Kate Hoey’s Today interview should remind us how much feeling matters in the negotiations with Ireland. Photo: PA

How does one solve a problem like Northern Ireland? It’s a complex question—but one which the UK will soon have to summon up an answer to. So far, suggestions include an electronic border, a goods check at ports in to both the Republic of Ireland and the North, and—from republicans—the incorporation of the latter in to the former.

On the Today program, Brexiteer Kate Hoey insisted that no physical border would be necessary on the island, adding that, were such a thing to exist, Dublin would “have to pay for it.”

While Hoey didn’t quite go full “we’ll build a wall and make Leo Varadkar pay for it,” her follow-up remark asking why the Irish government doesn’t “actually become more positive about this and start looking at solutions with their closest neighbour” will have raised eyebrows in Dublin. (To say nothing of her suggestion that the Republic will likely follow Britain out of the EU.)

It is easy, from London, to underestimate the place of feeling in the negotiations. But although Hoey can claim that the UK is a “friend of the Republic of Ireland”—adding that “the relations have never been as good”—the sentiment is not necessarily reciprocated over the Irish Sea, where many feel that Britain must now lie in the bed they made in June 2016.

While the Spectator can point out