David Davis powered through an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday despite feeling so unwell he needed a sick bucket beside him.
The poorly Brexit secretary also had a box of tissues and a glass of water on standby in the event he was ill live on air.
The drastic measures were quickly spotted by political pundits on Twitter.
It came as Davis insisted on the BBC programme that a solution will be found to the Irish border issue after Brexit and a trade deal with Brussels is now “incredibly probable”.
He said the Government was committed to protecting the Good Friday Agreement “at all costs”, the Press Association reported.
“There is a risk in trying to focus just on the downsides because the real likely outcome – the overwhelmingly likely outcome – is option A,” he told Marr.
“Option A is that we get a free-trade agreement, we get a customs agreement, all of those make the Northern Ireland issue much, much easier to solve.”
The EU withdrawal deal includes a fallback option of Northern Ireland effectively continuing to remain in the customs union, but Davis said either the UK-EU trade deal or new technology could prevent that.
When challenged that there were no other borders of that kind in the world, Davis told the Andrew Marr Show: “We have got a whole load of new technology now.”
He added: “There are ways to do this, you can’t just say ‘we haven’t done it anywhere else’, we haven’t attempted to do it anywhere else.”
Pressed on Labour’s planned amendment to Brexit legislation – which would enshrine the commitment to no hard border in law – Davis said he would have to see what they came up with.
But he added: “We will not allow a return to the borders of the past, we will preserve – at all costs – the Belfast Agreement.”
Although Mr Davis said the progress meant it was now “incredibly probable, very, very highly probable” that there would be a final deal, “you can never stop making arrangements” for a potential no-deal scenario.
He told the show it was like insurance: “You don’t expect your house to burn down, it’s less than a one in 100,000 chance, but you have house insurance anyway.”
A Sunday Times report suggested Davis has privately threatened to resign if Britain’s fishermen are not handed control of their waters again from 2021.
He defended the deal struck with Brussels during his Andrew Marr Show appearance – during which he was battling illness.
He said: “We will negotiate with our surrounding states so that we have access to their waters and theirs to ours, and markets and so on, but it will be under our control.
“It will not any longer be under the qualified majority voting arrangements we currently have.”
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