It’s tempting to ignore the government’s announcement, made in the doldrums between Christmas and the New Year, that it is to become legal to sell wine and champagne in pint bottles.

It is difficult to make sense of what Johnson’s Brexit government is doing, or trying to do, as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). I discussed the background in last week’s post, much of which remains relevant, but since then there have been daily, almost hourly, contradictory signals and reports.

[This post will] provide a detailed analysis of an article written by David (now Lord) Frost in this week’s Sunday Telegraph.

"The first week of Johnson’s new administration has seen both speculation about, and the beginning of some answers to, how he intends to undertake Brexit. The outrageousness of that situation shouldn’t pass without comment."

In my previous post I made reference to the recent upsurge of Brexiter interest in GATT Article XXIV. As noted there, it was mentioned as a way of avoiding the damage of no-deal Brexit by Boris Johnson in one of the leadership debates. Shortly afterwards, his claim was debunked by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England (£) but he has continued to push it in interviews this week.

We now know the conditions under which, for the second time in a fortnight, the EU-27 are willing to allow us to avoid, for now, the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit. The British Prime Minister was sent out of the room whilst the other countries, each of whom had a veto, argued for hours over our fate and now they have decided.

It’s been another painful week of shadow boxing and game playing that hardly begins to address the crisis the UK is now in, and refuses to address the choices that it must make.

Theresa May’s latest Brexit statement means nothing has changed except, of course, it takes us closer to the scheduled exit day with no sign whatsoever of when or how the Brexit chaos is going to be resolved.

Beneath a lot of sound and fury, the main story of this week is that Britain continues to go round in circles over Brexit.

What happens in the next three months, perhaps even the next couple of weeks, is going to shape the fate of the country for decades. If Brexit goes ahead, in any form, it will enact a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represent an unprecedented failure of British statecraft.

There is now a dangerous void of leadership and policy at the heart of British politics. Indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, as regards Brexit, the UK no longer has a functioning government. There are no obvious solutions in sight, and the outcome is completely unpredictable.

For at least three years – and in some cases much longer – Brexiters have peddled fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about what Brexit would mean and how it could be done. Ever since the 2016 referendum more and more of these have been exposed or debunked, as many of the posts and links on this blog testify.

It’s difficult to feel anything other than bewilderment and dismay at the events unfolding in Britain.