Deals, no deals and mountain molehills

I sense that James Aidan has a low opinion of Prime Minister Boris Johnson

(Viewpoint, January 13).

I concur, but with the caveat that I also have a low opinion of his predecessor.

As I made clear previously, in a letter about the lack of preparation for leaving the EU without any special trade deal, just defaulting to the existing WTO treaties:

“But after she had spent three years telling all and sundry that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal,’ surely she would have made sure that by the time she handed the reins over to Boris Johnson all the necessary preparations for a no deal exit were well advanced?

“I am no fan of Boris Johnson, far from it, but how can it be right for a politician to say one thing but do another, and then stay silent while her successor is pilloried for the dire situation she bequeathed to him? (Viewpoint, September 19 2019.)”

Well, we are where we are, as they say, and where we are is that Boris Johnson rightly condemned the Chequers plan

proposed by Theresa May as ‘vassalage’ and ‘Brexit In Name Only’, but to get his precious trade deal with the EU he was prepared to impose that on people in one part of our country, Northern Ireland.

But then he was only put on that track because Theresa May had declined to challenge the Irish government when they fabricated an insurmountable mountain out of a molehill on the land border, seeing their nonsense as a useful pretext to give the CBI and other business pressure groups much of what they were demanding.

Dr D R COOPER Belmont Park Avenue

Maidenhead