The National:

THE EU-UK stand-off over the Northern Ireland protocol caused sparks at the G7 last weekend.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron made his views very clear in comments to the media. Macron adopted the determined, restrained – but only just – tone of a serious top professional faced with a staff member throwing bizarre, repeat, self-centred teenage wobblies.

In essence, Macron was saying to Boris Johnson: “Enough is enough. This is your Brexit, your agreed protocol, so now we implement it properly.”

READ MORE: 'Spot on': Watch as Macron calmly picks apart Johnson's Brexit complaints

There is much frustration as well as a concise rehearsal of key facts in Macron’s forthright comments. The whole chaos of UK politics in the years since the 2016 Brexit vote – and not only the Johnson government’s current risky antics over the Northern Ireland protocol – lies at the heart of Macron’s telling it as it is.

No other European country, he emphasised, had ever asked European leaders to spend so much time on its sovereignty.

Brexit, in other words, has dragged on and on taking up a huge amount of time when there was much else and other big priorities to occupy EU leaders.

Brexit was the UK’s choice – not the EU’s; Brexit is the child of British sovereignty, as Macron put it.

The French leader was obviously also fed up with the dishonest, game-playing way that Johnson and his government and aides (including new Cabinet member David Frost) are now approaching post-Brexit EU-UK relations.

Macron clearly – and rightly – thinks it’s time Johnson grew up, behaved professionally, calmed down and got serious.

The EU and UK, said Macron, need to act calmly and with mutual respect to implement what was agreed just a few months ago: “Creating arguments each morning is not a good way to do that.”

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Macron outlined succinctly the essential facts about the Northern Ireland protocol.

Theresa May had agreed a different version of the protocol, keeping the UK temporarily (but doubtless indefinitely) in the EU’s customs union. As Macron said this was a way of reconciling sovereignty, the Good Friday Agreement and the EU single market.

The National: Home Secretary Theresa May

Johnson rejected this. He instead chose the current protocol, embedded in the international treaty called the Withdrawal Agreement. He knew, as Macron underlined, that the protocol he signed meant checks on goods at the Britain to Northern Ireland border.

The utterly inward-looking, self-centredness of Tory Brexit politics has also created massive frustration in the EU over the last years. Yes, Macron was saying, we respect UK sovereignty, its territory, but not at the expense of our own 27 countries’ sovereignty that, through the EU, chose to create a single market and to have border controls at the edge of that market.

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Across the EU, the UK’s political implosion over Brexit has led to major, and justified, damage to the UK’s reputation and to trust in the UK.

Where, they ask, did the professional, pragmatic, high influence UK go. And given, for whatever reasons, the UK has chosen the self-harming route of a hard Brexit, the EU wants the UK to own it, to be honest about the two deals that have been done – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Withdrawal Agreement – and to stop blaming the EU for the implications of those two deals. It was the UK’s choice.

The National:

Is there anything helpful for Scotland in this calamitous state of EU-UK relations? On the whole, not.

If Scotland was holding an independence referendum today, it might mean that existing EU sympathy for Scotland’s wish to remain in the EU would be strengthened. But in the end, Brexit is damaging enough to Scotland without the dishonest, clownish (but not funny) antics of Boris Johnson making the framework of EU relations within which Scotland and the whole UK now operate ever worse – more fractious, more problematic, more uncertain.

A way ahead on the protocol is there to be sorted out in the context of the Withdrawal Agreement and without further inflaming tensions in Northern Ireland. But it looks like Johnson may choose to make things worse before finding a route ahead, as if he’s stuck in some self-chosen groundhog day Brexit/“Red Wall” campaign.

Macron’s comments should be played to Johnson each morning. The EU has had enough. Its patience is at an end. It will not participate in a childish, dishonest, unreliable, unprofessional, unruly politics with the UK.

Time to grow up and get real.