Frosty the “No Man” has gone. It ought to be no great surprise, though it’s a punchy story and adds to the sense of an administration disintegrating before our very eyes. As my colleague John Rentoul has pointed out, there was plenty of uncoded criticism of Johnson’s policies in Lord Frost’s last speech, and Frost can’t be alone in his despair at how the prime minister is running the country.
Odd, though, that there wasn’t much about Brexit in the now former Brexit minister’s resignation letter. Frost simply asserted “Brexit is now secure. The challenge for the government now is to deliver on the opportunities it gives us”, meaning the usual Thatcherite small-state stuff Johnson actually has little time for. “Secure” means basically unchanged from when the pair signed it off in 2019 and 2020.
Johnson, by return of email, kindly mentioned all the stuff Frost had done on Brexit, including, “crucially” that he “highlighted and sought to address the destabilising impact of the Northern Ireland Protocol”. Highlighting and seeking to address is a fairly meagre index of success; Frost had demanded: “Our preference would be to reach a comprehensive solution dealing with all the issues. However, given the gravity and urgency of the difficulties, we have been prepared to consider an interim agreement as a first step to deal with the most acute problems, including trade frictions, subsidy control, and governance. Such an agreement would still leave many underlying strains unresolved, for example those caused by diverging UK and EU rules over time.”
Such an interim agreement is exactly where it has ended up, and where it is going to end. It is in fact the final agreement.
Neither Frost nor Johnson, for obvious reasons, sought to highlight and address the fact that the radical renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement (WA) had not been the success they had hoped for. Perhaps it was mission impossible; perhaps Frost messed up; perhaps Johnson was just trying it on. But in any case Frost was a flop, and yet another fall guy for Boris Johnson, who has now got bored with it, really does want to “get Brexit done”, and has decided to settle largely on EU terms and get on with the urgent task of political survival.
In retrospect, it does look like Johnson signed the WA in bad faith, just to win the 2019 election and with every intention of unpicking it at a later date. Therefore, after Michael Gove’s polite ways had got him nowhere, he sent Frost over to Brussels to play the madman, and to see what he might get. It was an extension of the Dominic Cummings school of diplomacy – do things they don’t expect: disrupt expectations. So Frost threatened to collapse the UK-EU trade and cooperation treaty, revert to WTO terms and dare the EU to impose a hard border in Ireland. Article 16 was always about to be triggered, with grim consequences. It wasn’t (except by the EU, briefly).
The British strategy did not work. We were not smarter than them, after all. The Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) has not been scrapped or re-written; the European Court of Justice retains de facto, and arguably de jure, its role in adjudicating the laws of the single market that apply to Northern Ireland; the French have quietly been given more fishing licences; and the new checks and controls between Britain and Europe (if not Ireland) will be implemented in the New Year. The war is over, and guess who lost.
It was a failure of power politics, as well as tactics. We cannot get away from the fact that the EU is roughly eight times the size of Britain’s economy, and Britain relies on its exports to Europe more than Europe needs its exports to Britain, proportionately. So Frost’s grand Command Paper on the NIP from July, his elegant, learned speeches, his tough talk and his threats were basically ignored by Maros Sefcovic and Ursula von de Leyen, who can spot a bluffer when they see him waddle into the negotiating chamber.
Johnson, unsentimental at the best of times, has betrayed the Unionists and his own party again, because he can’t fight on so many fronts as he is currently faced with. So Frosty was ordered to throw the towel in, eat all his grandiloquent words and withdraw his extravagant threats, and generally left looking a bit of a numpty. As minister for Brexit, and with the renegotiation talks and Brexit effectively over, Frost was out of a job. For that reason too it was more than natural he would resign. Stating his authentic Conservative credentials on the way out may help his chances of getting a job with Johnson’s successor. A reasonable gamble.
It is a humiliation though, and for Britain. Apart from medicines shipments to Northern Ireland, some extra goodwill and a face-saving pretence that the present state of the negotiations is merely “interim”, the attempted renegotiation of a Brexit has been no more successful than any previous attempt by the British to backtrack on treaty commitments. Not the Brexit most hoped for, then.
