Brexit is beneath assault from Labour and Brussels will not imagine its luck | Politics | News | EUROtoday

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 desk on the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

The former diplomat who went head-to-head with the European Commission’s hardest negotiators now fears Labour is placing Britain again within the orbit of Brussels – a transfer he argues will do nothing to assist the troubled financial system recuperate. Lord Frost has discovered a berth on the fabled think-tank at a time when the UK has stopped rising. He has a prepared prescription for bringing the financial system again to life; it consists of “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 dedication to “stay out of the EU” and Lord Frost reckons the occasion management at the moment are “regretting tying their hands quite so much”. He warns that the current technique of aligning with EU guidelines “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”, questioning whether or not Labour shall be swept away by a Government which might reverse any adjustments Sir Keir’s workforce can negotiate.

“But generally,” he provides, “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 entire 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 will observe 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 identical college in Nottingham as Labour’s Ed Balls and Liberal Democrat chief Sir Ed Davey. His dad and mom have been each designers with Rolls-Royce – amongst his earliest recollections goes to see a Lockheed TriStar aeroplane outfitted with engines his dad and mom helped design – and he has prepared recommendation on the way 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 may think 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 noticed the Left-wing occasion because the “best vehicle for opportunity for people who hadn’t had very much opportunity” however ultimately modified his thoughts.

Labour, he determined preferred “declining industries” and folks “knowing their place”. But he thinks he should have some “Labour DNA” due to his ardour 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 grew to become 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 subsequent basic election nears, it’s removed from not possible a celebration chief will resolve he might play a really helpful position in his or her workforce. We could effectively see greater than a contact of Frost.