Joe Rogan is no fool but
he’s still dangerous
James Marriott
Page 26
stimulated by banging on endlessly
about statues and Winston Churchill.
The vulgar precis of this dilemma
is that the fabulously dynamic,
lightly regulated, super-globalised
Nirvana described by the kind of
people who now look to David Frost
is at odds with the red wall revolt
against globalisation. Protecting the
“left behind” from the ravages of the
world economy and helping them to
compete in it is a distinctly big statebusiness. But, of course, this
government can’t say that and so
can’t argue ideologically.
A friend, a former Tory MP, told
me everything Frost was doing and
saying felt like a leadership bid,
except Lord Frost can’t be leader. “I
don’t get it,” he said. Well maybe it is
a bid of a kind. Nearly 12 years into
Conservative and Conservative-led
governments, a kind of cynical
pragmatism characterises the
administration. There is no clear
ideology. It’s one part what works to
two parts who votes. The intellectual
and ideological vigour comes from
the agitated section of the party and
its media supporters that Frost
speaks for. That’s the significance.
Perhaps unconsciously and
anticipating defeat, he’s not bidding
to be prime minister. He’s bidding to
lead the next opposition.It’s almost as if Frost wants to be Tory leader
Transformation of the Brexit negotiator into an ideologically driven politician may show where the party’s heading
AARON CHOWN/PA
pro-capitalist reforms while
appealing to suburban cultural
conservatives with a tough agenda
on crime, human rights, wokery,
Brexit and much else besides”.
Otherwise Brexit’s gains will be lost
and a mad coalition of Scots Nats,
Greens and Labour will contrive to
take us back into the orbit of the EU.
A less extravagant version of this
article appeared under Frost’s name
last week in The Sun. Of course, if
you were a minister you might point
out that if you’re going to do things
such as level up, start dealing with
the crisis in social care, help
homeowners out with cladding,
you’ll have to pay for them. That in
the medium term you lose more by
not moving fairly rapidly towards net
zero. And that the appetite of red
wall voters to see public services
slimmed down is not likely to beLord Frost’s views place him squarely
alongside dissident backbenchersAs a Frost-watching colleague at
The Times put it to me, the measures
were bound to be temporary — the
pandemic was probably coming to an
end. Why give up that mega, long-
term responsibility for something
that might be over in a few weeks?
So I started playing around with
two more cynical explanations. Boris
Johnson was already in trouble over
the Owen Paterson affair by the time
of Frost’s speech. But in between the
speech and the resignation came the
first Downing Street party
revelations and then the North
Shropshire by-election. Was it
possible that Frost (who is a highly
intelligent and well-connected man)
read that fiery writing on the wall?
Or might it be that over the Irish
protocol the government was giving
some ground and he didn’t want to
be associated with that? Or, my own
favoured theory (which is also, I
admit, a theory which suits my own
prejudices), that he could see what
David Smith was describing in our
business pages yesterday, that Brexit
as experienced by business and
consumers is a slow failure with
almost no discernible benefit and
plenty of drawbacks, and is likely to
stay that way under this government
on its current trajectory?
There is a widely held view on the
Tory right that is the equivalent of
those plaintive suggestions by left-
wingers following the obvious
disaster of the Soviet Union, that
socialism had never been properly
tried and so could not be said to have
failed. It is that because of feebleness
Brexit hasn’t been properly tried.
In a piece in The Telegraph that
Frost tweeted was “spot on”, Allister
Heath asserted that “Britain is a
worse place to do business than it
was five or ten or 20 years ago”.
What was needed was “to impose, at
great speed, an agenda that fusesH
ow might Rubens paint
the Transfiguration of
Lord Frost? The moment
when the beholder could
fully understand that the
former Brexit negotiator had
transitioned from semi-neutral
technocrat to utterly committed
political leader? Perhaps with his
lordship in open-necked white shirt
and rumpled suit, smiling, eyes cast
heavenwards to Margaret Thatcher
for inspiration, while below him the
members of the European Research
Group, the Covid Recovery Group
and the Clean Global Brexit
WhatsApp Group (minus Nadine
Dorries) regard him with awe.
For two years now I’ve watched
David Frost’s metamorphosis from
adviser to minister to politician with
some amazement. By last week some
Conservative MPs were speculating
that he might be the Heracles,
shipped in to clear out the prime
minister’s Augean stable. Lord Frost
was quick to tweet that he was not
available. It would be wrong, he said,
for someone who disagreed with
parts of the government’s agenda to
be in the government — a novel
objection, you may think.
My ear was first taken by Frost’s
increasingly untechnocratic
language in 2020-21 when he was
negotiating with the EU over the
Northern Ireland protocol. It has
been something of a convention that
unelected ministers brought in from
non-political backgrounds speak
more softly than elected colleagues.
But in late November, Frost
addressed a Margaret Thatcher
conference at the Centre for Policy
Studies (no, they don’t all dress up as
her, they talk about her legacy, OK?).
It was not just a speech about Brexit.
It was essentially a prospectus for
post-Brexit Britain starting now.
Frost’s argument was that to truly
benefit from its new status, Britain
needed to diverge significantly from
the EU. There had to be much less
regulation, much more competition,
there had to be “low taxes”. His
listeners might have thought this
agenda was in good hands. After all,
“my job” he told them, “is to drive
change within government, to push
policy in the right direction and to
overcome the forces of entropy, of
laziness, of vested interest”.
Then three weeks later he
resigned, leaving the task of
overcoming the forces of laziness etc
to someone else. And this
resignation amazed everyone(Nadine Dorries being insufficiently
alarmed by it was what got her
kicked off the Clean Global Brexit
group). As with Metternich’s
supposed comment on the death of
Talleyrand, we all asked, “I wonder
what he meant by that?”
To be fair to him, Frost was pretty
clear about his reasons. As he put it
later, “Covid was the reason I
resigned. I didn’t agree with the plan
B measures.” His worries about the
forthcoming national insurance rise
were a secondary factor, concerns
that placed him alongside groups of
dissident Tory backbenchers but
which were still hard to credit.The right says Brexit
hasn’t failed, it hasn’t
been properly tried
Voters facing public
service cuts don’t want
to hear about statues
Comment
David
Aaronovitchred box
For the best analysis
and commentary on
the political landscape
thetimes.co.uk/redbox@daaronovitch
the times | Thursday February 3 2022 25