Boris Johnson skeptical about UK PM Sunak’s new Brexit deal

Britain's former premier Boris Johnson on Thursday criticised Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's new Brexit deal with the European Union, saying he will find it "very difficult" to vote for it in Parliament. Sunak has been riding high on a largely positive wave since the British Prime Minister declared a "decisive breakthrough" with the EU in the form of a Windsor Framework, which replaces his former boss’ controversial Northern Ireland Protocol. The British Indian leader told the House of Commons that the new pact puts “beyond all doubt that we have now taken back control”. Johnson said he hoped Sunak’s deal would work, but argued that that it did not amount to “the UK taking back control” — a key Brexit slogan. 

“This is not about the UK taking back control,” Johnson said during a speech in London, referring to the fact that some EU rules will still apply in Northern Ireland. “This is the EU graciously unbending to allow us to do what we want to do in our own country, not by our laws, but by theirs.“I’m going to find it very difficult to vote for something like this myself, because I believed we should’ve done something very different,” Johnson said. The UK government’s Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, asserted that the deal meant that the UK was “decisively taking back control in a host of areas from Brussels.”