Morning View: Let us hope Sunak is being told how bad an election would be

The Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris yesterday seemed to pull back from an imminent election at Stormont.

That is how it seemed when he declined to give a date for an assembly vote.

But Mr Heaton-Harris did say that he was going to call an election so it is still possible that next week he will do something as stupid as call a December or January election.

Are people in government telling Rishi Sunak how atrocious such a contest will be? Let us hope that they are, and this explains yesterday's apparent U-turn.

The prime minister needs to hear in stark terms the way in which it would be yet another gift to Sinn Fein.

There is no win for unionists in such an election.

The DUP might just pull level with SF, although that seems unlikely, and in any case it would merely lead to the latest new republican grievance machine.

Sinn Fein and their cross-border, transatlantic friends would perpetuate the lie that unionists won't accept a nationalist first minster.

Some po-faced types might scold the notion that the government should care whether or not an election is good for unionists, but instead should be neutral.

Of course the Conservative and Unionist Party should care, when NI sits on the ledge of the Union.

Not just in the push for a border poll but in the sudden push for joint authority which in the last week alone has made a return to undiluted direct rule from London almost politically impossible.

The DUP do not have the space to go back into Stormont now, given what the UK itself has said in criticism of an Irish Sea border - a barrier that has not been resolved in the way that London has said it must be.