The Economist December 4th 2021 Britain 29LordFrost
Portrait of a Brexiteer
A
visitorpickingupa newspaperatthe
Eurostar terminal would be puzzled.
Why, five years after the Brexit referendum
and two years after agreeing on an exit
treaty, are the British still arguing over the
same vexed issues of customs, subsidies
and courts? Why, as a pandemic rages and
straining supply chains threaten to ruin
Christmas, is its government risking a
trade war over issues it had promised vot
ers were fixed?
British officials are once again pacing
Brussels conference rooms, seeking to re
write the settlement on Northern Ireland
that bedevilled Brexit talks. Unless radical
surgery is undertaken to allow food and
medicine to move freely, warns David
Frost, Britain’s chief negotiator, Britain
will invoke Article 16, an emergency clause
that could lead to parts of it being unilater
ally suspended. To understand why means
seeing the world through the eyes of Lord
Frost, a former diplomatturnedwhisky
lobbyist whom the prime minister, Boris
Johnson, ennobled and promoted to the
cabinet. In the referendum of 2016 there
were a dozen varieties of Brexit, contradic
tory and vaporous. Now there is only one,
diamondhard—and it is Lord Frost’s. His
negotiating partners, who struggle to un
derstand him, think it fanaticism. He
would call it simply Brexit.
European observers tend to think Brex
it’s historical lodestar is the second world
war, or perhaps the British empire. In Lord
Frost’s telling the story begins with
Edmund Burke, a conservative philoso
pher of the 1700s who warned of a conflict
between an organic constitution built on
custom and traditions, and the cruel, hyp
errational order the French Revolution
would unleash. For him Brexit is the pro
duct of a clash between an adaptable Brit
ish Parliament and an artificial, brittle
European edifice unable to adapt to voters’
demands. Those who argue that the bloc is
a British project are suffering from a “false
consciousness”, he has said. Across the
continent, he detects a stirring of the na
tion state. Brexit is not a freakish accident,
but a restoration of the natural order.
British diplomats long saw the question
of whether Britain was truly “sovereign”
inside the European Union as a dinner
party thought experiment. What mattered
was influence. But according to the Frost
doctrine, sovereignty is real and hard, to be
clawed back and keenly guarded. eu mem
bership was to him a “long bad dream”; on
ly when Britain left did it become indepen
dent and free. To his interlocutors this
seems quixotic, and to those who have ex
perienced real dictatorships, a touch in
sulting. “Nobody expected such a crude
nationalist to emerge out of the Channel
tunnel,” says one Brusselswatcher.
Shielding Britain’s autonomy means a
thin trade agreement and pain for busi
nesses, for which Lord Frost has offered
few apologies. Fix the constitution, his log
ic runs, and prosperity follows. He seems
unembarrassed to be unstitching a deal onNorthern Ireland that the prime minister
signed. As he sees it, the deal was a flawed
means to an end—to save Brexit—and one
that has unravelled surprisingly quickly.
Nor does he see its terms, which create a
trade barrier down the Irish Sea, as his
fault. He argues that negotiations were
hobbled from the start after Theresa May,
Mr Johnson’s predecessor, gave away too
much, and the Europeans exploited chaos
in the British Parliament to drive a lopsid
ed deal. He regards those years as epic hu
miliation caused by British negotiators
who were too cosy and too needy. He tells
his staff to stand up for their country, and
to repeat their demands until they sink in.
Lord Frost is softlyspoken and courte
ous, and a keen student of Flemish history.
But noble ends justify rough means, say
his allies. Only if Britain threatens to blow
up the talks or tear up agreements will the
Europeans give way. “He does not see nego
tiations as ‘how do we write nice commu
niqués that don’t do very much,’” says a
former official. On Article 16, “he is abso
lutely willing to pull the trigger.” His cabi
net colleagues are more squeamish. No
one knows whom Mr Johnson will heed.
Lord Frost denies that he is refighting
yesterday’s battles in order to whip up
Eurosceptic voters. Only if the deal is fixed,
he has argued, can the new relationship
with the euso desired by his Europhile col
leagues flourish. But his approach excites
his party, which has become disillusioned
by the prime minister’s fumbling.
A survey of Tory members by Conserva
tive Home, a website, ranked Lord Frost as
the secondmostpopular member of the
Cabinet behind Liz Truss, the foreign sec
retary. Mr Johnson was second from bot
tom. Lord Frost delighted them with an ad
dress on November 22nd in which he
warned against wasting Brexit by missing a
chance to abandon the European social
model and embark on radical regulatory
reforms. Among his fans on the back
benches is David Davis, who served as Mrs
May’s Brexit secretary. Things would have
gone a lot better if Lord Frost had been in
charge from the start, he says.
Born in Derby and educated at a private
school in Nottingham before a long but rel
atively unglamorous career in the Foreign
Office, Lord Frost looks more like the mid
dleclass provincials who predominate on
the Tory benches than like his boss, who
was born in New York and educated in
Brussels and at Eton, and for whom Brexit
appears more a wheeze than a cause. He
was condescended to by eu negotiators,
who thought his threats to walk out theat
rical and childish. The old guard of the dip
lomatic service are crueller: they think him
a thirdrater. No great surprise, says one
former colleague. “Theyhatehis guts, be
cause he’s proved themallwrong and de
stroyed their life’s work.” nThe world according to Boris Johnson’s pugnacious chief Brexit negotiator