DUP leader Arlene Foster bizarrely claimed there had never been a hard border between Northern Ireland the Republic as she urged Theresa May to get tough with Brussels.

The ongoing row over a backstop to prevent a hard border on the 310-mile frontier is set to derail the Prime Minister’s withdrawal plan tonight.

The insurance policy is designed to avoid a return to checks on the divide.

But Mrs Foster, whose policeman father John Kelly was shot by the IRA at his home in 1979, insisted the claims were exaggerated.

Speaking at press conference organised by A Better Deal said: “As someone who lived through the Troubles, we never had a hard border.

“There were 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland and they couldn’t hermetically seal the border in Northern Ireland.

“It is a bit of a nonsense, frankly, to talk about a hard border.”

British Army checkpoints and watchtowers at strategic locations along the frontier were key targets for IRA terrorists, who regularly targeted both troops and infrastructure in the “badlands” along the border.

Tearing them down was an immediate and visible sign of the peace process.

But Mrs Foster said: “Terrorists were able to come and go across the Irish border – and if we didn’t have a hard border during those awful times in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we’re certainly not going to have one in respect of this.”

Why Brexit vote defeat could be biggest since WW2

MPs were set to vote down the Brexit deal by more than 100 – making it the biggest defeat of a government since the Second World War.

That’s according to Prof Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University London, who analysed more than a century of votes in the Commons.

Prof Cowley – who wrote the book on the 2017 general election – analysed all "meaningful" defeats of the government in the Commons. That meant excluding surprise ‘ambush’ votes, free votes and votes the government chose deliberately not to fight.

• The (known) record for a meaningful defeat is by 166 votes in 1924, under the minority Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald
• Since WW2, the biggest ‘meaningful’ defeat of a government was by 89 votes in 1979
• The biggest rebellion of modern politics was in 2003 when 139 Labour MPs revolted against Tony Blair over the Iraq War
• The biggest ever Tory rebellion was in 1997 when 95 Conservatives rebelled over post-Dunblane gun control under John Major

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