The danger of not thinking things through

Deeper and deeper into the mire.  The Guardian reports:

Theresa May faces a frantic 48 hours to try to save her Brexit negotiating strategy after she admitted talks had ground to a halt because of the EU’s insistence upon a Northern Ireland-only backstop.

The prime minister is expected to plead with EU leaders to drop their Irish backstop proposal at a make-or-break summit dinner on Wednesday night after seeking the support of members of her cabinet on Tuesday morning.

With time running out before Wednesday’s meeting, May used an emergency Commons statement to say the EU’s plan “threatens the integrity of our United Kingdom” because it could lead to the creation of a customs border in the Irish Sea.

She should have thought of that last December when she formally committed the UK to no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.  Because that meant either that the UK remained in the single market/customs union or that the hard border was set in the Irish Sea.

Update:

And from elsewhere in The Guardian: 

May appeared to have forgotten she had already agreed to a Northern Ireland backstop last December and was now asking the Commons to share her outrage that the EU wasn’t prepared to rubber-stamp the UK’s attempts to renegotiate the backstop agreement with another that included the whole of the UK. Confused? You ought to be. When May started talking about “the backstop to the backstop”, a little piece of everyone died inside.

By now the prime minister was running on full Maybot. She wanted the backstop to be temporary but we shouldn’t get too worked up about finalising an end date because she hoped there would be no need ever for it to come into operation. Basically, she was waiting on a miracle. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” she concluded. “But a no deal outcome is one that no wants.” So something no one wanted was somehow better than something else that no one wanted. At which point logic died and her circuit boards melted.