Boris Johnson has made his Brexit negotiator David Frost a full member of the Cabinet and the UK chair of both the partnership council, which manages the UK/EU trade deal, and the joint committee, which handles the Northern Ireland protocol. Frost’s appointment is a recognition that someone is needed at the heart of government to handle the EU relationship – that it can’t be treated as simply a Foreign Office matter, and that it needs to be a full-time job (Michael Gove had previously been the UK chair of these committees).
The challenge for Frost will be to get out of the negotiations mindset. The withdrawal negotiations and the trade talks were necessarily tough and Frost pushed hard. But the UK and the EU now need to create a new, neighbourly relationship rather than the continual trench warfare of the divorce talks and the trade negotiations.
The first issue that will land on Frost’s desk is what to do about the Northern Ireland protocol situation. Unionist sentiment is becoming increasingly hostile to it and that is before it has even been implemented in full. But the EU is saying that all these checks are in the agreement that the UK signed up to, which is right. The challenge is to persuade the EU that sticking to the letter of the protocol will actually end up undermining one of its purposes, which was to preserve stability in Northern Ireland. If the situation continues as is, the next Stormont election will turn into a proxy referendum on the protocol.
I understand that Michael Gove will now be spending most of his time on the post-Covid public services committee that Boris Johnson has set up and that Gove is now chairing.
One of the other intriguing questions about Frost’s role is how it will dovetail with the work of the Foreign Office. Frost will handle relations with the Commission. But there is an intriguing question of whether it will be the Cabinet Office or the Foreign Office who manage relations with EU capitals such as Berlin and Paris.
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