Brexit is going to damage the PM in 2022 – but not in the way you might expect

Brexit and, to a lesser extent, Covid-19 are two of the things that Boris Johnson might have thought he “got done” 12 months ago, and yet here we are at the beginning of another year likely to be dominated by both.

- JOHN RENTOUL

A year ago on Thursday, Bill Cash, the longest standing Eurosceptic Conservative MP, hailed the prime minister’s triumph in negotiating a trade deal with the EU. “Like Alexander the Great, Boris has cut the Gordian knot. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher would have been deeply proud of his achievements, and so are we,” he said in the Commons debate on the EU (Future Relationship) Bill, which became law a year ago today. “Regaining our right to govern ourselves is a true turning point in our great history. In peacetime, it compares only with the restoration by Monck in 1660.”

A comparison worth discussing in an A-level history paper, but however towering the achievement, it was not the end of Brexit – as Johnson and David Frost, his former Brexit negotiator, spent much of last year trying to renegotiate parts of the original withdrawal agreement.

Nor were the vaccines – a year ago Margaret Keenan had just become the first person in the world to be vaccinated – the end of the coronavirus story.

One of the lessons of the past two years is that you cannot separate political predictions from anything else. So if we are to speculate about what might happen in politics in 2022 we have to be epidemiologists first and students of politics second.