Collapsing public support suggests Brexit is anything but done

theguardian.com:

The mantra right up to the grisly end was that he had got Brexit “done”.

Boris Johnson’s apparent double miracle was to break the parliamentary impasse that tormented his predecessor Theresa May when trying to pass her withdrawal agreement and then to successfully negotiate a trade deal with the EU in the following 10 months.

“This deal means a new stability and a new certainty in what has sometimes been a fractious and difficult relationship,” Johnson had said on Christmas Eve 2020 as the ink was drying on the new trade agreement.

Johnson certainly achieved a political feat in uniting his party after removing May from office and then forming an unlikely electoral alliance in the wider country – despite misleading the Queen, in the opinion of a Scottish court, as he sought to threaten recalcitrant MPs with a no-deal exit back in the dark days of 2019.

But recent polling suggests support for Brexit in the UK has collapsed – and the outgoing prime minister’s critics might confidently argue today that Johnson leaves a mess of issues behind rather than the “certainty and stability” that he claimed to have secured 18 months ago.

For all of the talk in 2019 of having struck a great deal, the government has in recent weeks threatened to unilaterally rip up a hard won and crucial agreement over the post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland if the EU does not agree to a fundamental overhaul – despite the Conservative manifesto on which Johnson formed his government committing to no renegotiations.

The problem Johnson has found is that the withdrawal agreement has – as the government’s own impact assessment had said it would at the time, along with everyone else who understood the deal – drawn a regulatory border down the Irish