Despite his name, is Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, a snowflake? It is a good general rule that unless ministers must leave the Cabinet, they must not. Family or health reasons, a serious matter of principle or simply not being able to get on with your job are good reasons. Most other ones are bad. When you join a government, you should put up with many individual annoyances: you sign on because you believe in the thing as a whole.

So, why has Lord Frost signed off? In his resignation letter to the Prime Minister, he says “Brexit is now secure”. This may be true, but there is a constant danger of Brexit being hollowed out via the Northern Ireland Protocol. Despite British sovereignty, the protocol turns Northern Ireland into a semi-satrapy of Brussels, severing it from the rest of the kingdom.

As Boris Johnson says in his reply, “you have sought to address the destabilising impact the current operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol is having on communities in Northern Ireland, which is undermining the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and the territorial integrity of this country”. In other words, Boris thinks Lord Frost has done well, but is leaving unfinished business.

Why, then, is he going? Because of the next bit in Britain’s future – which his letter calls “the direction of travel”. This applies not only to Brexit, but to everything. Will we grasp our advantages to become a freer country, or not?

Lord Frost became a Cabinet minister in March. At first, the trend of Covid policy was good. Vaccination put us ahead of continental Europe. He was dismayed to see Britain fall back after reimposing stricter measures in June.

For him, Plan B’s recent imposition of vaccine passports was the last straw. The idea that you must produce medical information before being allowed to participate in ordinary life was more than he could stomach. The Government was destroying the philosophical barrier to sliding down the slippery slope.

Lord Frost resisted Plan B in Cabinet, unsuccessfully. Why not stay to fight on? It is always difficult for a Cabinet minister, especially one parachuted into politics, if he lacks a government department of his own as a power base. He got on well with Boris personally, but found, once he had passed through the door from No10 to the Cabinet Office, that he was cut off – more eminent, but more impotent. The Downing Street machine, some of whose staff had helped frame Theresa May’s original Brexit proposals, could now squash him. Last week, briefing against his stand over the role of the European Court of Justice appeared in the media.

Now Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, has had Lord Frost’s former responsibilities added to hers. In principle, it is good if the Foreign Office at last “takes ownership” of Brexit as central to our foreign policy; but it remains sadly ill-equipped to do so, and has never understood the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. I fear the EU is right that it will now be easier to manipulate Britain over the protocol.

It should worry Boris that Lord Frost thinks he must leave the Government, though he feels no personal animus. This lack of grudge makes his decision the more telling. The Frost direction of travel reassured Brexiteers. What is the Government’s direction of travel now he’s gone?

An exercise in democratic accountability

My current hero is Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Alone among Democrats, he is delaying the Build Back Better budget of his fellow party member, President Joe Biden. He thinks it will incur ruinous debt and particularly damage the fossil fuel-oriented workers of his blue-collar state. Because of the tied numbers in the Senate, everything turns on his vote.

So far, Mr Manchin seems to have succeeded in halving the amount sought by the president. It now stands at $1.75 trillion (£1.3 trillion), but even that sum is roughly one-and-a-half times larger than our own government’s entire annual spending. It had been expected that, having got that far, Mr Manchin would fold, but at the weekend he announced he would not.

Good for him. No one man in history can ever have blocked such a colossal sum. He is thus fulfilling one of the key roles of elected legislators in the United States (and in Britain) – to protect the money of citizens against the depredations of government.

One of Mr Manchin’s fellow Democrats protests: “We cannot allow one lone senator from West Virginia to obstruct the president’s agenda.”

She is mistaken: that is exactly what the US Constitution does allow. Thank God for it.

Imagine a single member of the National People’s Congress of China even faintly attempting such a thing, and you will see how a free country differs from a totalitarian one.

Make knitting a national crusade 

Today is the shortest and therefore the gloomiest day in the year, but I am smiling at a charming photograph friends have sent me. It shows a pillar box in Faversham, Kent, whose top is snugly covered by a sort of tea cosy. The knitwear depicts a full, three-dimensional Nativity scene of woollen figures – Mary, Joseph, infant Jesus, manger, shepherds, three wise men, two sheep and one donkey. I wish it would go viral and decorate every post box in the land.

But this is clearly a home-made product, requiring many hours of knitting by many thousands of knitters. A national target for Christmas 2022, perhaps.