Here’s a summary of the day’s main events: The Brexit minister, Lord Frost argued for a rethink of the Northern Ireland protocol. In a speech in Portugal, he said the deal his government sought, signed up to and then trumpeted loudly was unacceptable and unworkable. He said it would, therefore, be imprudent of the EU to try to enforce it. Frost was accused of lacking maturity by Labour. “Instead of approaching the occasion with maturity and in the spirit of cooperation, Lord Frost has effectively asked to rip up the agreement he negotiated – and the prime minister signed – just two years ago,” his opposite number, Jenny Chapman, said. Tory ministers are trying to defend the UK government’s actions in the early part of the pandemic after a report led by two of their own parliamentary colleagues found they constituted one of the worst public health failures in UK history. The Cabinet Office minister, Stephen Barclay, sought to portray the pandemic as an unprecedented situation ministers were trying to get to grips with in real time. But a Tory former cabinet minister pointed out that several other countries, facing a similar threat, had managed to mobilise more quickly. Nevertheless, Greg Clark stressed that the UK was “not the only country that made mistakes” and said the failure to implement an earlier lockdown was a consensus decision – despite the opposition having called for it about a fortnight before the prime minister acted. The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group dismissed the report as “laughable”. Hannah Brady, its spokesperson, criticised a passage that said the “success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test-and-trace system, so that the outcome is far better than would have been the case without this success”. The Welsh health minister Eluned Morgan has apologised for mistakes made during the early days of the pandemic. “Of course, we had a huge amount to learn. Of course, we made some mistakes at the beginning because of a lack of information, data and knowledge. We have a duty to say sorry where we have made mistakes,” she said. A Conservative MP was axed from his senior role with a charity for apparently mixing up two senior Asian ministers, allegedly saying “they all look the same to me”. James Gray was told to step back as a commander of the St John Ambulance after reportedly introducing the then vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi as the health secretary at a parliamentary reception last month. Sajid Javid is the health secretary.