𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost talks about the British economy as if it is a patient in danger of a heart attack.

“The arteries of the economy have just furred up,” he warns, calmly, sitting at a highly-polished table at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

The former diplomat who went head-to-head with the European Commission’s toughest negotiators now fears Labour is putting Britain back in the orbit of Brussels – a move he argues will do nothing to help the troubled economy recover. Lord Frost has found a berth at the fabled think-tank at a time when the UK has stopped growing. He has a ready prescription for bringing the economy back to life; it includes “getting tax down, getting spending down, stopping borrowing so much money” and “ending the net zero programme”.

He views Sir Keir Starmer’s Brexit reset agenda with grave unease.

“Obviously I take it as read that everybody in the leadership of the Labour party wants to get back in the EU,” he says. “That’s where they would really like to be.”

Labour made a manifesto commitment to “stay out of the EU” and Lord Frost reckons the party leadership are now “regretting tying their hands quite so much”. He warns that the present strategy of aligning with EU rules “bit by bit” is the “worst of both worlds”.

“We have to accept EU laws on food, agriculture, the electricity single market and carbon pricing without any say in those laws.”

The 61-year-old is quietly scathing about “Labour’s view that the EU is the solution to Britain’s growth problem”.

“There’s no reason at all to think that that makes any sense,” he says. “You know, the EU has just as many problems as the UK does – in many cases they’re worse.

“All of Europe is suffering in some ways from the same sort of malaise of high taxation, high spending, high regulation, crazy energy policies and so on. You know it’s not going to get any better by joining them.

“What we’re doing is losing our own freedom to take a different path.”

What will the EU Commission make of Labour’s tinkering with the Brexit settlement?

Lord Frost expects the eurocrats are “a bit ambivalent”, wondering whether Labour will be swept away by a Government which would reverse any changes Sir Keir’s team can negotiate.

“But generally,” he adds, “I suspect they can’t believe their luck that they’ve been presented with yet another Government that just seems desperate to reach agreements on almost any terms. I mean, anybody can reach deals if you’re not bothered about what the deal is.”

He argues the whole negotiation is the “wrong way around”, claiming the Government has “somehow managed to present being subordinated to EU law as a good thing”.

Warning of the social uproar that would follow if Brexit is reversed, he says: “If politicians are careless and give the impression that popular votes don’t matter, then you have a problem.”

Lord Frost was born in Derby and went to the same school in Nottingham as Labour’s Ed Balls and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey. His parents were both designers with Rolls-Royce – among his earliest memories is going to see a Lockheed TriStar aeroplane equipped with engines his parents helped design – and he has ready advice on how to revive Britain’s former industrial heartlands and “level-up” the nation.

“First of all we stop doing stupid stuff like making it impossible to run energy-intensive industries in the Midlands and in Northern England,” he says.

You might imagine that in his youth Lord Frost was an ardent Thatcherite. Not so.

“When I was younger I was on the Left,” he says. “I was a Labour party member when I was at university and for a few years afterwards.”

He saw the Left-wing party as the “best vehicle for opportunity for people who hadn’t had very much opportunity” but eventually changed his mind.

Labour, he decided liked “declining industries” and people “knowing their place”. But he thinks he must have some “Labour DNA” because of his passion for “equality of opportunities”, even though his ideas have changed radically about how to make this a reality.

Having studied languages at Oxford, he “kind of drifted into the Foreign Office”. And when he was posted to Brussels he became a eurosceptic.

“I just reacted against the the lack of democracy, the kind of determination to pull Britain into a federalist system that there seemed no consensus for and yet no way of stopping,” he remembers.

As a diplomat he rose to become ambassador to Denmark and – after a spell as chief executive of the Scottish Whisky Association – Lord Frost was snapped up by then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson as his special adviser and later as his chief negotiator for exiting the EU.

“I really loved working for him,” he says.

While Mr Johnson could be “maddening and frustrating in all sorts of ways”, Lord Frost “really warmed to him”.

“Whatever one may think about his immigration policy or his net zero policy,” he says, “on Brexit he was always super tough”.

The prime minister granted him a peerage and he served as a minister in the engine room of government, the Cabinet Office. But in December 2021 he resigned, citing concerns about the “direction of travel”, just days after Mr Johnson had suffered his biggest rebellion over measures to combat the Omicron variant of Covid. Lord Frost sees it as a “pity” the two men came to differ on the pandemic and they still talk “from time to time”. He also considers it a “pity that the Boris government went off in this sort of rather statist high-spending direction from which the Conservative Party has not recovered”.

Since the fall of Mr Johnson and Labour’s landslide victory, Reform UK has become the top-polling party. Does Lord Frost worry the Right is split? Right now, this free-marketeer welcomes the competition between the Tories and Reform.

“I want to see a strong Right-wing party in Britain capable of delivering properly free market, small-c conservative policies,” he says, later adding: “I suspect we just have to let this play out.”

There have been bouts of speculation that he might join the teal tribe. When asked if he is tempted to get onto the party political pitch, he does not rule this out but says: “I think being part of the ideas debate in politics and trying to get things in the right place is the most useful thing I can do.”

As the next general election nears, it is far from impossible a party leader will decide he could play a very useful role in his or her team. We may well see more than a touch of Frost.