Yahoo Movies Boris Johnson news – live: NI protocol critics will be ‘pleasantly surprised’, after Welsh FM calls PM ‘awful’
First minister of Wales Mark Drakeford said he felt a “sense of despair” and was “wringing” his hands after a crisis Covid meeting with Boris Johnson in December. A TV documentary crew caught the Welsh Labour leader saying: “Dear me, he really, really is awful.”
It comes as Mr Johnson’s top Brexit adviser Lord David Frost has been accused of “playing games” with the EU over the protocol. The civil servant in charge of the Brexit department between 2017 and 2019 said the protocol remained the “least-worst option” and has to work.
Meanwhile, the prime minister today claimed he was “optimistic” about a satisfactory settlement of the UK’s latest row with the EU over trade with Northern Ireland, insisting that critics who have accused him of burning up trust and goodwill with Brussels would be “pleasantly surprised” by the outcome.
The EU is threatening legal action after London said for the second time that it was prepared unilaterally to tear up the terms of the protocol negotiated as part of Mr Johnson’s Brexit deal, but the PM told a No 10 press conference that “goodwill and imagination” were all that was needed to iron out what he claimed were “teething problems”.
