Year two of Brexit began with the revolution devouring another of its children. David Frost, whom I had the pleasure of facing as Brexit minister in the House of Lords for the previous 10 months, announced his resignation days before Christmas, citing irreconcilable differences over a broad range of policies with the same Boris Johnson whose hard Brexit treaty he had negotiated and lauded to the skies only a year earlier.
Frost becomes one of the shortest-lived Cabinet ministers of recent times, resigning on the same prime minister who created him—as peer, minister and messenger—within one calendar year. Even more remarkable was the Brutus manner of his departure, implying that Johnson was insufficiently radical—by which he meant insufficiently libertarian, right-wing and in denial—on everything from climate change and Covid recovery to tax-cutting, deregulation and bashing Brussels. Frost had spent his last months in office threatening the EU with the detonation of the entire Brexit deal if they wouldn’t agree to rewrite the Northern Ireland Protocol and reverse the damage it is doing to British-Northern Ireland trade, although he himself had put this in place as the price of getting a deal at all.
Frost will fade quickly, joining the 46 other Brexit ministerial resignations since 2016—the largest number on a single issue in modern British history, most of whom are now similarly forgotten. So too will his “Brexit Opportunities Unit,” which never discovered any real opportunities despite ransacking every corner of No 10 and the Treasury, and which, according to a senior Whitehall source, is “leaderless and in limbo” after Frost’s departure. My favourite exchange with Frost in the Lords was when I asked him whether I might apply to head the unit, on the basis that the best opportunity facing Brexit was the chance to negotiate immediate re-entry to the EU single market and customs union. He said he didn’t think I met the “person specification.”
However, the manner of Frost’s departure—including his comprehensive lambasting of Johnson’s agenda in a Mail on Sunday interview over the weekend—exposes the growing fissure at the heart of the government and the Conservative Party as to its post-Brexit strategy. Two clear, and increasingly armed, camps are emerging.
Camp One, which includes most of the original and radical Brexiters, from Farage and Redwood to Lamont, Lawson and Rees-Mogg, wants Brexit to herald another dose of Thatcherism. In a hubristic article immediately after the 2016 referendum, Nigel Lawson, the architect of Thatcher’s privatisation and tax-cutting for the rich as her chancellor for most of the 1980s, declared that Brexit “gives us a chance to finish the Thatcher revolution.” One of Frost’s initiatives in his short tenure was a fast-track procedure for dismantling inherited European regulations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brexit Opportunities Unit was tasked with producing a list of them, whether on environmental protection and labour standards. I doubt this will now see the light of day, but Camp One is increasingly vocal and strongly opposes the National Insurance tax increase to pay for the NHS and social care, as well as any other major new public spending programmes.
Camp Two, by contrast, wants more, not less, public spending to “level up” Britain in the wake of Brexit. It argues that the Tories will be sounding their death knell if they neglect the huge social and economic pressures in the “red wall” seats across the Midlands and the north which the party won from Labour on the back of Brexit and Corbyn in 2019. Leaders of Camp Two either supported or went along with Brexit in the belief it would highlight the plight of “left-behind England” and initiate a revolt against the “liberal metropolitan elite” in both the Labour and Conservative parties, which had neglected the left-behind for too long. A few true Brexit believers are in this camp, notably Michael Gove, now minister for levelling up. Most of its leaders, however, are northern and Midlands Tories like Mayors Houchen of Teesside and Street of the West Midlands, who got elected on the back of this provincial revolt and whose survival depends upon actually delivering some levelling up. Andy Street is a fervent champion of HS2 and was decisive in persuading Johnson not to cancel the high-speed line from London to the Midlands and the north just before the first lockdown, while Houchen gave both barrels to Johnson this week in a Timesarticle setting out a string of vital public projects for the northeast.
All of this invests huge significance in Gove’s forthcoming Levelling-Up White Paper, which looks set to be the most important ideological route map of the post-Brexit Tory Party, both in terms of what it says and doesn’t say. If it is a bold plan of action with major investment plans, Camp Two will be ascendant, and we could indeed be witnessing a durable Tory social and political coalition of north and south geographically, and wet and dry ideologically. It will be precarious—all broadly-based parties are precarious—but I suspect it would be a powerful beast. The right wing of the Tory party has nowhere else to go, and however much the Tories tax and spend, middle England will always be worried that under Labour it might “get out of control.”
If, however, the white paper is long on waffle but light on policy and investment, Thatcherite Camp One will be crowing—or at least, relieved—and the middle ground will become much harder for the Tories to contest. Especially against an increasingly sensible and moderate Labour Party, which would do well to rebrand itself in “one nation” clothing.
When Gove got stuck in that BBC lift on Monday on the way to a Today interview, and was immobile for half an hour, that was a metaphor for the government as a whole at the start of this new year. “By their deeds ye shall know them,” and show time is fast approaching.
