FForget, for now, the technical details of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which aims to reverse Britain’s commitments under its Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union. Forget – as the British government itself has done – the old-fashioned principles of conservatism such as telling the truth, keeping your word and obeying the laws you made yourself.

Instead, think about the strategy Johnny Depp’s lawyers used against Amber Heard. It’s called Darvo – denying, attacking and reversing victim and aggressor. This legislation should be called the Darvo law: to deny the flagrant violation of international law. Take on the very thing you claim to stand for, which is the political and economic stability of Northern Ireland. And blame others (in this case the EU) for the known consequences of your own choices.

The bill is not, as Boris Johnson argued on Monday, “a bureaucratic change that needs to be made”. It’s a gaslight exercise. Its purpose is to invent an alternate reality in which Johnson did not create the protocol himself, assert that “there will be no checks on goods going from GB to NI, or from NI to GB”, did not call it “a good arrangement… with the minimum possible bureaucratic consequences” and did not insist that “it is fully compatible with the Good Friday agreement”.

And certainly did not win an election on the grounds that this text was his magic formula that allowed him to achieve Brexit. If you think you remember such things, you must be crazy. In the pseudo-reality that is now being conjured up, it was the EU that forced this horrible deal on defenseless Britain. Self-pity has always been the dominant emotion of Brexit, and it has shaped the story Brexiters are now telling themselves about the protocol.

Lord Frost, who led the British side in the talks, now claims that ‘my negotiating team was brutally treated like the suppliant representatives of a renegade province’. The UK “was not a fully sovereign power when we negotiated” the protocol. The protocol was therefore “essentially imposed under duress” – making it neither legally nor morally binding.

This masochistic fantasy was never revealed to parliament or the electorate – “subscribing to the EU’s brutal diktat” was not likely to be a winner in the vote. But that’s the narrative that underpins the new bill. Only by rewriting the very recent past as enlightened misery, with poor little Britain as the victim of abuse by the dastardly stranger, can Johnson’s direct responsibility for protocol be obscured. One would have hoped that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would have provided a sobering reminder of what brutality, coercion and denial of sovereignty really look like. But the lure of imagined oppression can, it seems, resist even this powerful dose of reality.

Everyone – including the EU – admits there are problems with the implementation of the protocol, which was, after all, a last-minute attempt at damage control. But this bill is not about fixing anything. It’s about undoing everything. The bill, in effect, subjects almost every aspect of a legal agreement that is the cornerstone of the entire Brexit Withdrawal Agreement to the whim of British ministers. This gives them the power to cancel the vast majority of the Northern Ireland clauses of this agreement whenever they wish.

It is literally disturbing. The whole effort of the Belfast Agreement was to allow Northern Ireland to calm down after 30 years of bloodshed, to give its people a solid foundation on which to stand. Johnson and Liz Truss deliberately cut that ground from under them by creating, in this bill, a charter of arbitrariness. In some respects, it would have been better to just tear up the whole deal than to do what the bill envisions, which is to make almost every element of it dependent on the thoughts of the Brexit fanatics.

The cruel recklessness of the bill is that it is based on a self-fulfilling prophecy of trouble in Northern Ireland. Term 15 explicitly gives ministers reserve power to tear up any aspects of the protocol which they believe cause political or economic instability in Northern Ireland. There is a dark and absurd circular logic at work here: we will cause trouble in Northern Ireland by threatening to tear up the protocol, and then we will use that mess to justify tearing up the protocol.

What can be built on such a logic, if not an additional absurdity? The real problem with the protocol is that some of its implementation is too complex, especially for small businesses. The bill’s purported solution is to add to the complexity by creating a dual regulatory regime, with some products having to conform to UK standards only, others to EU ones (and some even to both). No one seriously thinks it can work in reality – but then, reality is precisely what gaslighting seeks to deny.

This also applies to the central assertion that the Bill is necessary to protect the Belfast Agreement and its principle of “cross-community consent”. This is political nonsense – Brexit itself does not have the consent of the people of Northern Ireland, who voted against it in 2016. But it is also legal nonsense. The need for cross-community consent relates, in the Belfast Agreement, only to the operation of Northern Ireland’s own political institutions. The Withdrawal Agreement and Protocol are outside of Stormont’s purview. This is Westminster business.

And in fact, this is made very clear by the bill itself. In effect, it deprives the elected representatives of Northern Ireland of their only chance to decide the fate of the protocol. The Belfast Assembly, elected last month, is due to vote at the end of 2024 on whether it wants to scrap some of its key provisions. We know roughly how it would happen: only 37 of the 90 members of the assembly are opposed to the protocol. It is almost certain that the assembly would vote to keep the protocol in place.

The proposed bill is a preemptive attack on this exercise of democracy. The assembly will now be asked to “consent” to new arrangements imposed unilaterally, with no possibility of reinstating the protocol as agreed in 2019. The very idea of ​​consent, on which the whole justification for breach of international law, becomes an obvious masquerade.

The only consolation in all of this is that it’s too patently unreal to even work as a gaslight. Johnson called the removal of the protocol “trivial.” In this, however, he was accidentally approaching the truth. There is, in the play at the heart of the bill, a deep moral and political flippancy about Europe’s unity in the face of the Russian threat, about Britain’s position in the world and about the future of Northern Ireland. The Brexit bill, which was supposed to make Britain great again, has reached the point in this bill where it appears, in a time of serious international crisis, simply innocuous.