Lord Frost has given an interview to James Forsyth in The Spectator. Forsyth is married to Allegra Stratton, Johnson's press spokeswoman and friend of Carrie Symonds. All very cosy, eh? Forsyth and The Spectator rather give the game away with the title: Bloc buster: David Frost on Brexit, Barnier and the backstop Note the use of the word "bloc" and the reference to busting it. However, it is quite a revealing piece, as several people have pointed out already.
Forsyth asks about Frost's abrasive negotiating style and he (Frost) claims this was necessary to counter the impression the EU side had got from Theresa May's team that Britain was a soft touch and didn't mean what it said:
"Unfortunately, under the previous negotiators, the EU had learned that we said things and didn’t necessarily stick by them. We had to go through a process of getting them to take our word seriously."
This is from the man who, having renegotiated May's withdrawal agreement to include the NI protocol and a revised political declaration at the end of 2019, went to Brussels in February 2020 and more or less repudiated it.
For example, the PD he agreed in 2019 says, "It will be underpinned by provisions ensuring a level playing field for open and fair competition, as set out in Section XIV of this Part."
Four months later, in Brussels he was saying:
"So to think that we might accept EU supervision on so called level playing field issues simply fails to see the point of what we are doing."
This shocked the EU, Far from showing Britain's word could be taken seriously, it showed we could not be trusted. Not only that, he has unilaterally extended the grace periods set out in the protocol and is talking about invoking Article 16. How is that keeping our word?
Trade disruption
Frost now says about the protocol he negotiated, "The problem we’ve got is that the boundary[note not a border] for trade purposes is proving more of a deterrent to trade and more of a generation of trade diversion than many people expected."
When he talks about 'many people' he means himself and Boris Johnson. This is what he said in his 'lecture' to Brussels in 2020.
"As you may have guessed, I would question some of the specifics of all those studies [the ones showing trade would be severely impacted]. This probably isn’t the moment to go into the detail – maybe I will get a chance in the future to do so. But, in brief, all these studies exaggerate – in my view - the impact of non-tariff barriers they exaggerate customs costs, in some cases by orders of magnitude."
"There is obviously a one-off cost from the introduction of friction at a customs and regulatory border, but I am simply not convinced it is on anything like the scale or with the effects these studies suggest. In any case, we aim to manage it down as far as we can through modern customs facilitation arrangements – and I am convinced that other factors will outweigh it"
In other words, he was told but dismissed it all as scaremongering.
Article 16
Shifting blame
You can tell when things are going wrong when those at the centre are looking around to see who might be able to share responsibility for a disaster or which innocent party might have the blame heaped upon it. This is the case with Frost and Edwin Poots, the newly elected leader of the DUP.
Let's start with Frost. When it's pointed out that he agreed to the protocol, he blames parliament:
"The problem is that the UK signed the document in the first place. Frost insists this was only done under parliamentary duress during the Commons’ Brexit deadlock in the autumn of 2019. ‘We signed it in conditions, obviously, as you remember, where we had the Benn-Burt Act and the requirement to get a deal before we could deliver on the referendum result…"
A tweet from professor Chris Grey calls it 'revisionism':
Shocking (if it was possible still to be shocked) revisionism from Frost, not least as the WA was promoted as a 'great deal' to electors (& nonsense anyway to say that but for the Benn Act a different deal could have been done). https://t.co/ZCObB8JZZN
— Chris Grey (@chrisgreybrexit) May 20, 2021
Remember, he and Johnson set the deadline and went to the country in December 2019 presenting it as a triumph. I don't remember anybody saying it was a bad deal signed under duress. And can anything be done under 'parliamentary duress' - isn't that what democracy is all about? Frost remember was and still is unelected.
Next Poots. He has given an interview to BBC Radio Ulster journalist, Stephen Nolan, reported by The Newsletter where he (Poots) declares the Northern Ireland Protocol is "so damaging for all of Northern Ireland"
Nolan put it to Poots that given the DUP's support for Brexit, the protocol was an inevitable consequence stemming from the UK leaving both the European Union's single market and customs union, to which he replies:
"I am not owning the protocol because the protocol is something that was pushed and forced upon us by the Irish government in conjunction with Sinn Fein, SDLP and Alliance."
Note no admission that the DUP enthusiastically backed Brexit and as Nolan points out, the hardest possible Brexit. It was all "forced upon" them.
Both men refuse to accept the consequences of the bad decisions they made. Frost in particular is being disingenuous. He is like a man who walks into a car showroom and announces he wants to buy a car in the next 15 minutes and sets out what he wants and his maximum price. He has £5000 cash and wants a petrol car, manual gearbox, four wheel drive, four doors in blue and so on. Let's call them his red lines.
The dealer (there is only one) has 500 cars and using the filters in his database quickly finds the only vehicle that fits the bill is an old American Jeep with 150,000 miles on the clock. He gets the keys and sorts out the paperwork and off the customer goes, only to return in a few days saying his family don't like it, it's terrible to drive and he wants his money back. He complains the dealer mis sold the vehicle and it's nothing like what he expected.
The dealer points out (as the EU are doing) that he chose it himself - by ruling out all the other 499 vehicles.
Isn't this what Britain has done to itself?
