criss-crossing the country frantically and fatigue may account for the occasional sloppily worded answer, but Hunt’s blunder comes after Theresa May ruled out including an amnesty or statute of limitations for troops in the government’s consultation into dealing with the past in Northern Ireland. These plans are likely to involve the reinvestigation of every Troubles-related killing by the armed forces, while many terrorist atrocities will be ignored.

Far from being based on equal treatment, the peace process has been nudged along by letters of comfort and royal pardons granted mainly to former IRA members suspected of the most appalling crimes. “All of the terrorist organisations benefited from the early release of prisoners and there have been many other concessions made to terrorists,” the DUP MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, points out, “none of that has been sought or replicated for members of the armed forces, nor would we want them to be.”

The Ulster Unionist MLA, Doug Beattie, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was just as scathing. “The law must be applied equally and fairly,” he asserted, “and that has patently not been the case.” The statistics support his analysis.

Currently, the coroners’ court in Northern Ireland is investigating ninety two deaths supposedly caused by the police and army. Forty of these investigations involve the deaths of terrorists, including, for example, eight IRA men who were killed by the SAS at Loughall as they tried to bomb the local police station. There are no equivalent inquests into murders committed by paramilitaries.

Republican groups were responsible for sixty per cent of killings during the Troubles and loyalist groups accounted for another twenty per cent, with every single incident amounting to murder. The remaining ten per cent of deaths were caused by the security forces and, while many of these killings will have been lawful and justifiable, each and every one is being investigated.

The government’s consultation proposals are based on structures agreed by the DUP and Sinn Fein during the Stormont House Agreement negotiations back in 2014. They include an Historical Investigations Unit (HIU), which critics believe will entrench an unbalanced approach to investigating the past. The HIU will take on the PSNI’s current caseload, just forty five per cent of which focuses on deaths caused by republican paramilitaries, as well as hundreds of allegations of ‘non-criminal misconduct’ against the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Victims of republican terror suspect that the new structures will leave them searching in vain for truth and justice. And organisations representing veterans believe the HIU will be used to persecute ageing soldiers and policemen, who successfully prevented Northern Ireland from descending into outright civil war, even while the IRA did its best to kill them.

They’ll be exceptionally disappointed that, instead of addressing their concerns, Jeremy Hunt’s first instinct was to call for terrorists and former service personnel to be regarded equally. If the defence secretary was actually calling for fairer treatment for ex-soldiers, then he expressed himself clumsily and the point was lost. His subsequent tweet seemed less like a clarification and more like a contradiction.

Indeed, the government’s stance on the legacy of the Troubles has for some time seemed contradictory. The defence secretary, Penny Mordaunt, and other ministers, talk about protecting soldiers from prosecution, while Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley polishes up proposals that will probably make them the target of more investigations.

If Jeremy Hunt becomes prime minister, veterans will wonder if they can expect a more consistent policy, or more of the same?

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These results make depressing reading for Tories who take the unionism of the Conservative and Unionist party seriously. YouGov’s questions were hypothetical, but they bolster the argument that the bonds that tie together the UK have been weakened by three years of intemperate debate on implementing Brexit.

It’s not that Leave supporting English Tories are the only ones whose priorities have been upturned. A vocal clique of Scottish political commentators promote the idea that an independent Scotland has become newly appealing thanks to Brexit, which they claim stems from English nationalism. “If Brexit is a shipwreck, independence can be a lifeboat,” writes Alex Massie. If another referendum takes place his colleague, Chris Deerin, says he doesn’t know which way he’ll vote.

On either side, tempers are frayed and these proclamations may be fuelled by anger. I don’t recognise my country anymore, squeal ultra-remainers, as if membership of a distant bureaucratic monolith in Brussels was always the bedrock of British national identity. Democracy is being subverted, roar the wilder Brexiteers, and we must smash everyone and everything responsible, regardless of the consequences.

Yet, even if the poll results are shaped by short-term anger, it would be complacent to dismiss the sentiments being expressed and the dangers they represent. The main parties at Westminster spend far too little time thinking about the Union and how it can best be preserved and strengthened. So far, the integrity of our nation state has been a marginal issue in the Conservative leadership race.

The YouGov poll coincided with the publication of a Policy Exchange paper on the Irish backstop, written by Lord Bew, one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement. The document is part of a series tackling difficult policy issues and asking “what do we want from the next Prime Minister?”

Lord Bew examines the backstop with broader constitutional questions in mind and urges the new premier to pay more attention to the resilience of the United Kingdom. “In an era in which the Union is being questioned and challenged,” he writes, “the cohesion of the British nation state must be the absolute priority of anyone seeking to hold the highest office.”

This importance of this point is underlined by seeming ambivalence among grassroots Tory members, though these attitudes also demonstrate why the leadership candidates are unlikely to respond positively.

If the bulk of Conservatives are cavalier about the future of the United Kingdom – if achieving Brexit eclipses economic considerations, party loyalty and even the survival of the country – then a prospective leader will not win by making the Union a central theme of their campaign.

The erosion of the political affinities that bind together the UK did not start with Brexit or even with the independence referendum in Scotland. Devolution created lasting tensions between central and regional governments that have never properly been addressed or thought through. The administrations in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff allow nationalists to nurture grievances against Westminster and, in turn, breed resentment in England, where taxpayers feel they are funding generous public services in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Against this backdrop, the idea that we could take a major constitutional decision like Brexit as a single nation and a single electorate caused difficulties. Nationalists and die-hard opponents of leaving the EU have tried to pick apart the referendum result, claiming that England has forced its choice on Scotland and Northern Ireland, where majorities voted for Remain. These claims have often found a receptive audience, even among those who would formerly have counted themselves as unionists.

At the same time, the EU has ruthlessly exploited the idea that the Good Friday Agreement requires a “backstop” for Northern Ireland that includes an internal economic border down the Irish Sea. The agreement, Lord Bew says, “has been ripped out of its historical context… The false narrative – that the backstop is the only way to protect the Good Friday Agreement – must be challenged at its core.”

Yet some Tories, like the MP Daniel Kawczynski, who supports Boris Johnson in the leadership contest, have started to blame Northern Irish unionists for blocking Brexit. “We have still not left the European Union,” he claims, “because the DUP absolutely categorically refused to contemplate the Northern Ireland backstop.” By this logic, unionists in Ulster should accept being ripped apart from the rest of the UK and placed substantially under the authority of Brussels, so that the British mainland can leave the EU.

It’s an attitude reflected in the findings of the YouGov poll.

In theory, members of the Conservative party should be among the strongest advocates of maintaining the United Kingdom. The Tory grassroots are overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the EU and Brexit was supposed to be about asserting the sovereignty of our nation state. Veteran Conservatives, like Lord Tebbit and Colonel Bob Stewart MP, have expressed scepticism about the results, but the YouGov poll at least shows how damaging this saga has become to our sense of togetherness.

Whatever the outcome of Brexit, the next Prime Minister must make rebuilding those bonds his most urgent priority.

During the campaign, you would hope that the contenders will move beyond talking warmly about the importance of the Union and address important questions about its future. As members of the Conservative and Unionist party, they should each feel a responsibility to repair our damaged sense of common identity, restore confidence in British nationhood and ensure people across the country feel properly included in UK-wide political conversations.

Compared to other countries, the United Kingdom can seem like a complicated and even a contradictory thing.

It’s a nation state, but it’s also a Union of nations. It’s governed by a sovereign parliament, but Westminster’s power is now devolved, unevenly, to several regional assemblies. The country is not a federation, but its component nations sometimes wield an informal authority that has a whiff of federalism about it.

Historically, the shape of our constitution was not a major topic for national debate, because our blend of institutions, laws and conventions worked surprisingly well. The United Kingdom is still more robust than its opponents acknowledge, but devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland created tensions between regional governments and Westminster that allow separatists to mount a running challenge to the Union.

This ongoing threat has become more serious thanks to Brexit, which was commonly portrayed as an outburst of English nationalism imposed over the heads of voters in other parts of the UK. The idea that we can make major political decisions as a united nation has sustained significant damage as a result.

Our prospective leaders should be thinking seriously about how to balance the rights and competencies of the devolved institutions with the interests of the UK as a whole. And this conversation should extend beyond haphazard plans to hand ever more powers to Holyrood, Stormont and Cardiff Bay. Why aren’t we constantly discussing the relationships between various levels of government and how they can be improved?

Devolution, insofar as it was thought through at all, was intended to kill off nationalist sentiment in the smaller nations of the UK. These major constitutional changes were included in Labour’s glitzy 1997 manifesto and, Tony Blair later admitted, steam-rollered through after the election. Instead, this experiment created a platform for the SNP to dominate politics in Scotland and come within 200,000 votes of breaking up the Union at the 2014 independence referendum.

It was easy for devolved administrations to pose as defenders of their nations and regions, fighting with an overbearing central government for a fair share of power and resources. They could claim credit for all the things that were right, while attributing responsibility to Westminster for everything that went wrong. In poorer parts of England, the perception flourished that the devolved nations were getting a great deal at the expense of English taxpayers.

Devolution is responsible for a less united kingdom, but there is no popular appetite to abolish these institutions. So, the challenge is to prevent this layer of government from becoming a constant source of ill-feeling against Westminster and a rallying point for separatist feeling.

It is easy, particularly with the chaos of Brexit still unfolding, to fall for a narrative about the United Kingdom’s decline, but there could and should be more confidence in our nation’s future. The economic case for maintaining a strong, integrated country remains compelling, but the cultural, political and historical affinities on which our Union is based are even more powerful and shouldn’t be neglected or talked down.

In a thoughtful paper for Policy Exchange, the historian, Arthur Aughey, noted that the modern UK is based on the principle of consent of its constituent parts. This consent has to be maintained, he believes, by a “continuing political ‘conversation’ in which citizens can participate in an imaginative debate about the Union’s history, politics, culture and society.” Political deliberations should highlight the importance of ‘shared rule’ as well as respecting the value of ‘self-rule’ for the devolved regions.

Over the past three years, it’s seemed at times like the UK has suffered a crisis of confidence, or even that its population has developed a streak of self-loathing.

It is sad, for instance, that it’s become so common to mock the belief that Britain is exceptional and sneer at British achievements. By any standards – through our parliament, our language, our judicial system and (whisper it) our empire – this country’s contributions transcend the national. British ideas shaped a civilisation and not merely a nation state.

I don’t want radical change in our country, but I do want the UK to get its mojo back.

I want Britain to be confident and outward looking, with pride in its past and a sense of togetherness that spans all four component parts. In this Britain, devolution will be a means of bringing decision making closer to the people, rather than nurturing separatist grievances or avoiding responsibility when policies go wrong. The big UK-wide political debates will be passionate and fiery, but we’ll have them as a nation, in the conviction that we all have something at stake and that each of our voices matter.

Will any of the candidates who hope to replace Theresa May explore these important themes during the Tory leadership race, or will they be too busy with the trivial trappings of photo shoots and social media?

In Northern Ireland, where the power-sharing government has not met for nearly eighteen months, the DUP and Sinn Féin were relatively unscathed by voters’ anger. The success of the Alliance Party and the Greens attracted a good deal of attention, but their strong performances did not come at the expense of the larger parties.

The DUP lost a handful of seats, thanks to the vagaries of the single transferable vote system, but it won 24.1 per cent of first preference votes – a 1 per cent improvement on its showing in 2014. Sinn Féin actually won more council seats than previously, though its share of first preference votes fell slightly, by 0.8 per cent to 23.2 per cent.

Alliance, whose vote share rose from 6.7 per cent to 11.5 per cent, is viewed traditionally as a cross-community group that tries to bring together unionists and nationalists. Under its current leader, Naomi Long, though, the party has been keener to emphasise ‘progressive’ policies.

At the moment, Alliance is attractive to members of the affluent middle-classes, who worry that leaving the EU might affect their lifestyles, as well as younger people, who believe that social reforms, like legalising same sex marriage and abortion, are being prevented by the DUP.

Unfortunately, the party has also imported the preachier aspects of modern identity politics and its hostility to Brexit means it backs plans to loosen Northern Ireland’s links with the rest of the UK and tie it more closely to the Republic of Ireland.

That hasn’t prevented Alliance from drawing most of its support from traditionally unionist constituencies, where there is a certain amount of complacency among well-heeled voters about the benefits of the Union and confusion about the constitutional aspects of leaving the EU.

As a consequence the party has gained many of its new votes from areas where the Ulster Unionist party previously performed strongly. In last week’s election, the UUP, which was once the overwhelming force in politics in Northern Ireland, continued its long decline.

The party had a particularly disastrous result in Belfast, where it won only two seats on the city council, down from seven in 2014. One of its successful councillors, Jim Rodgers, a veteran who was formerly lord mayor, has now had the UUP whip withdrawn, as punishment for distributing election literature that accused Alliance of habitually supporting Sinn Féin at city hall.

This controversy neatly encapsulates the party’s dilemma. There are tensions between old style candidates like Rodgers, who fight for votes in unforgiving working class areas in Belfast, or in constituencies where unionism has a more traditional flavour, and representatives who need support from middle class voters who are becoming increasingly liberal and secular. A number of Ulster Unionist candidates claimed that media coverage of this aggressive leaflet cost them their seats.

In its glory days, when it dominated Northern Ireland’s parliament, the UUP was a broad coalition that spanned every variety of unionism. That was its strength, but in more recent times it has become a weakness. Its decline started decades before, but the party finally lost its leadership of unionism after signing up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and undergoing relentless attacks from Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionists.

In the intervening years, the UUP’s leaders have never quite worked out whether to consolidate its position as a more moderate unionist option or compete for hardline voters with the DUP. In the end, they’ve done neither and both.

The party last generated excitement and a sense of purpose when it formed an electoral pact with David Cameron’s Conservatives, under Sir Reg Empey’s leadership. That arrangement, known as UCUNF, performed strongly in the 2009 European Parliamentary poll, but it was undermined by infighting and narrowly failed to win seats at the 2010 general election.

The party’s leader between 2012 and 2017, Mike Nesbitt, tried to forge a cross-community relationship with the SDLP, by forming an official opposition at Stormont to the DUP and Sinn Féin executive. Yet, he also made electoral pacts with the Democratic Unionists and his overtures to the SDLP were met with a lukewarm response. His successor, Robin Swann, has so far been equally unsuccessful in trying to define a clear role for the Ulster Unionists.

Alliance’s growing popularity suggests that unionism in Northern Ireland badly needs some sort of secular, modern advocate to avoid losing younger and more liberal voters. If unionists are content to lend this pro-Union electorate to other parties until a border poll takes place, it will empower an ongoing nationalist campaign to erode the meaning of the province being part of the UK.

With a few notable exceptions, the UUP has spent decades haemorrhaging votes under successive leaders. The party is too old and illustrious to disappear quickly, but unless it can find a strong message and a clear reason to exist, its long slow death will continue.

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At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the Prime Minister reportedly told colleagues that the process has gained “momentum” following the funeral of Lyra McKee, a 29 year-old journalist who was shot dead by republican paramilitaries in Londonderry. The murder led to a “renewed rejection of violence by the people of Northern Ireland,” who, “expressed their frustration at the current impasse and their desire to see devolved government restored quickly,” according to Theresa May’s spokesman.

Undoubtedly, the shooting has created a new atmosphere around the province’s political parties, whose leaders issued a joint statement condemning the incident and appeared together at events afterwards. The words of Father Martin Magill, who scolded politicians at the funeral for uniting only after the death of a young woman, were reported widely and resonated with mourners and the public.

That mood may have persuaded Sinn Féin and the DUP to take part in talks, but it doesn’t mean that their discussions are significantly more likely to be successful. The two largest parties say that they will negotiate in good faith but they also insist that they won’t compromise on divisive issues, like Irish language legislation and investigating the Troubles.

Sinn Féin collapsed power-sharing at the start of January 2017, supposedly because Arlene Foster refused to step down during an investigation into a renewable heating scandal. More than two years later that issue is more or less forgotten, but the party insists that its list of demands must be met before it will go back into an executive with unionists.

Ominously, its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has already asked the governments to devise a ‘Plan B’ that will deliver on Sinn Féin’s ‘red lines’ if the DUP rejects them.

The idea that the parties should cooperate so that Lyra’s death is “not in vain” is seductive, but it’s also facile. The fanatics who encouraged youths to riot in Derry and instructed gunmen to fire at the police despise the Stormont executive. They will try to shoot and bomb their way to an all-Ireland state whether or not there is devolved government.

If the democratic institutions in Northern Ireland were to work properly for a sustained period and tackle segregation, the atmosphere in communities where paramilitary groups operate might gradually start to improve. However, the Stormont executive, when it functioned, rarely legislated and refused to confront controversial social and economic problems.

Since the Assembly was introduced in 1998 under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement, it has been suspended regularly.

After they replaced the UUP and SDLP as Northern Ireland’s largest parties, the  DUP and Sinn Féin agreed to share power in 2007, when they signed they St Andrews’ Agreement. They were locked in talks over devolving policing and justice just three years later, which resulted in the Hillsborough Agreement. In 2014, the Stormont Agreement was needed to restore the institutions after the parties disagreed on welfare reform. Then, less than a year later, they were negotiating again, after police blamed the IRA for killing one of its former members, Kevin McGuigan, during a republican feud.

Irrespective of the fact that, on that occasion, its movement was literally accused of murder, Sinn Féin made further demands on welfare and Troubles inquests, before more money from Westminster facilitated the ironically titled ‘Fresh Start’ agreement.

Even if the latest set of talks results in yet another agreement, it is unlikely to remove the incentive for Sinn Féin – and, let’s be honest, invariably it is Sinn Féin that has to be appeased to get Stormont back up and running – to crash power-sharing in the future. Indeed, by intervening in this manufactured crisis rather than discharging its responsibilities properly and implementing direct rule, the British government arguably ensures that another impasse is more likely, months or years down the line.

The prospect of this round of talks resolving Northern Ireland’s problems has already been damaged by the way this insensitive Dublin government has elbowed its way to the front and centre of the process. The behaviour of the Irish foreign minister, Simon Coveney, confirms to unionists that his administration doesn’t care about the limits the Good Friday Agreement imposes on its involvement in the province’s internal affairs.

People in Northern Ireland are certainly fed up with the lack of progress at Stormont. In theory, they want politicians to get back to work and they think they’re doing a terrible job. Yet, almost certainly, they will go to polling stations this week and endorse the positions of Sinn Féin and the DUP regardless. If those two parties reach an accommodation in the impending talks, it will be worth very little if it does not take away the incentive for one of them to collapse power-sharing when it doesn’t get what it wants.

It’s become mandatory too for politicians to tramp the muddy lanes and fields that divide north and south. Back when there was some hope that Theresa May could still negotiate a respectable deal with the EU, the prime minister was harangued for visiting a farm outside Bangor – Northern Ireland’s third largest settlement – rather than following the well-worn path to Enniskillen or Londonderry.

She should apparently have copied various Eurocrats and Labour MPs who listened to carefully curated propaganda from nationalists, the Irish government and arch-remainers in the border’s vicinity. In the telling of some reporters, the residents of these areas have a special fund of knowledge and wisdom that is almost mystical.

In one feature in The Guardian, John Harris solemnly contrasted the “incisive eloquence” of a Derry rock band with the “casual indifference” of English youths. He was taken in by the drummer’s claim that every household in “the North” holds a copy of the Good Friday Agreement. “You could read it in a day.”

Now, the document was in fact posted to every house – back in 1998. It’s also 35 pages long, so that musician must be a slow reader, and it contains no content precluding a “hard border”, contrary to repeated claims to the contrary. The reverence with which Harris greets this supposed nugget of wisdom tells us more about English deference to nationalist blarney than so-called indifference.

You can understand why journalists and politicians like this formula. The border has become a symbol of the incredible complexity of leaving the EU and the Irish backstop has been by far the most intractable issue during negotiations. People who move regularly between Northern Ireland and the Republic are concerned about the impact that Brexit will have on their lifestyle and livelihoods.

Yet, voices in the border areas have been amplified far beyond anything that is justified by numbers or fairness.

It’s become easy to forget that Northern Ireland makes up a tiny part of the UK and its population is in any case concentrated in the eastern counties, around Belfast, rather than the west or the south of the province. This distribution reflects an economy that is dependent on trade with Great Britain rather than the relatively small volume of business conducted with the Irish Republic. Some 56% of Northern Ireland’s external sales are destined for the mainland, while 14% go to the Republic. Only 1.6% of southern exports go to the north.

It’s an extraordinary PR success for Dublin and the EU that the Brexit negotiations have focussed on the supposed threat of checks at the land border, rather than the far greater complication of a border in the Irish Sea. Their task has been made easier thanks to the political culture of grievance that exists in many of these frontier areas.

These places are overwhelmingly represented by Sinn Fein politicians, who are world class at nursing small complaints until they become perceived by their sympathisers as glaring injustices. Witness the grim pieces of street theatre orchestrated by the group Border Communities Against Brexit, cheered by its republican allies. They’re the ones who set up that famous picture of a supposed border guard stopping a car.

Remember that these stunts are taking place in the same neighbourhoods where the IRA carried out many of its most infamous atrocities, which made watchtowers and other security buildings necessary. Here, the terrorists found their strongest supporters and that is reflected in voters’ ongoing willingness to back a party whose movement butchered their neighbours. Sinn Fein holds each of the Westminster seats along the border.

This callous attitude is made possible by a culture of victimhood that is deeply ingrained. It’s a mindset that drives incessant demands both significant and trivial.

For years, Sinn Fein and others promoted the idea that the west of Northern Ireland was starved of government infrastructure and investment. This claim took no account of population density. Half of the province’s 1.9 million people live within the confines of Belfast’s “travel to work area”. County Fermanagh contains one tenth as many residents as County Antrim and only one fifth of Northern Ireland’s population live in a council district close to the border.

Nonetheless, Sinn Fein managed to secure major spending for projects such as upgrading underused roads in the west of the province, as part of the sectarian carve-up of resources that it oversaw at Stormont alongside the DUP. The justification was always that persistent myth that rural, nationalist areas were underfunded.

Border communities are of course close to the Republic of Ireland and they have stronger cultural, social and economic affinities than the rest of the country with the south. People who live in those localities are justifiably concerned about how Brexit might affect these links.

However, there is no reason why arrangements in Northern Ireland after we leave the EU should be tailored any more to address the concerns of citizens in Belleek and Bellanaleck than those in Bangor and Belfast. Indeed, more populous areas should be heard more loudly and more frequently than relatively sparsely populated places.

It’s important to debate Brexit thoroughly but we’ve already heard rather too much from grievance-mongers near the border. Their complaints need to be put in perspective. They’re a small part of the smallest region in the UK. By no means should they be ignored, but neither should they be allowed to shout down the rest of the country.

Yesterday, the party announced that it will run former SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, as a candidate in this year’s elections to the European parliament. It’s not that it’s unusual for northern politicians to finish their careers down south. Austin Currie, a founder member of the SDLP and a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, eventually served in a Fine Gael government.

This arrangement is slightly different though, for a number of reasons.

Mr Durkan will stand in the Dublin constituency, but his attention will be divided between the Irish capital and his former political beat in Northern Ireland. “It’s Leo Varadkar following through on the promise that he made last year that he wanted to ensure that Irish citizens in the north were not left behind,” the Londonderry man explained to RTE news. He believes Fine Gael is asking him to “reflect the interests and perspective of Northern Ireland, but also to serve the people of Dublin as well.”

Not many carpet-bagging politicians, no matter how shameless, launch their pitch to new voters by pledging first to represent people one hundred miles away, in a different nation-state. Perhaps he thinks that the European Parliament is so tenuously involved in the everyday affairs of the constituency that Dubliners will not mind being a secondary concern for one of their prospective MEPs.

More seriously, this move is clearly about broader political symbolism, but in that way too it creates problems.

Varadkar’s decision will resonate with some northern nationalists, though Durkan’s former colleagues in the SDLP will be seething at his decision to join Fine Gael, as they’ve just announced a shared policy platform with its main rival, Fianna Fail. But the Irish prime minister is also trying to persuade unionists in Northern Ireland that the proposed Brexit backstop is not a threat to their position in the UK. At the same time, he is implying that his party is entitled to speak for Northern Ireland in the European parliament.

Unionists are worried about the backstop precisely because they fear that they will be distanced from the political and economic life of the rest of the UK, while Dublin’s influence will increase as it becomes a conduit between Belfast and Brussels.

Varadkar can certainly assert that British sovereignty should be diminished in this way, if he’s going to be open about its intentions. Though he must then be prepared to answer the counter-argument that the principle of consent upon which the Good Friday Agreement is based is undermined by attempts to dilute Northern Ireland’s UK status and integrate it with the politics of the Republic.

It’s another thing entirely to dismiss unionists’ concerns as nonsense, as the Taoiseach and his sidekick Simon Coveney have done repeatedly, then to act in a way that confirms their fears.

Unionists believe, with justification, that the Irish government frequently acts as if the peace process established some form of joint authority north of the border. In fact, the Belfast Agreement established cross border cooperation in a limited number of areas, while excluding Dublin explicitly from a role in Northern Ireland’s internal affairs.

Previous administrations have tested these boundaries and, under Conservative prime ministers, the government has had to remind the Irish of the limits of ‘strand two’ of the agreement, which governs north-south matters. No Dublin prime minister in recent times has been as provocative as Varadkar, who, aside from his backstop antics, implied that the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference should be used to make joint decisions on the province in the absence of Stormont.

Mark Durkan is a reasonably well-known political figure across the island and it’s understandable that Fine Gael wants his name on its ticket. Presenting him as a potential voice for Northern Ireland in Brussels makes the move much more controversial: not least because his potential voters live in the Dublin area.

This new attempt to blur constitutional lines will strengthen unionists’ suspicions that Varadkar is using Brexit to bring Northern Ireland more firmly under Dublin’s influence.

When the British people voted for Brexit, it was widely interpreted as an expression of disenchantment with the current parties and the Westminster “elite”. A better than expected election result for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was viewed through the same lens and, now, this curious collection of Blairite MPs and pro-EU Tories plans to pose as a radical departure from the old way of doing things.

It might be more accurate to say that this group is reacting to the way that politics has changed very profoundly since the Brexit poll and offering a return to the more settled, predictable landscape that prevailed previously. ‘Centrism’ has gone out of fashion, but it’s hardly a revolutionary idea.

Admittedly, the direction of the current Labour party is even older. Corbyn, McDonnell and Milne espouse a hard-left ideology that developed out of anti-establishment feeling in the 1960s and 1970s. While moderates may eventually regain control of the parliamentary party, the seven MPs who resigned on Monday and formed the Independent Group felt they couldn’t wait any longer.

Their rejection of extreme socialism and condemnation of anti-semitism in Labour formed a persuasive case for a split. Now that they’ve been joined by three disgruntled Conservative MPs, their argument becomes less coherent. The thing that binds together the eleven members most strongly is their shared determination to stop the UK leaving the EU, by staging a second referendum, which could have a short sell-by date as a policy platform.

Many self-declared centrists claim that they feel politically homeless after Brexit, because neither of the two main parties will oppose the result outright. Their disillusionment and Labour’s move to the left have encouraged the idea that there needs to be a realignment of British politics.

Usually this discussion focuses on the supposed need for a ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ party – a role that the new group will now try to fulfil. Yet, the notion that remainers and pragmatic soft-Brexiters are not represented in the House of Commons is difficult to sustain. The majority of MPs fall into this category.

The argument that the two main parties are in the grip of extremism isn’t persuasive either. Theresa May is rudderless and useless, but she is certainly not a Tory Corbyn. She’s trying to steer a withdrawal agreement through parliament that would offer a soft Brexit, while Labour is seeking an even closer relationship with the EU.

So far, none of the suggestions for a centrist platform has managed to move beyond europhilia.

The Economist journalist, Jeremy Cliffe, briefly mooted a ‘Radicals’ party that would appeal to pro-EU sentiments, but he also drew up a manifesto of decentralising, free-market policies that would spook the most ardently libertarian ERG member. The Times suggested four new groups in parliament, ranging from the Solidarity Party on the left, standing for a large public sector and high taxes, to The Freedom Party on the right, which would be similar to some of the patriotic populist movements on mainland Europe.

Perhaps the Independent Group really will uproot the old party system and replace it with something that reflects the new political alliances and divisions revealed by Brexit. On the other hand, after the UK leaves the EU, older allegiances and rivalries may re-emerge, as we get back to concentrating on domestic issues.

The three former Tories who today joined eight Labour independents claim to be from the party’s ‘one nation’ wing. That tradition is supposed to value the positive aspects of society that are worth preserving – stability, prosperity and democratic liberties – while recognising that these goods are sustained thanks to institutions and culture that could easily be damaged by sweeping change.

The Conservative party they left was an imperfect vehicle for these ideas, but it is currently the only mainstream party where they are articulated at all. The modern Tories have managed to balance free-market ideology and traditional conservatism remarkably successfully through their history. It is unlikely that the new group, dominated by the social democratic tradition, will accommodate one-nation conservatism so comfortably.

Before the Brexit referendum, it was common to hear commentators complain that both main parties occupied the ‘middle ground’ with too little to separate them. To combine these two flavours of centrism in one movement, then to try to promote it as something completely different is an unlikely recipe for success.

On her last visit to Northern Ireland, Theresa May promoted the Draft Withdrawal Agreement that she’d made with the EU, including the infamous backstop (and an Irish Sea border to which she’d previously said no British premier could ever agree). Now, in an extraordinary about-turn, she’s committed to amending that backstop with “alternative arrangements”.

The prime minister’s speech was supposed to reassure her audience that, in the few weeks of negotiations that are left, she will find a solution that “commands broad support across the community in Northern Ireland” and “secures a majority in the Westminster parliament.” Of course, it will be worthless solving even those knotty equations, if the EU rejects her suggestions.

It’s possible that, even at this late stage, May will navigate identity issues in Ireland, shifting alliances in the House of Commons and the byzantine complexities of politics in Brussels, to reach a deal that most people will accept. But there could be few more surprising outcomes, given how she’s conducted negotiations so far.

If Mrs May’s political obituaries revolve around the word ‘backstop’, it will largely be her own fault.

She blundered horribly right at the start of the process, by making a unilateral commitment that there would be no ‘hard border’ in Ireland. By making a promise that the UK couldn’t keep without cooperation from Brussels, she provided the EU with an incentive to raise objections to every government plan, while claiming credibly that the onus was on Britain to avoid checks and other infrastructure.

The obligation to agree an ‘insurance policy’ on the border was created by the ‘Joint Report’ on the progress of negotiations, published in December 2017.

The UK’s pledge in paragraph 49 to “maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which… support North-South cooperation, the all-Island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement,” was supplemented by paragraph 50, which committed to avoiding new regulatory barriers between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

The significance of these paragraphs was disputed practically from the moment they were signed, yet May’s government took over six months to explain how it interpreted the document. It’s not difficult to guess the likely reason.

The text appeared to tie the UK to a chunk of single market and customs union rules, in order to limit differences across the border in Ireland. May was understandably reluctant to have a conversation with some sections of the Conservative Party about what exactly this might entail.

This instinct may have been vindicated, partly, by the angry reaction of many Tory Brexiteers to her Chequers proposals, which set out ideas for alignment with the EU. But her aversion to confronting the problem allowed Brussels and the Dublin government to promote their version of the backstop, which involved Northern Ireland remaining in a “common regulatory area” with the Republic of Ireland.

The idea was established firmly that the backstop meant Northern Ireland would have to stay inside the single market and the customs union, if the rest of the UK left without a trade deal.

When May defended her Chequers proposals in Belfast, in July, she compounded these mistakes by making the entirely unhelpful assertion that anything other than a ‘seamless border’ on the island of Ireland would “breach the spirit of the Belfast Agreement”. This contention echoed Irish nationalists and hard-core remainers, who claimed that Brexit could not apply to Northern Ireland, because it would be incompatible with the 1998 accord.

One of the peace deal’s architects, Lord Bew, published a paper last week, expressing astonishment at “the way in which the British Government has allowed the Irish Government to control the narrative around the Good Friday Agreement unchallenged.” His former boss, Lord Trimble, is now considering a legal case against May’s Brexit deal, on the basis that it threatens key aspects of the 1998 document.

They will be dismayed to hear that May has not altered her language significantly today, insisting that she is seeking changes to the backstop, rather than its removal from the deal. It sounded very much like more of the same and it is unlikely to reassure anybody.

It’s still not too late for Britain and the EU to reach an accommodation that keeps trade moving freely across the Irish border and removes the threat to divide Northern Ireland economically and politically from the rest of the UK. There must surely be enough remaining goodwill and mutual understanding from the two sides, to at least try to make this happen.

The prospects of such a breakthrough won’t be helped though, if May fails to grasp the seriousness of her predicament and continues to pursue the same disastrous tactics.

In their wisdom, they’ve managed to turn one of the world’s great sporting competitions into a sprawling, confused mess and the format has already been ditched in favour of a more compact setup for 2024. However, football fans are used to wrestling with statistical and organisational complexity. It’s just possible that they’ll be able to understand the various routes to a tournament that makes Brexit negotiations look simple by comparison.

First – the (relatively) simple part. The draw was conducted in Dublin on Sunday and the teams were divided into 10 qualifying groups, consisting of 5 or 6 teams each. As is traditional, England was drawn against less challenging opponents than the rest of the home nations. Gareth Southgate’s men will play against an assortment of struggling countries from the former soviet-Bloc; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Kosovo.

The Scots’ task is much harder – which will be no more than they expected. Alex McLeish’s charges drew Belgium, Russia, Cyprus, Kazakhstan and San Marino. Wales will face the World Cup finalists Croatia, as well as Slovakia, Hungary and Azerbaijan.

Northern Ireland is in the so-called ‘group of death’, that includes the Netherlands, Germany, Estonia and Belarus. And that was where even the time-worn ritual of drawing teams out of a hat (or a large transparent bowl in this case) got complicated.

Initially, it was the Republic of Ireland that was chosen to face the might of the Dutch and Germans. However, Dublin is a venue for matches in the finals tournament and, though host nations don’t qualify for this competition as of right, they do have special entitlements during the draw. Alongside a plethora of rules preventing clashes that raise political sensitivities or involve unfeasibly long distances, there were restrictions on the number of host countries that could be drawn together in each group.

For that reason, to the delight of the Dublin crowd, the Republic was immediately moved to group B, which contained more amenable opponents – Switzerland, Denmark, Georgia and Gibraltar. Meanwhile, Michael O’Neill’s Northern Ireland team was consigned to group C, which features glamorous fixtures, but makes reaching the finals through conventional means exceptionally difficult.

For any of the home nations, the most straightforward route to Euro 2020 is to finish as one of the top 2 teams in its qualifying group. These high-achievers will comprise 20 of the 24 nations at the tournament. The complicating factor is that all of the countries have already played in a separate, but related competition, that took place during 2018.

The UEFA Nations League was intended initially to replace international friendly matches, which were considered a rather unappealing aspect of the football calendar for fans and broadcasters. As an alternative, the organisers created 4 seeded ‘leagues’, each consisting of 4 groups, that included either 3 or 4 teams each.

The format featured promotion and relegation, allowing nations to improve their seeding ahead of the main qualifiers. However, not content with that innovation, UEFA decided that the group winners in each league would compete in a play-off, consisting of semi-finals and a final, with the winners of the divisions filling the final 4 places at Euro 2020.

If your head is now spinning a little, bear with me.

Essentially, the outcome will be that one team from the lowest ranked league, D, whose groups were won by Georgia, Belarus, Kosovo and Macedonia, will take its place at Euro 2020, without the need to best higher rated countries. The same is true for leagues A, B and C. In other words, the strongest 24 teams, as of right, will not reach the finals of the tournament.

To make things even more confusing, the group winners in the top two divisions of the Nations League are generally strong sides, like Portugal and England, who, by the time the play-offs are played, will probably have qualified already, through the conventional route. This means that they are likely to be replaced in these matches by the next best-ranked teams in their division.

In the very likely circumstances that there are not enough countries left in the league to take up the 4 play-off berths, the slots will go to the next best-ranked teams in the division below. For fairness, none of the group winners will be asked to compete in the play-offs for a higher league, so we’re talking here about sides that finished second or third in their Nations League group.

If we clear aside the tangle of detail, this all means that thanks to a fairly arbitrary concertina effect, a number of countries that have performed without distinction in both the conventional qualifiers and the Nations League are likely to get another chance of reaching Euro 2020. Essentially, they’ve simply been in the right place at the right time.

UEFA insists that providing multiple routes to the finals tournament will mean more meaningful matches for more teams; and greater interest from spectators and television companies. In fact, it could well result in poorer quality games, at a competition that has already been butchered by dividing it up between 12 host nations.

Euro 2016 was one of the most engaging international football tournaments in generations. The organisers have taken a popular, successful format and revamped it for little reason other than they can.

Happily though, when the mist clears, we can still be relatively confident that the actual final will be a showpiece occasion, contested between two of the finest teams in the sport. And that match just happens to have been scheduled for Wembley Stadium, London, on the 12th of  July, 2020.

On Wednesday, a video appeared online of a 16-year-old boy grabbing his Syrian schoolmate by the throat, wrestling him to the ground and pouring water in his face. It was shared thousands of times on social media, the BBC and ITN featured the incident prominently on their news bulletins and Newsnight discussed the attack with junior defence minister, Tobias Ellwood.

The footage, which was filmed at Almondbury Community School in Huddersfield, was shocking and unpleasant; viscerally so. And the assault may well have been racially motivated, as reports implied. Bullies have always zeroed in on difference, when they’re choosing victims to make them look big and tough. The video had a familiar look to anyone who has experienced bullying or witnessed it at close quarters.

The incident was disturbing, but, let’s be honest, it’s also disturbing that so many people, including the media, felt it was appropriate to deal with something like this in the public square. It’s understandable that it made so many people so angry, but specific instances of bullying simply should not be making the national news, unless they’re properly anonymised and used to illustrate a broader trend.

Just have a look at social media to see why it is not a good idea.

Since the footage emerged, grown adults have used online platforms to pour out their hatred and disgust for the perpetrator. Otherwise sensible people have responded to this schoolyard violence by wishing more violence on the boy responsible. “If you meet this horrible little git, give him a smack in the mouth from me,” was one typical response.

We know a little about the victim of this attack. He’s a 15-year-old refugee called Jamal, whose family escaped Homs in 2010, just before the outbreak of civil war in Syria. It’s likely that he’s had a very tough time and he should feel safe and respected in this country.

We know even less about the bully, his upbringing and any problems that might contribute to making him the way he is.

Even if he’s a nasty bit of work, though – a neo-Nazi in the making – what will it achieve to subject him to the hatred of a nation? If anything, public opprobrium is only likely to deepen any racist attitudes that motivated him to act so appallingly.

At an individual level, the bully probably deserves suspension or expulsion from school, and the police have charged him with assault, which seems fair and proportionate. It’s another thing entirely to expose his behaviour to the court of public opinion, then invite an entire country to bring its ire down upon him.

If there’s a general problem with the treatment of refugee children in schools, that’s something to investigate and talk about more widely, without using one 16-year-old child as a cypher for the issue.

Indeed, it’s worrying that there’s been so little discussion about the editorial decisions that led to this footage being aired on national TV, or the judgement of prominent public figures, who created a story in the first place by sharing it on social media. There’s been almost no criticism of the prominence that this incident has been given, except from unpleasant figures like Tommy Robinson, who seems to imply that the victim was somehow to blame for the attack.

It’s an indictment of our social media age that Jeremy Vine, Tobias Elwood and others felt no qualms about focussing on this specific incident and these particular children. We’ve become deeply confused about what constitutes the public and private spheres; and we seem to be unable to consider an issue in the abstract, untangled from our own emotional response.

When we see a video of a child acting horribly to another child, we feel we have to share our horror. In fact, we feel that it is our right. Then if subsequently we’re asked to think about the consequences any more deeply, many of us are unable to engage with that discussion, beyond whether we empathise with the perpetrator or the victim.

Of course, we’re right to be appalled and disgusted by the footage of a bully picking on a smaller, more vulnerable child. Unless we’re involved with the school or the children involved, we should be far more worried that this drama from the schoolyard has been drawn to our attention in the first place.