The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill will be presented to MPs by foreign secretary Liz Truss this afternoon, though no debate will take place at this stage.

Prime minister Boris Johnson today told radio station LBC that the bill will make “a bureaucratic change that needs to be made”, and “a relatively trivial set of adjustments”.

However, the UK government’s decision to make changes unilaterally – having failed to persuade the European Commission that the Protocol should be revised – has led to sharp criticism from the EU, the Irish government and some of his own MPs, who already gave him a bruising in a tight vote of confidence last week.

Last month, the EU warned that unilateral action by the UK could lead to retaliation.

Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission’s vice-president for interinstitutional relations, said then: “Should the UK decide to move ahead with a bill disapplying constitutive elements of the Protocol as announced today by the UK government, the EU will need to respond with all measures at its disposal.”