Northern Ireland has never particularly animated Boris Johnson. In this respect, the former foreign secretary differs from other contenders for the Conservative leadership, most notably his nemesis Michael Gove. For Gove, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was New Labour’s gravest sin. Tony Blair’s willingness to compromise with Sinn Féin reflected what Gove, then a reactionary polemicist, diagnosed as a corrosive moral laxity. In a pamphlet published in 2000, The Price of Peace, he even argued that the peace agreement should be torn up. Extracts were published in the Spectator, then edited by Johnson.
Yet Johnson did not truly share Gove’s zealous and deeply ideological brand of Unionism. Yes, he was given to sweeping denunciations of Republicanism in his own journalism. But they read like the sort of easy absolutes beloved by debaters, rather than sincerely held points of principle.
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