Lord Frost says he and Boris Johnson ‘always hoped’ Northern Ireland protocol would eventually collapse

6 comments

1. Lord Frost has said that, when he and Boris Johnson negotiated the Northern Ireland protocol ahead of Brexit, they “always hoped” it would eventually collapse.

   It is not the first time that he has said they regarded the agreement as less than ideal, and not likely to last, but never before has been been quite this explicit, revealing that the Johnson administration wanted the protocol to fail.

   Frost made the comment yesterday in a debate in the House of Lords on the protocol and the Windsor framework – the new version negotiated by Rishi Sunak intended to minimise problems it was causing in Northern Ireland.

   The protocol was necessary because Johnson wanted a version of Brexit that would take the UK out of the EU’s single market and customs union, but without controls on goods having to be introduced on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

   The solution (the original protocol) involved checks and conditions being imposed on some goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. Unionists hated it, but the deal broke the deadlock with Brussels and enabled Johnson to go into the 2019 election claiming to have an “oven-ready” Brexit agreement ready to so. Within weeks of his victory, the UK had formally left the EU.

   Frost, who was Johnson’s Brexit negotiator before becoming Brexit minister, told peers yesterday that the Johnson government never wanted the protocol to work. He said:

   >*The Johnson government, of which I was part, always took the view – many criticised us for taking it – that the protocol was unsatisfactory and temporary.*
   >
   >*We always hoped that, ultimately, divergence by GB would produce the collapse of the protocol arrangements, whether consensually through a vote, a further negotiation or otherwise. We always wanted something better.*

   At the time Johnson strongly defended the protocol, falsely claiming during the 2019 election campaign that it would not require traders in Northern Ireland to fill in new paperwork.

   In a speech to Policy Exchange last year Frost said that the protocol was not perfect but that he and Johnson agreed it assuming “we could sort out the detail later”.

   He also said in the same speech that, when the protocol was agreed, he assumed relations with the EU would improve after Brexit and that they would find a way of making the protocol “workable”. At the time he also assumed the protocol would last until 2024, he said, by which time there would be “so much domestic reform and change within Great Britain … that it would be self-evidently attractive to Northern Ireland to end the protocol and put some other arrangements in place”.

2. Did any of you lads and ladettes vote for this guy to be your negotiation because lol.

3. Whatever helps Great Britain get rid of NI, the better.

4. Lord frost is a cunt

5. I’m shocked and surprised as if it wasn’t clear at the time.

   One of the most disgusting thing Frost did was trying to incite violence in Northern Ireland so he could get an excuse to ditch the Protocol.

6. “The United Kingdom of England and Wales”