It is very common these days for foreign politicians to be invited to write in newspapers and the format is pretty well understood. First you praise the country whose newspaper your are writing in, talk about shared history, ever better relations and then something, if totally necessary, about how your government needs to understand our government just a little bit better and an agreement is as good as signed.
Lord Frost and Brandon Lewis have written an article for the Irish Times, but seem to have forgotten the formula. Instead they start by complaining long and hard about the Northern Ireland Protocol. Apparently they assumed and expected that somehow the agreement wouldn’t work the way it is. The key passage is this; the agreement is causing problems because “of the inflexible requirement to treat the movement of goods into Northern Ireland, as if they were crossing an EU external frontier.”
Well yes, that is exactly what the NIP does and was designed to do, it is the cunning scheme the UK came up with and promised to implement. But Lord Frost and Mr Lewis instead call for a “new balance” in implementing the NIP, by which they mean not implementing it. They even put this in the article, if we cannot find solutions then “we will..consider all our options.”
Why you would want to warn the EU in a national newspaper that you have no intention of doing what you signed up to 6 months ago is beyond me. We can only assume that they think that they are increasing the pressure on the Irish and other EU countries. But you can’t put pressure on someone to let you have your cake and eat it, it is a fantasy and impossible to win.
All they have done is tell the other side their plans, irrational and illogical desires and imagined exceptionalism. We can only assume neither minister plays poker.
https://jonty.substack.com/
This is an actual quote from the article...
"Nevertheless, given the extraordinary nature of this agreement, and the delicate political situation, we expected to be able to administer them sensitively in practice."
Which can be interpreted as 'we said we'd do things, but we didn't mean it at the time.'