Insight - As Frost departs, will the ice melt across the Channel? - by Charles Grant, 20 December 2021

But Frost’s supporters point to the Commission’s October proposals to improve the working of the Northern Ireland protocol: they think the Commission would not have made such a generous offer without being scared that the UK would invoke the protocol’s Article 16, which could lead to the UK renouncing that document altogether. [...] And while Dublin and Brussels reckon the British government has unduly favoured the Unionist viewpoint, because of the Tories’ longstanding ties to the Democratic Unionist Party, Frost has been right to point out that many people on the EU side have paid insufficient attention to Unionist concerns, notably their fears of being cut off from Great Britain and subsumed into the republic. [...] Which is presumably why in recent weeks the British have given a lot more licenses to French fishing boats, and why they are no longer prioritising the complete removal of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) from the governance of the Northern Ireland protocol. [...] I knew him quite well in the first decade of the century, when he was a fairly senior diplomat in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) – head of the EU department, ambassador in Copenhagen and head of policy planning. [...] But he left the FCO in 2010, and two weeks before the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he worked for the Scotch Whisky Association, he wrote an essay containing strong arguments for the UK to remain in the EU.