A new report published by Policy Exchange, with a foreword from Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, shows that the Protocol has failed to protect the Good Friday Agreement based on the EU’s own measures.

As negotiations between the UK and EU continue, this new paper demonstrates how an ‘Irish interpretation’ of the Good Friday Agreement shaped EU thinking and its negotiations, and how, to get a formal commitment to alignment of Northern Ireland with the EU, they redefined ‘avoiding a hard border’ from a peace process issue to a legal requirement of the Good Friday Agreement.

It never was. Yet this has hardwired an imbalance into the Protocol, with the result that it not only does not work operationally, as even the EU admits, but has failed politically.