Brexit: soporifically dull?

18/05/2021

Michael Deacon, parliamentary sketchwriter for the Telegraph, has an interesting take on the pandemic, remarking that there is one good thing about it. Without it, he says, we'd have spent a lot more time listening to MPs drone on about Brexit.

He has a point there, which he illustrates by referring to his experience yesterday of watching the recently ennobled Davis Frost give what is loosely described as "evidence" to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee.

Such an event, he writes, should have been rather gripping. Frost is, after all, the man who negotiated Johnson's Brexit deal. The day before, he'd written a rousingly pugnacious column for the Mail on Sunday , in which he ordered the EU to "stop the political point-scoring" and "work with us" to resolve problems in Northern Ireland so the assorted hackery were braced for "something spicy".

Try as he might though, Deacon admits, "I can't recall any being quite so soporifically dull". In fact, he says, "it was so soporifically dull" that he was not quite sure how he was going to make the word count for his column - except perhaps by typing out the phrase "soporifically dull" another 200 times.

I know exactly how he feels. I like to make my nightly blogposts about 1200 words, and sometimes it's a real struggle to get there. But Deacon's 500 words should be a breeze, except when it comes to writing about Frost's testimony.  It was, he says, "flatter than an abandoned can of Fanta".

Unlike in his column, he observes, "Lord Frost was not punchily defiant. He did not glower, grit his teeth, and bang his fist on the table. He did not tear off his shirt and challenge Emmanuel Macron to settle their differences with a bout of bare-knuckle boxing".

"On the contrary", Deacon complains, "he was a perfect teddy bear. Come to think of it, he actually looked quite like a teddy bear. Albeit a rather shabby, well-worn one. At any rate, he was clearly trying to sound less combative".

"At the moment we are talking to the [European] Commission about a range of practical issues that have arisen from trying to operate the [Northern Ireland] Protocol", he murmured. "We’ll have to see how far we can take it … I still hope it might be possible in the next month or so …".

Unwittingly pointing to the essential problem of select committees, Deacon notes that the exchanges might have been less drab if the MPs had asked Lord Frost some slightly tougher questions. What he had in mind was: "Why have you been pinning all the blame on the EU when you negotiated this deal yourself? Are you sure none of this is your fault?"

Inevitably, that was not the type of scrutiny the Scrutiny Committee was interested in. That's why it tends to be a complete waste of time – along with most of the other select committees. As one very senior ex-civil servant remarked, even if he (accidently) asked the right questions, they wouldn't understand the answers.

In this case, mostly, members preferred to grumble about the pettiness of Brussels. This was not without justification, of course, Deacon suggests. Richard Drax (Con, S Dorset) said some EU customs officials had accused British exporters of using "the wrong colour pen" on their forms.

That made me smile somewhat – they can't even get that right. It's not the exporters but the chromographically challenged vets who can't even read the forms properly that they are signing.

The instructions are printed on the forms, telling the officials that they must use different colours for their signatures. Despite charging a king's ransom for their "services" in filling in the export forms, these geniuses can't even get that right.

Having missed that point, the rest, according to Deacon, was all very weak and low-wattage. As ever, Sir Bill Cash, the committee's chairman, was reminiscing about long-forgotten debates on Europe the way Uncle Albert from Only Fools & Horses reminisces about the War. "Going back to the days when I was involved in the debates on the Single European Act in 1986 …".

I'll say that for Deacon, he's got Cash banged to rights. If he ever loses his job as an MP, he could easily get a job as a fire alarm. He is so tedious that, once he starts talking, he can clear a room the size of St Paul's Cathedral.

Still, for all that he bored the pants off the Telegraph's sketchwriter, he and Frost's inputs were taken slightly more seriously by Denis Staunton, London correspondent of the Irish Times.

Staunton takes a very different tack, noting that Frost was warm in his praise for his counterpart, Maroš Šefcovic, suggesting that, if it was left to the two of them, they would find a way forward which would implement the protocol in a way that satisfied everyone. To Frost, the problem is that the Commission and many of the member states do not match Šefcovic's understanding of Northern Ireland.

Clearly, he is unaware of the standard warning given to anyone approaching the delicate subject of Northern Ireland politics: if you think you understand them, you haven't been listening.

But, says Staunton, if Frost hopes to engage the sympathy of the member state which understands Northern Ireland best, he has chosen an unorthodox way to go about it.

Dublin, he warns, has been "alarmed" by weekend briefings from sources close to Frost identifying 12 July as a deadline for agreement on how to implement the protocol, following a meeting in Belfast last week with a delegation from the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC), which included representatives of paramilitary groups.

Frost repeated the linkage between the negotiating timetable and the North's marching season to the MPs on Monday, although he said it was not a hard deadline, but it is already to no avail, The European Commission has dismissed Frost's "posturing", saying it would continue to work on technical solutions in negotiations with Britain.

"The various unhelpful comments in the press will not prevent us from doing so. Our focus is on making the protocol work for the people of Northern Ireland, and across the island of Ireland", says Commission spokesman Daniel Ferrie. "Only joint solutions, agreed in the joint bodies established by the withdrawal agreement, can provide the stability and predictability that people and businesses need to take advantage of the opportunities of the protocol".

Staunton, however, thinks the DUP is signalling a more a realistic approach to the protocol. Christopher Stalford, an ally of incoming DUP leader Edwin Poots, has told the BBC there were only three ways to get rid of the protocol: persuading Boris Johnson to scrap it; winning a legal action against it; or winning a unionist majority in next year's Assembly elections.

But he leaves his piece hanging there, unable or unwilling to say which option is on the table, leaving the Guardian to breach the boredom threshold by having Frost tell us that unilateral action was something the UK would consider if it were not able to reach agreement on border checks, mandated in the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

What gives this the edge is the British government hope that the EU would not take "retaliatory" measures, all in the interests of "stability and peace", possibly making the MPs wish they had stuck to coloured crayons.

Crucially, Frost also confirmed that the UK was not going to align with EU food law. Instead, he was calling for a bonfire of "Brussels red tape", yet again demonstrating that he hasn't the first idea of how the international trading system works.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had a man who really knew his subject. Being questioned by MPs who knew something about theirs, the select committee session could have been really interesting – and informative.

As it is, we have to be content to learn that Frost it recruiting for a task force that would focus on how to diverge from EU rules to give Brexit Britain a global competitive edge over European businesses in areas such as financial services.

Apart from the attempt being almost certain to add to Brussels' anxiety about Britain's plans, we now have to wait to see how long it takes Frost and his merry men to discover the double coffin lid of international standard-making.

For want of that – and if we really want some laughs – we would always attempt to negotiate a trade deal with Nigeria. That should really give Brexit Britain a global competitive edge over European businesses.

Also published on Turbulent Times.