The Northern Ireland Protocol is a problem Boris created

If Boris Johnson was elected on a single slogan, it was ‘Get Brexit done’. He then claimed it was done at the end of 2019 in the terms for leaving the EU he agreed. Not so. Today legislation will be introduced by the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unilaterally overhaul a central pillar of the UK’s negotiated exit from the EU, the Northern Ireland Protocol – which is seen by the EU, whatever the government may claim, as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations. 

Economic relations with the EU, still the biggest market for our exporters by a country mile, were already bad. They are about to become appallingly bad. As the UK’s former ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers said in a magisterial lecture on Thursday: ‘The EU… is bound to commence legal proceedings… [It] will view the threat to rewrite the Protocol unilaterally as self-evidently in bad faith, as an extraordinary hostile step to take at this geopolitical juncture and as warranting retaliatory safeguard measures.’

Rogers anticipates the EU commencing legal proceedings against the UK within days, a freezing of all the important talks on further trade and research co-operation between the UK and EU, and selective trade sanctions by the EU against the UK.