However ‘ingenious’ Johnson’s Brexit deal turns out to be, a Final Say remains the only way to put this to rest

Editorial: The prime minister seems likely to return to parliament with more or less the same deal he resigned over as foreign secretary – and he doesn’t have the votes to pass it

Boris Johnson. No 10. Dominic Cummings. Dublin. Belfast. The European Commission. Some 28 EU members’ governments, their diplomats and spin doctors, journalists worked into a feeding frenzy, the Twittersphere…

The details of the Leo Varadkar-Boris Johnson Brexit breakthrough were never going to stay top secret for very long. And so the leaks have begun, and speculation about the “concessions” offered by both sides during the talks in Cheshire is gradually crystallising into fact, more or less.

The short version of the story is that the Unionists have been unceremoniously thrown under a Boris bus, along with the Conservative European Research Group (ERG) or what remains of them – the so-called Spartans. Some sort of quasi-customs union containing Northern Ireland, Great Britain, Ireland and the rest of the European Union is being concocted that simultaneously avoids any hard border infrastructure between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and “protects the all-island economy”, in the words of Michel Barnier.