David Frost is not a man who likes to draw attention to himself. “I remember nothing at all about him,” his Oxford tutor Nico Mann told me last year when I was writing a profile of the former Brexit minister for Prospect. “There are people who walk into your room and you notice them. David Frost wasn’t one of those.”
The prime minister certainly cannot be so dismissive this weekend. With his resignation from the Cabinet, Frost has not only got himself noticed in spectacular style, but he has also highlighted the fundamental flaws that threaten to blow apart the government. The departure of the Brexit minister is not just about one man’s career. It reveals the political incoherence at the heart of Boris Johnson’s administration and the entire Brexit project.
Of course, Frost’s resignation will further undermine the prime minister’s own fragile political authority at a time when he is already reeling from a huge parliamentary rebellion, a disastrous by-election result and rows over Downing Street Christmas parties and wallpaper. The Brexiteer Tory MP Andrew Bridgen called Frost’s exit “a watershed moment” and a “devastating blow” for the prime minister. Johnson, he suggested, was “running out of time and out of friends to deliver on the promises and discipline of a true Conservative government.”
What should worry the prime minister more, however, is that Frost’s departure also reveals the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands of the coalition of voters who supported Brexit and went on to give the Tories an 80-seat parliamentary majority at the 2019 general election. In his resignation letter, Frost expressed his concerns about “the current direction of travel” in Whitehall. “I hope we will move as fast as possible to where we need to get to: a lightly regulated, low-tax, entrepreneurial economy, at the cutting edge of modern science and economic change,” he wrote. This is the aspiration of the right-wing traditional Tory Eurosceptics who dream of turning Britain into Singapore-on-Thames.
Yet, as the prime minister himself understands better than anyone, the former Labour voters in the so-called “red wall” seats in the north and the Midlands—who voted Leave in the EU referendum, and then supported the Conservatives at the last election to “get Brexit Done”—are not interested in deregulation or tax cuts. In fact, they depend on strong workers’ rights and taxpayer-funded public services, including the NHS. They want more protection from the impact of mass immigration and globalisation, not less.
The divergent positions of the constituent parts of the Tories’ electoral base are pulling the government in completely opposite directions. It is a tension that Johnson still has not resolved and arguably cannot ever resolve. There are, for example, fundamental differences between the two sections of the Conservative coalition over the government’s political priority of “levelling up,” which—if it is to mean anything—will inevitably involve the wealthier parts of the country contributing more.
To make matters worse for Johnson, the focus of the internal split is now shifting from Brexit, the prime minister’s first defining purpose, to the pandemic, the mission he has had thrust upon him. In the Commons, the Brexit Spartans who made Theresa May’s life a misery have morphed into the Covid mutineers, now causing trouble for the prime minister over pandemic restrictions.
Echoing the libertarian Tory MPs who are increasingly disillusioned with Johnson, Frost suggested that the country had to learn to “live with Covid.” He told the prime minister: “You took a brave decision in July, against considerable opposition, to open up the country again. Sadly it did not prove to be irreversible, as I wished, and believe you did too. I hope we can get back on track soon and not be tempted by the kind of coercive measures we have seen elsewhere.” Yet here too, the ideological instincts of right-wing Tories are out of tune with the vast majority of the voters on whom the Conservatives now depend.
Frost did not mention Northern Ireland in his resignation letter. But it cannot be a coincidence that it was reported last week that the UK is ready to drop its demand for the European Court of Justice to be removed as the ultimate arbiter of trade rules in the region, a massive concession to Brussels. That would be a total humiliation for the man who has doggedly stuck to his guns on the importance of sovereignty after Brexit. There were perhaps echoes of the build-up to the deal struck last year between the UK and the EU, when it took the prime minister intervening and overruling Frost to get an agreement over the line, by caving into the idea of a border in the Irish Sea. According to Whitehall sources, Frost remained a “total devotee” of the fantastical idea that technology could solve the Irish border problem “and stuck to it long after it was completely obvious to all that it would not fly.” Johnson insisted on compromise after his meeting with Leo Varadkar, then Irish Taoiseach.
Those who know him say Frost is stubborn, literal and unimaginative. As one former colleague told me: “Frost seems to think all you have to do is wait for the other side to admit they’re wrong and come round to your position. He’s like a brick wall, inflexible and obdurate.” Another former senior diplomat said that Frost’s uncompromising approach has gone down badly in negotiations with the EU: “He does not listen; only transmits.”
By contrast, Johnson is feline, fluid, endlessly flexible. He thrives on chaos and inconsistency—the possibility, when it comes to cake, of being “pro having it and pro eating it too.” He hopes to keep the Conservatives’ Brexit coalition together by telling everyone what they want to hear—but this will ultimately be impossible. Already, all sides are beginning to feel betrayed.
As a career diplomat at the Foreign Office, Frost was unusual in being a Eurosceptic. In a speech last year, he said that his positive youthful view of the EU “did not long survive my exposure to the institutions in Brussels and I rapidly became a persistent private critic of them.” It was, he suggested, a “form of cognitive dissonance” about the value of his work that eventually “drove” him out of the Foreign Office to accept a job as the head of the Scotch Whisky Association in 2013.
Cognitive dissonance may help to explain the wider dysfunctionality in Number 10. The psychologist Leon Festinger argued that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency in order to be able to function mentally in the real world. That is not possible in a government that depends on an electoral coalition with such competing demands. There is a fundamental internal incoherence underlying both Brexit and the Johnson premiership. The psychological stress of trying to square that circle has driven Frost out and will ultimately destroy the prime minister.
