The Frost report: is Boris Johnson’s trusted aide up to it?

The Prime Minister stunned Whitehall this week with his choice of new National Security Adviser. Who is David Frost?

When David Frost was chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association, he took part in an Open Europe debate during which he asked if the UK was self-indulgent to be fretting about its relations with the EU when so much else was going on in the world.

Britain’s position, he said, reminded him of an anecdote told by George Orwell in 1940 of a New Yorker picture showing a little man walking up to a news stall stacked with newspapers, their headlines screaming: “Great tank battles in Northern France. …dogfights in the sky.”

Yet the man ignores the newspapers, requesting a copy of the Action Stories magazine. Frost asked: “Are we like that man asking for Action Stories? When you have IS rampant in the Middle East, Putin out there on the borders and home-grown Islamist terrorists and other things going on, are we being self-indulgent about whether we can get the best outcome to renegotiations?”

It was a good question, which Frost went on to answer, arguing that solving the British problem in Europe was vital for the UK but also for Europe to be more effective. More pertinently, he suggested that a more sophisticated answer was needed than the binary choice between staying and “off we go.”

To put Frost’s comments into context, this debate took place in February 2015, shortly before David Cameron headed to the polls with the promise of renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU and then putting it to the people in a referendum. It was based on an essay he wrote for Open Europe, titled “How EU renegotiation will happen and how to pursue it”. At that stage, OE was the UK’s most influential think tank advocating reform of the EU, and Frost sat on its advisory council. The boss, Matts Persson, went on to advise Cameron on those EU negotiations.

Frost made three further fascinating points which he said would make for a successful EU negotiation which are relevant today. First, he said the UK should create a cross-party departmental unit to take charge of negotiations to avoid turf wars. Secondly, the UK should ensure that requests that might seem weird should be seen as normal, and aggressively pursue them. Britain, he said, had to widen the Overton window, to make the range of policies politically acceptable to the public and the press at any given time – making the weird become normal rather than just the whim of an individual politicians’ likes or dislikes.

His third point was that persuading the EU to change was imperative if it were to survive. He wrote: “This will be a disruptive period for the EU and not just because of British demands. To get results, Britain needs to make sure it is seen as working with others to put a failing system into better order rather than as presenting unreasonable British demands disrupting an essentially well-functioning system.”

But Frost wanted this to be a sophisticated option, to move European countries along with the UK to “recognise that successful constitutions have balanced firmness and flexibility, fixity and the ability to evolve. Polities that have found that difficult – like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, another organisation underpinned by laws rather than by national feeling – have in the end often disintegrated.”

He added: “No-one has seriously suggested that aspirations in the UK’s nations to run more of their own affairs should simply be resisted or met in a purely token way. The EU could look closely at this lesson, and learn from it.”

He might have quoted Tancredi Falconeri’s remarks in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard, referring to the revolutionary undercurrents in Sicily between the aristocrats and unifiers: “Everything must change for everything to remain the same”.

Little could Frost know, then, that four years later – after a bitter referendum which split the country into the bloodiest divisions since the Civil War and which defenestrated two Prime Ministers – that he would be hired by a third Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to lead Britain out of Europe as chief Brexit sherpa and negotiator.

A year after leading those Brexit negotiations, Frost – soon to be Lord Frost – is to be elevated to one of the most powerful roles in the country after that of PM.

To say that Johnson’s recent decision to appoint Frost to take over from Sir Mark Sedwill as the new National Security Adviser has generated controversy is putting it mildly.

That it caused a rumpus is no surprise. Frost’s extraordinary elevation is without parallel in Whitehall in modern times. He will soon be occupying a position of power alongside the PM which is akin to the relationship Harry Hopkins had with FDR. Or maybe that of Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, the monarch who broke with Europe in the Reformation?

Just about every insult has been flung at Frost, and the political nature of Johnson’s appointment. Frost has been labelled a Brexit ideologue, a little Englander who has been given the NSA job only because he’s a lackey who laps up the Johnson/Dominic Cummings Brexit school of thought, as someone who relishes heading to the Channel beach waving the No-Deal flag.

And some of that criticism is coming from the Conservative benches. They do seem to be rather good at being their own internal opposition. By contrast the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has been studiously absent from the chorus of criticism.

The second charge thrown against Frost, mainly from anonymous spooks and ex-ambassadors, is that he does not have sufficient national and international experience of security, defence and intelligence to be the NSA. There are whispers that Frost was a mere mid-ranking diplomat who ran off mid-career to run a whisky association.

These voices of criticism were joined by a furious Theresa May – who appointed Sedwill to be NSA role – whose outburst in the Commons attacking him for not having the right experience was like seeing a pressure cooker explode. Watching the steam rise, you could see the years of anger against the Brexiteers had finally found a vent.

What should we conclude ? That this is the usual spiteful tittle tattle when an outsider gets the top job? That there are many jealous voices because their man or woman has not got the role that so many covet?

Or do the critics have a point, that Frost’s appointment is so political that it turns Britain’s constitution upside down, paving the way for US style partisan appointments?

On just about any measure, it’s nonsense to say that Frost’s NSA role is political or that he is partisan: he is a career civil servant steeped in international diplomacy and has held some of the most senior posts in the Foreign Office for more than three decades.

As Baronness Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, suggested, the more important issue is his independence of character.

Let’s look at Frost’s credentials. He is obviously a supremely talented former diplomat who has been at the heart of detailed and difficult negotiations with Brussels over trade and other issues for more than 25 years.

Born in Derby, Frost was a free scholar at the private Nottingham High School. He went on to read medieval French and medieval history at St John’s College, Oxford where he gained a first.

Joining the Foreign Office in 1987, he worked in a series of posts starting in the British High Commission in Nicosia, followed by a stint as UK Representative to the EU in Brussels as First Secretary for Economic and Financial Affairs in 1993. He then worked for the United Nations in New York covering human rights and social and economic affairs.

Returning to London, he went on to serve as private secretary to the head of the diplomatic service, John Kerr, now Lord Kerr, famously associated with the infamous Article 50 – the part of the Lisbon Treaty designed to give EU members a difficult two-year pathway out of the EU.

Then in 2001, Frost was promoted Economic Counsellor to Paris, in charge of reporting on all aspects of French economic and commercial life, together with its EU policy.

Once again, Frost came back to London to head up the EU Internal Department and he was then Director for the European Union in the Foreign Office where he worked on some of the trickiest and stickiest of negotiations over the Working Time Directive, and the EU’s multi-annual Budget framework.

He was part of the UK’s leadership team during its EU Presidency in 2005, and a year later became the British ambassador to Denmark.

After heading back to London, in 2008, he became a senior Whitehall official – first as director for strategy and policy planning in the Foreign Office, and then as director for Europe, Trade and International Affairs in the Department for Business, where he was the most top trade policy official dealing with Brussels at the time.

Along his travels, Frost learnt Greek, Danish, Spanish, German and Russian to add to the French he studied at Oxford.

Then comes his brief interlude with the hard stuff. Out of the blue in 2013, he was headhunted to be chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association. This might sound a little parochial for those south of Watford, but running the SWA is a hugely prestigious and international job. The Scottish whisky industry is worth more than £5bn a year in exports, and works closely with representatives from the world’s biggest drinks companies including Diageo, Pernod Ricard and Beam Suntory, all of which are represented on the SWA’s council.

Why Frost left the Foreign Office is not clear. “He wanted a spell in business,” says a friend. Switching to the private sector is much prized by FCO mandarins who encourage diplomats to take a break in commerce. The late and much lauded Sir Jeremy Heywood left the civil service to work at Morgan Stanley for several years before returning to Whitehall.

While working on the hard stuff, Frost was also advising Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister, on European and Brexit affairs.

He struck up relations with Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary after the referendum and in November 2016 joined as his special adviser. Frost stayed until Johnson resigned over Theresa May’s Brexit deal in 2018.

After once again leaving the FCO, Frost went back into business, going to head up the London Chamber of Commerce. Once again Johnson came calling, this time when he became Prime Minister last summer, to take up the role as chief Brexit sherpa taking over from Sir Olly Robbins.

Now the deadline for an extension has passed, Frost has just six months left to bang heads to come up with a deal before we properly leave on December 31.

What’s the prognosis so far? Not bad seems to be the all round response. Frost is trusted implicitly by Johnson and is now primus inter pares with his rival, the silver-tongued Michel Barnier.

Frost made it clear to Brussels that the UK-wide backstop had to go. This went but was replaced with a version of the Northern Ireland-only backstop as originally envisaged by Brussels. He paid the price of accepting friction in the Irish Sea.

More recently, he has been theological about putting the case that Britain cannot stay within the regulatory level playing field demanded by Barnier.

So what is Frost holding out for? At its simplest, the UK wants a straight forward Free Trade Agreement such as CETA, the EU’s treaty with Canada, or that it has with Japan. In these agreements, there is no need for full harmonisation or for one partner to submit to the legal oversight of the other, but each side recognises the other’s domestic standards as equivalently effective for trade purposes.

Frost has also made it clear the UK wants a normal FTA chapter on competition and state aid, beyond the baseline of WTO rules, but not fully replicating the Brussels regime. Crucially, he also wants the governance of the future agreement to be based on an independent arbitration panel to enforce the common rules, not ECJ oversight, which is normal in every other FTA.

As Frost said back in 2015, it’s important to be ambitious, to make the weird seem normal and aggressively pursue those ambitions. So far, it seems as though he is doing just that.

And Barnier, despite his recent comments accusing the UK of backtracking, is of course still grandstanding and will hold out for more on fishing. He has to: it’s called honour among thieves.

These negotiations will go to the wire, as all EU spats do. Frost understands that. As one observer says: “The two sides are closer than you think. He has been able to push Barnier back by being ambitious in what he wants. Frost has great clarity, is thoughtful and has a calm, cool manner but he is also relentless. He looks like a big cuddly teddy bear but he has the mind of a shark.”

What Frost is not is an ideologue, as his early comments make clear. He has said on many previous occasions that no deal is not the preferred outcome, and in the past suggested that staying in the single market, like Norway, would be acceptable as a transitional arrangement.

It is now too late for that, but it shows that Frost is no wild Brexiteer eager for No Deal or WTO terms. Au contraire. He’s a diplomat and knows better than most how crucial it is for the UK to have good relations with the EU: but not at the cost of staying within the jurisdiction of the ECJ or regulatory alignment. Only when all options have gone to the wire, says one observer, would he go for broke, and opt for WTO rules.

One diplomat who worked with Frost says: “He was always highly capable and professional, has deep EU experience and one of the few who did trade policy in depth. He has a great brain, knows where he is going. He does not suffer fools gladly.”

If he’s come to be a Brexiteer, adds the diplomat, it’s because “he’s seen the EU close up and realised the UK could not reform from the inside. But he is hardly a Little Englander. If he had stayed in the FO, he would be running the show now.”

Instead, Frost has leapfrogged them all to be given the NSA job. Colleagues say he was astonished when asked to do the role.

But does Frost have the experience – the five eye world view – that critics say is needed for the role? And as it’s a political appointee, does he have the independence of spirit to ensure he can stay impartial?

Former NSA head, Lord Ricketts, says whoever does the job needs the experience of all the different agencies and to be able, then, to convey the consensus of those agencies to the National Security Council, and the PM.

A government minister says: “He’s good, but he’s not a National Security Adviser.” Another says he’ll have to learn very fast.

Returning to Frost’s query in his 2015 essay – whether Britain is being self-indulgent or not – you do get the sense of his independence and genuinely analytical mind.

Plus there’s another dimension to Frost’s experience which has been missed by critics: working at the heart of the EU for so long he will have a fundamental understanding of Britain’s role within the Nato alliance. He will know why it matters that the UK is the biggest spender within the defence organisation and that, as one of its most reliable members despite the angst wrought by recent internal politicking.

For now, Nato is still the best weapon against the new cold wars breaking out with Russia and China, and Britain’s strong position in Nato is still one of the big underplayed negotiating hands in future relations with the EU. With President Trump posturing in typical style that the alliance is obsolete, while President Macron asks in that French existentialist manner whether it is not brain-dead, the UK has a role to play as mediator.

Frost, from his international diplomatic postings – and contacts made through his globe-trotting whisky days – will know this. He has made good contacts with networks not only in the EU but around the world. That’s a perspective worth having.

Knowing what makes a great malt is not a bad skill either when it comes to gathering intelligence from the spooks. Frost’s rise is odd but it’s certainly interesting. He’ll now have to repay Boris Johnson’s faith by securing a Brexit deal, then reconstructing British security policy in the age of an increasingly assertive China with the US in flux. No pressure, then.