By Alec Ross

Every day it does.

Here’s today’s new low. It comes from Manchester, courtesy of the thigh squeezing, serially mendacious unelected Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his speech today.

Imagine you’d lived on the island of Ireland through the troubles and then through twenty-one years of peace brought about by an agreement that meant that the border between the north and the south was to all intents and purposes invisible. Then imagine that you’d voted to stay in the EU but were about to be dragged out anyway and there was going to be a border again. And imagine the unelected guy dragging you out described the wholly unnecessary debates around the subject as “technical issues”, when of course you saw them for what they were – issues of lasting peace brought about largely by the frictionless trade and free movement brought about by the Belfast Agreement and membership of the single market and the European Union.

I don’t live in Ireland and wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone on that lovely island. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that if I did I’d be insulted that a morally bankrupt demagogue reduced my history, culture and safety to a discussion of where to position a surveillance camera in Derry.

And I’d also be deeply frightened in the realisation that the cavernous gulf in the understanding of the true significance of the British border between the people who live there and the people who have power cannot possibly be bridged before Halloween.

And, as a Scot, I’d realise I’d be deluding myself if I thought these people would somehow treat me any better than my friends only a short ferry crossing from Cairnryan away. I’d realise that if the GFA can be traded away for the sunlit uplands of Brexit, then they’d close down Holyrood in a second if it stood in the way of the disaster capitalist project that Brexit has always been.

And I’d be lobbying my First Minister to drop everything else and remove Scotland from a tragedy not of her making with immediate effect.