If Johnson and Frost had an instinctive understanding of the EU and the political culture of EU member states, why did they box themselves in with no escape hatch? If Frost knew this was going to be such a disaster, why did he take an impossible job in the first place? https://twitter.com/AndrewPRLevi/status/1299381097856405511

From 2010 on, the history of UK-EU relations has been driven by repeated cycles of UK politicians and officials becoming convinced that EU unity would collapse and Germany would come to the rescue only to discover that the UK government was boxed in after it was too late.

If you take a look at archival material from previous catastrophic policy failures in the UK and elsewhere, the amount of times experienced politicians and officials have convinced themselves that they had far more control over a situation than they really did is striking

The politicians and officials that led Britain into Suez intervention, post-1945 economic planning, the Poll Tax, the ERM crisis, the Iraq War and the build up to the Brexit referendum also had decades of experience behind them

The politicians and officials leading the UK into a Scottish secession crisis also have decades of experience behind them