Boris Johnson’s government is sinking deeper into the crisis every day: Saturday, December 18, David Frost, his loyal Brexit minister, confirmed his resignation citing ” The direction [politique] socket “ by Downing Street, regretting the tax hikes decided by the Prime Minister in the fall and the health restrictions adopted in mid-December in an attempt to curb the huge wave of Omicron variant infections sweeping the United Kingdom. “I hope that we will move as quickly as possible in the right direction: an economy that is not very regulated, little taxed, at the forefront in terms of innovation and scientific development”, Lord Frost insisted in his resignation letter.
On Sunday, Liz Truss, Mr Johnson’s ambitious foreign minister, was appointed to replace him. Member of Parliament since 2010, she has held ministerial posts since 2012 (education, commerce, Treasury, etc.). She voted against Brexit in 2016, but since then, the elected official, who insists on her political affiliation with Margaret Thatcher, has adopted a very Eurosceptic rhetoric. It will have to resume at short notice the difficult renegotiation with Brussels of the Northern Irish protocol (the part of the Brexit treaty governing the status of the province). The Europeans offered many concessions, but David Frost demanded more: the end of the role of the European Court of Justice in the province, and the almost complete lifting of customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
David Frost, 56, was known to be loyal to Mr Johnson. The latter recruited him when he was Theresa May’s foreign minister. At the time, “Frosty” as the British media have called it since, only had a rather dull diplomatic career to his credit (a visit to Brussels, an ambassadorial post to Denmark). But he stands out for his strong Eurosceptic and sovereignist convictions, which are quite rare in the Foreign Office. Mr Johnson bombed him as the chief Brexit negotiator when he entered Downing Street in July 2019, then appointed him minister in his cabinet in early 2021. His seriousness reassured Brussels at first, but his ideological approach was quickly seen as a brake on looking for a compromise. Mistrust of him was at its peak since, this summer, he demanded to renegotiate the Northern Irish protocol, which he had however accepted eighteen months earlier, threatening to suspend its application if it failed. not for his purposes.
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