Chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has lambasted the EU for “look[ing] like an organisation that does not always want us to succeed”, and called for the Northern Ireland Protocol to be completely redrawn. In a blistering speech delivered in Lisbon this afternoon, Frost insisted that the influence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) needed to be rescinded, replaced by “international arbitration” of a kind agreed within the Brexit trade deal. If that doesn’t happen, Frost warned, Britain may well trigger Article 16…

Frost really didn’t hold back:

“The protocol is not working, it has completely lost consent in one community in Northern Ireland… it is doing the opposite of the thing it was set up to do, protect the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.”

“[The UK] is being asked to run a full scale boundary through our country…for the EU now to say that the protocol – drawn up in extreme haste in a time of great uncertainty – can never be improved upon, when it is so self-evidently causing such significant problems, would be a historic misjudgement.”

Punchy stuff. The ball is in Brussels’ court…