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.
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