Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposals are a series of contradictions – he knows it, and so does Brussels

Editorial: The plan is essentially a version of Theresa May’s ‘max-fac’ proposals from two years ago. It wasn’t accepted by the EU then, and probably won’t be in its new formulation now

It is generally a good rule in life not to over-promise and under-deliver. It is also a rule, like so many, that Boris Johnson seems to find irksome. His Brexit policy is starting to leave the country and his supporters feeling rather short-changed. He was supposed to be better than this, surely?

What, for example, happened to the defiant overnight spin about Mr Johnson’s “take it or leave it” Brexit plan? The “final offer”? It was always an obvious bluff and the EU appears to have called it even before Mr Johnson could trot it out to the eagerly expectant Conservative conference delegates – the easiest crowd imaginable. Instead, they had to put up with the former leader of the Leave campaign bizarrely asking them to agree with him that “We are Europeans”. They demurred.

The formal letter from Mr Johnson to Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, contained an offer, which broadly means keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU single market’s regulations for a “prolonged period”, but with the province firmly outside the EU customs union, post-Brexit.