For all the talk of '30 days to secure a deal' and the repeated insistence by Boris Johnson that he is eager to renegotiate the terms of our exit from the EU, does anyone really believe it? I don't.

The new PM was voted in on a ticket to deliver Brexit "do or die", claiming that a deal would only be possible if our EU partners would renege on the backstop designed to prevent a hard border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic.

It is a calculated move predicated on the promise of certain failure - when the EU leaders refuse to budge on it they can be blamed, and the Tory Government gets what it wanted anyway. A win-win.

The most ardent Brexiteers don't really care whether or not there is a hard border in Ireland afterall.

They didn't live through the Troubles and most probably see the whole Northern Ireland issue as a tiresome roadblock slowing their path to that longed-for, cut-all-ties WTO-style freedom.

READ MORE: Can an alternative to the backstop be found in 30 days? 

But it's not just peace that they are willing to sacrifice on the altar of a no-deal Brexit, it's people's lives and health too.

Many wish to dismiss the dangers to the NHS as exaggeration or the griping of sore losers - the vast majority of doctors, medical bodies and health professionals had backed Remain and many continue to push for the softest Brexit possible.

But the threat is real. It's just that, if they were totally honest, Brexiteers don't really care that someone they don't know - who probably voted Remain anyway - might have to wait longer for cancer treatment because the NHS is running low on radiotherapy isotopes.

Or spend longer on a waiting list for diagnostic tests because the EU clinicians and scientists who used to perform the scans, analyse the blood tests or carry out a colonoscopy have packed up and headed back to the Continent.

The Royal College of Radiologists says potential shortages of staff and medicines mean the NHS will have “no choice but to prioritise” which patients to treat.

More than two-thirds of the UK's pharmaceutical imports come from the EU, and even without a no-deal pharmacists in Scotland and the rest of the UK are already battling with rocketing prices of some drugs and scarce supplies of others - that situation will only get worse.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn branded 'cowards' for dodging traditional press conferences 

The UK Health Secretary has admitted that a no deal "is not pretty" for healthcare - so much so that NHS trusts in England have reportedly been banned from publishing their own impact studies.

But there are those - think Nigel Farage, for example - who have been hustling for years to replace the NHS model with an insurance-style system.

For them, no-deal is a prize that outweighs the NHS.