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British officials are roaming Brussels conference rooms again, seeking to rewrite the Northern Ireland settlement that has hampered Brexit talks. Unless radical surgery is undertaken to allow food and medicine to flow freely, warns David Frost, Britain’s chief negotiator, Britain will invoke Article 16, a clause of emergency which could lead to the unilateral suspension of certain parties. Understanding why means seeing the world through the eyes of Lord Frost, a former diplomat turned whiskey lobbyist Prime Minister Boris Johnson knighted and promoted to cabinet. In the 2016 referendum, there were a dozen varieties of Brexit, contradictory and vaporous. Now there’s only one, hard as a diamond, and that’s Lord Frost’s. His interlocutors, who struggle to understand it, think that it is fanaticism. He would simply call it Brexit.

European observers tend to think the historic star of Brexit is WWII, or perhaps the British Empire. In Lord Frost’s tale, the story begins with Edmund Burke, a conservative philosopher of the 1700s who warned of a conflict between an organic constitution based on custom and tradition, and the cruel, hyper-rational order that the French Revolution was job function email database going to trigger. For him, Brexit is the product of a clash between an adaptable British Parliament and an artificial and fractious European edifice incapable of adapting to the demands of the voters. Those who argue that the bloc is a British project suffer from a “false conscience”, he said. Across the continent, he detects a nation-state unrest. Brexit is not a monstrous accident, but a restoration of the natural order.

British diplomats have long viewed the question of whether Britain is truly ‘sovereign’ within the European Union as a thought experiment over dinner. What mattered was influence. But according to the Frost doctrine, sovereignty is real and difficult, to be reclaimed and protected with care. EU membership was for him a “long bad dream”; it was not until Britain left that it became independent and free. For his interlocutors it seems chimerical, and for those who have known real dictatorships, a bit insulting. “No one expected such a rude nationalist to emerge from the Channel Tunnel,” said an observer from Brussels.