My guest is George Parker.

George Parker is the political editor of the Financial Times.

Welcome to the podcast, George.

Hello.

Right.

We're going to talk about the current state of UK-E relations, but I think maybe to clarify

for the benefit our listeners.

This is being recorded two days before the local elections in the UK and, course the very important elections to the Northern Line, the Assembly and Stormont.

My first question is a pretty obvious question.

To what extent is this the huge row brewing, I had to bring for some time between the UK new over the Northern Ireland Protocol,

just part of a political ploy by the British government,

Boris Johnson, to make sure that his base is galvanised and he doesn't lose support domestically.

Well, I think that's certainly part of it, although it's a complicated picture, as ever,

with anything to do with Northern Ireland politics and indeed British conservative politics

when it comes to the European Union. But certainly

an element of this has been the sort of constant niggling over the Northern Ireland protocol,

which Boris Johnson obviously signed in 2019 as part of his Brexit deal, and he spent the last

three years trying to repudiate it. Both he and Lord David Frost, the former Brexit minister who is now out of the government,

but writes columns in the Daily Telegraph, bemoaning the treaty that he himself negotiated.

And certainly there's an element that Boris Johnson needs to be seen to be trying to renegotiate,

or indeed scrapping parts of the Northern Ireland protocol to protect his own position.

He's under pressure, as you know, from Conservative MPs over his leadership.

...