This deal could have been struck in 2021 – but the last thing Brexiters wanted was to get Brexit done | Fintan O'Toole

The leave ultras rely on their Eurosceptic grievances - no wonder Boris Johnson created the disastrous protocol in the first place

Is the grievance factory about to shut up shop at last? The Northern Ireland protocol is the last outpost of the once mighty manufacturing empire that produced, in industrial quantities, self-pitying narratives of Britons oppressed by Brussels. Now, perhaps, that assembly line has finally juddered to a halt.

The paradox of the Brexit project for its own advocates is that its very success has cut off the pipeline of complaint that fed their teeming springs of outrage. The protocol was the last excuse for throwing the old shapes, the one remaining arena in which the grand game of Euro-bashing could be played. It is not surprising that there are those - Boris Johnson, much of the European Research Group (ERG), part of the Democratic Unionist party - who can't bear to part with it.

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times