Boris Johnson will be forced out by autumn without ‘positive new agenda’, Lord Frost says – as it happened

Boris Johnson is expected to campaign in Devon on Friday. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

5.32pm BST

Afternoon summary

• The United Nations refugee agency has made a dramatic intervention to try to halt Priti Patel’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. As Diane Taylor and Rajeev Syal report, in a late submission of evidence, the UNHCR claimed the home secretary misled refugees over the organisation’s support for the plan. A decision from the high court is expected very soon on whether to grant an injunction halting the first deportations to Rwanda, which are due to take place next week.

• The Council of Europe has rebuked the UK over a plan to grant conditional immunity to people accused of murder and other offences during the Northern Ireland Troubles.

• The government’s social mobility tsar has said she does not think Boris Johnson is a good role model for children.

• The UK may be entering its third wave of coronavirus this year, researchers warn, as official figures show infections are on the rise again in England and Northern Ireland.

Boris Johnson with the Conservative candidate Helen Hurford at Ditchetts Farm in Tiverton and Honiton, Devon, where a byelection is taking place later this month. Photograph: Andrew Parsons CCHQ/Parsons Media

Updated at 5.58pm BST

5.05pm BST

London and EU should both have known NI protocol, if strictly applied, 'was never going to work', says Mandelson

The British government and the EU should both have realised that the Northern Ireland protocol, if implemented strictly, was never going to work, Lord Mandelson said today.

In a speech to an Irish Funds lunch at the Mansion House, Mandelson, a former Northern Ireland secretary, said that, as a result of Brexit, relations between the Irish government and the UK government were the worst they had been since the 1980s. He said he feared Brexit had created problems that “cannot be solved”. He went on:

However, they can be managed and in an imperfect world managing a problem can be good enough.

The main Brexit-related dispute between London and Dublin now centres on the Northern Ireland protocol and Mandelson implied that both sides were at least in part at fault over the arrangements that were agreed (checks on goods going from Britain to Northern Ireland) to prevent the need for a hard border on the island of Ireland. He explained:

We have a prime minister who won office because he opposed a Brexit relationship that could have worked. It is highly likely that the same prime minister signed up to the current arrangements in bad faith. It is certain that he has consistently failed to tell the truth about them.

But both the British government and the EU should have known, and probably did know, that this protocol if implemented strictly – and there is room for interpretation - was never going to work for Northern Ireland. It was always unlikely to survive contact with reality and therefore requires deftness in its application.

Mandelson said a solution would require “seriousness of intent and mutual trust” from Brussels and London.

I do think both sides can find a landing zone that works for Northern Ireland. It would require painful compromise from both sides. It would also be immensely easier if the United Kingdom aligned with EU plant, animal, and food safety rules.

This, as the EU has offered, would remove a big part of the barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Britain that unionists find so painful, as well as for trade in those goods between Britain and the EU 27.

This is not an easy choice for the UK – letting an outside power determine an area of regulation for you – but the benefits would be big.

Updated at 5.06pm BST