I never thought Lord Frost would last long. Sitting directly opposite him and questioning him in the House of Lords for his 10 months as Brexit minister, I was most struck by his petrified shiftiness. He never once looked me in the eye, just nervously recited Brexit platitudes which he had to read out haltingly from a big red binder because he couldn’t even remember them properly.
Our last exchange, two days before his resignation hit the headlines, said it all. I wished him a Happy Christmas and joshed that just as in Christmas Past, when he was a strong supporter of the EU, so in Christmas Future I hoped he could stop being Mr Scrooge and buy his nieces and nephews glorious presents in the single market and customs union. His response—you can watch it here—was this piece of wooden nonsense: “I believe that our future outside the European Union is a great one. I must say that I have not noticed any difficulty in access to products from the European Union, and our exports to the European Union are continuing well. I am sure we will prosper on that basis.”
He himself surely didn’t believe this when he said it, or he wouldn’t have been spending the last six months noisily attempting to renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol, a key part of his Brexit agreement with the EU which kicked in only a year ago, and which he kept telling us has had an immediate and catastrophic effect on trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The negative impact on trade between GB and the EU is equally undeniable—just look at all those empty supermarket shelves and the chronic shortage of HGV drivers—and he was in denial about that too.
Even so, walking out on Boris so suddenly and publicly—and claiming, like Steve Baker, to disagree with him on the whole direction of the government because it isn’t right-wing enough, and because it is taking some measures to stop Omicron overwhelming the NHS—is an act of truly epic disloyalty. Frost owes everything—peerage, position, power—to Boris and would have been nobody without him. Not even Mr Scrooge. Now he has turned Brutus to Caesar, just like Dominic Cummings. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them plotted his departure together, along with that Maoist resignation letter bemoaning that the Brexit revolution is failing because it isn’t revolutionary enough.
Brexit is steadily devouring its instigators and its children. Of the 24 members of David Cameron’s Tory cabinet of just five years ago, only three are still in office and only one—Liz Truss, who ironically has been passed Frost’s poisoned chalice—has been in office continuously since May 2016. Frost is the 47th ministerial resignation related to Brexit. So there are two compelling questions. Are we yet at peak revolution and starting the reactionary phase? And has Caesar been slain or only wounded? The two are obviously related, particularly after last week’s North Shropshire by-election, which saw a 34 per cent swing to the Lib Dems and made a lot of Tory MPs contemplate their own mortality.
We appear to be on the Boris-Brexit plateau, in that an intensification of the Brexit battles simply isn’t viable anymore. Before his walkout, Frost had already been forced to retreat from his threat to use Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to suspend the whole Brexit deal with the EU. It is also hard to see how Boris ever returns to post-vaccine levels of popularity, which during the summer and autumn gave him a political position akin to Thatcher after the Falklands and Blair before Iraq. He totally failed to capitalise on it because he has no credible ideas for national renewal, or even any interest in it beyond the empty slogans of “levelling up” and “build back better.”
But as Adam Smith said, “there is a lot of ruin in a country.” It is a huge and usually long-drawn-out process to remove a prime minister outside of an election defeat. Just because that has happened twice in the last five or so years—both amid deep Brexit crises—doesn’t mean it is bound to happen this time. Boris’s extraordinary ruthlessness, egocentricity and ability to rebound—which I document in my profile of the “the Prime Etonian”—probably haven’t deserted him yet, and the Frostite Tory right, who are currently doing most of the gunning for him, absolutely don’t want high-tax Sunak or crypto-Remainer Truss as his successor.
It is also highly significant that North Shropshire was lost to the Lib Dems, not Labour—particularly in the context of the Bexley by-election only two weeks previously, which the Tories held comfortably against second-placed Labour. The country wants a better Tory government—with or without Johnson—but it isn’t yet showing signs, in real elections, of wanting to vote for a Labour government. I remember all those SDP and Liberal by-election victories of the 1980s and early 1990s—followed by repeated Tory general election victories; the last of them, in 1992, under a new leader because Thatcher had become simply too unpopular and incompetent with the poll tax.
We may be getting to that stage, but I don’t think it is imminent. Mr Scrooge, an apt parallel for Johnson in his project for the country if not his personal licentiousness, may see another Christmas yet. But I wish a glorious holiday, and lots of glorious presents, to all my readers—if you can find any to buy in the shops!
