With just a week to go before the result is announced of the election to choose the new Tory leader, and our new PM, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are shape-shifting into each other.
On Brexit Hunt is adopting more and more of Johnson’s rhetoric about the need to keep open the option of a no-deal Brexit.
And in Monday night’s Sun debate, both of them made a new commitment that makes no deal the most likely outcome – they both said they wanted to scrap the so-called backstop, the mechanism for keeping open the border on the island of Ireland.
Johnson said that putting a time limit on the backstop, or acquiring a unilateral right for the UK to withdraw from the backstop, would no longer be an acceptable reform.
The backstop had to go altogether.
Hunt concurred.
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