Truss has been appointed Brexit minister to thaw out Frosty EU relations

Giving Lord Frost’s role as Brexit minister to the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is a politically smart as well as logical and sensible move by Boris Johnson. The signs are that No 10 and the Treasury really do want to “get Brexit done” now as we approach the first anniversary of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. There are some remaining issues, which will probably drag on for years, but the attempt to renegotiate the UK-EU withdrawal agreement, the “divorce treaty”, has been confirmed with the departure of Frost. The Northern Ireland protocol, fishing licence and other contentious matters will be left where they are. Modest concessions by the EU, such as medicine supply to Northern Ireland, will be pocketed, and blind eyes turned by both sides to trivial violations and cross-border leakages.

In such circumstances there is no further need for any separate cabinet post charged with Brexit, and the UK’s relations with the EU can revert to where they always were run from, namely the Foreign Office. Indeed, the only reason Brexit was hived off into a separate new, Department for Exiting the European Union (Dexeu), after Theresa May became prime minister in 2016, after the referendum, was that she didn’t trust her new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. Before long she decided she didn’t trust her Brexit ministers either, the likes of David Davis, Dominic Raab and Steve Baker; so Brexit was run from 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Dexeu was symbolically abolished, unmourned, on the formal implementation of Brexit on 31 January 2020. What work there was on the new arrangements and unpicking the deal was conducted from the Cabinet Office, first by the polite and emollient Michael Gove, and then the spikier David, soon Lord, Frost.

Now we have come full circle and Brexit is back with the Foreign Office, and normal administrative and diplomatic life has been restored. Politically, Johnson has hit upon the smart idea of making Truss responsible for the quiet ending of the never-ending wars of Brexit – a poisoned chalice. Mixing metaphors, she has been handed a white flag to take to Brussels at some convenient point in the not-too-distant future. There will be no more empty threats about triggering Article 16, upturning the free trade treaty and initiating a trade war with the EU. Even if Truss has the stomach for a fight with President Macron and President Von der Leyen, Johnson and Rishi Sunak certainly do not. Truss’s fan base in the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party won’t be enhanced by her eventual climbdown. To that extent, her status as a hardline rival to Johnson will be diminished.

Truss also has a new junior minister, a minister for Europe, Chris Heaton-Harris, a former transport minister and before that chair for six years of the European Research Group, and thus possessed of formidable Eurosceptic credentials (Truss, inconveniently for her, was a Remainer). He also spent a few months as a junior minister at Dexeu in the chaotic 2018-19 period, so he’s seen it before. Together, Truss and Heaton-Harris are the equivalent of the cleaners who arrive to tidy up the mess after a particularly raucous party at Downing Street. Not, of course, that such things ever happen.