What happened
The referendum decided that the UK would leave; it did not decide how. The spectrum ran from Norway-style single market membership to the minimal free trade agreement actually signed. The choice of the hardest available deal was made by the Johnson government, with David Frost — an unelected adviser, subsequently made a life peer and Cabinet Office minister to oversee the deal's implementation — as chief negotiator.
Frost's negotiating doctrine, set out in his February 2020 Brussels lecture, held that regulatory independence was itself the point of Brexit and worth paying an economic price for. The TCA reflects that doctrine: zero tariffs on goods but full customs formalities, no mutual recognition of professional qualifications, no equivalence framework for financial services, and the end of frictionless supply chains. Services — 80% of the economy — were barely covered.
The measurable results: the OBR's rolling assessment holds at a 4% long-run productivity loss and 15% lower trade intensity versus EU membership. Small exporters faced paperwork many simply abandoned; food and drink exports to the EU fell sharply in the deal's first years; the Windsor Framework later had to renegotiate parts of what had been signed.
Frost resigned from the Cabinet in December 2021 and moved to punditry — a Telegraph column and frequent broadcast appearances, from which he attacks the deal's consequences as failures of implementation by others. Under this project's rules, the record is the entry and the punditry is context: the deal is his documented act; the commentary career is what the record makes legible.
Evidentiary class: official forecast (OBR Brexit analysis, maintained since 2016 and reaffirmed in successive Economic and Fiscal Outlooks).