Even those of us who have the rosiest impressions of our politicians know that they all twist the truth. Most get away with it, but the biggest lies have a nasty habit of catching up with them. Ahead of his 2019 election landslide win, Boris Johnson promised that there would be “no border” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that the Good Friday Agreement would not be compromised. He could have kept that promise. There were several ways to avoid a border in the Irish Sea and a hard border, the most obvious (and economically sensible) would have been for the UK to stay in the EU’s customs union or single market. But Johnson’s government flatly refused to countenance that.