Lord Frost at the centre of a Liz Truss government would be an ecological disaster

For anybody who rightly cares deeply about the climate, his appointment would take us backwards, writes Donnachadh McCarthy

Lord Frost writes regularly in the Daily Telegraph and Mail (PA Wire)

One of the toxic legacies that Boris Johnson will leave behind is the placing of David Frost, now “Lord Frost”, at the centre of Britain’s political illiberal elite.

And for anybody who rightly cares deeply about the climate and ecological crises unfolding around us, this is a disaster.

Having been appointed to lead the Brexit negotiations, and given a life-peerage by Johnson, Frost, cemented his power by occupying two of the other key pillars of unaccountable power that control Britain’s captured democracy – the secretively funded right-wing “think-tanks” and the right-wing media-baron tabloids.

Frost is now a “senior fellow” at the Policy Exchange and a regular columnist in the Telegraph and the Mail. From here, Frost has tried to influence the Tory leadership debate and thus Britain’s next premiership, which if he has his way, will lurch even further to the right than under Johnson.

The Policy Exchange recently published Frost’s essay on where Britain should go next, following Johnson’s fall. As one of its main themes was a full-throated attack on climate protection, I had the misfortune to have to read the whole paper, in preparation for a TV debate about it.

It was titled “Holy Illusions – Reality-based Politics and Sustaining the Brexit Revolt”. With characteristic hubris, Frost has the nerve to open the essay with a quotation from George Orwell saying, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

If this essay is the cream of British “intelligence”, we are in real trouble. Despite the planet being engulfed by record temperatures, wildfires, floods and droughts, Frost claims that even the modest actions taken by the UK government to reduce carbon emissions are one of the four main ills affecting Britain.

Without quoting a sliver of scientific evidence he simply claims: “The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate emergency.”

This, despite it being published just weeks after Britain suffered its first experience of temperatures exceeding a punishing 40C, triggering travel chaos and wildfires across the UK.

He then rails against almost every action that could reduce our carbon emissions. Frost does not want to reduce his flying, driving, meat-eating or any other fossil fuelled consumption. He dismisses our extraordinary new offshore windfarms powering millions of homes and other renewables as “medieval technology”.

Frost not only opposes green taxes, safer streets for kids cycling to school and climate regulations, but even objects to gentle nudges to reduce carbon profligacy. He clearly wants to enjoy his destructive consumerism free from his conscience even being gently troubled by the genocidal impacts on future generations.

The existential ecological crisis is entirely missing from the essay.

The “essay” should be dismissed as a rambling missive from an archetypal “angry old man of Tunbridge Wells” demanding a return to his imaginary, white-tinged nirvana of fossil fuelled 1950’s Britain. But terrifyingly, it cannot be dismissed.

This is because the Mail reports that Frost may be either in Liz Truss’s cabinet if she wins or more worryingly as her chief-of-staff in Downing Street. There he could poison efforts to tackle the climate and ecological crises right across Whitehall, rather than doing his characteristic damage in just one department.

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Frost argues that energy policy should be dictated by security and cost. But he then proceeds to advocate nuclear, fracked gas and carbon capture at gas power stations, all of which are about twice to four times more expensive than renewables.

Frost is equally illogical on the population explosion. He whines about the positive fact that UK birth rates are declining, whilst demanding we close our doors to immigration.

Frost and his bosses at Policy Exchange, Mail and Telegraph must not be allowed to break the cross-party consensus that action on the climate and ecological crises are imperative. Rather we need to rapidly translate that consensus into the actual 2030 net-zero actions needed to save us.

Frost’s heresies must be frozen out. They are a fundamental threat to us all.