Brexit's new 30-day deadline

So Boris Johnson has come away from his meetings with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron with a new Brexit deadline. Just 30 days. In that time period he and his cleverest ministers and officials have to find a solution to the Irish backstop impasse which no one else has thought of in the last three years. It's a pretty tall order. Principally because there is NO obvious or even unobvious solution. If you have a hard border between north and south in the island of Ireland, it would be a serious breach of the Good Friday Agreement which ended the terrorist war - The Troubles as they were quaintly called - and could lead to a new era of violence. But if you don't have any checks at the border and let things carry on as they are today, then Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, will have to be subject to the trade rules of the European Union and thus effectively remain in the EU single market and customs union. It's one or the other. But Boris told Merkel and Macron in separate meetings that he wanted to scrap the Irish backstop arrangement which would guarantee a free border in Ireland whatever deal the UK and EU agreed on, or if the UK crashed out without any sort of deal. If anyone has the brains to work out a way around all that, then hurray and terrific and God bless him or her or them. But, as I say, after three years of detailed and anguished negotiations, nothing that could remotely be described as a third way has emerged. There is no third way. So this new 30-day timetable offered by Merkel and supported by Macron, sounds good for Boris, except that if there really was a third-way solution, someone would have thought of it already. I think the brainiest people in the country, young or old, should be invited to Number 10 Downing Street and asked to come up with an idea by the end of the day. Or Boris should tell Michael Gove, the cabinet member with the biggest brain, to go away on his own for a long weekend and return only when he has The Big Idea. The only encouraging thing to emerge from the toing and froing between Berlin and Paris is that Boris has made it clear he really really wants a deal and is not hell-bent on leaving without a deal. He'll go for a no-deal Brexit if all else fails because that is what he has promised. But in the next 30 days, there has got to be a shift in the political tectonic plates. Maybe the hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party which has been rigidly opposed to being the only province of the United Kingdom to remain bound by EU rules, will change its mind for the benefit of the wider community. In other words, the DUP agrees for Northern Ireland to be uniquely subject to EU trade laws while the rest of the UK withdraws, and just get the hell on with life. Could that be a solution? A third way?