The Brexit-backing former ambassador set to become national security adviser

The nature of his appointment has raised a lot of eyebrows, writes Tom Peck, but who is the man chosen to fill the UK’s highest national security job?

UK Brexit negotiator David Frost sits next to the ambassador to the EU, Tim Barrow, during negotiations in Brussels (Reuters)

The civil service, like Everest, is not meant to be conquered the back way. The almost impossibly tough though well trodden path to the summit is supposed to be the only one available. Indeed, in recent years the failures of various corporate-backed stuntmen have shown that parachuting in to the top is even harder than doing it the hard way.

Perhaps David Frost, Boris Johnson’s most favoured civil servant and now the nation’s newest and by some margin most inexperienced national security adviser, might like to show them how it’s done.

The clearest evidence that Frost’s appointment to the highest national security job in the land is out of the ordinary came in the form of the out of the ordinary scenes that followed it. Within 24 hours of his appointment, the not overly interventionist Theresa May had denounced his suitability for the role on the floor of the House of Commons.

It is worth noting that when Ms May told Michael Gove, who was at the despatch box at the time, that Mr Frost was “a political appointee with no proven expertise in national security”, Mr Gove, who is not one to miss an opportunity in a debate, did not disagree. He knows it is true.

Frost’s lack of expertise in national security is a matter of fact. The more curious aspect of the tale, however, is how he came not to acquire the expertise in question.

David Frost, now aged 55, is by no means the first young man to walk into the Foreign Office, as he did in 1987, and find themselves marked out for greatness and then achieve it. But he is perhaps the first to achieve it having had the mark removed along the way.

The office of the chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association, which he occupied in 2013, is a well known resting place for diplomats who have gone as far as the diplomatic corps will let them. Former colleagues and foreign office insiders suggest that Mr Frost was no exception.

The problem was that, along what was meant to have been a gilded pathway via Brussels, he discovered a certain degree, not of full blown Euroscepticism, not yet anyway, but of agnosticism towards the EU project, which was the prevailing view in the upper echelons of the establishment which he had not yet reached. Later, of course, on 23 June 2016 to be exact, a rather different establishment began to take over, and they would discover him right back.

You don’t have to read very far into the various profiles written of David Frost to discover he is a fan of Derby County Football Club. And you don’t have to read many profiles of anybody at all to learn that, as with a best man’s speech, the earlier the footballing allegiance of the subject is mentioned the less of interest there is likely to be lurking thereafter.

Those who have sought to get beneath the “Frosty” exterior quickly find themselves describing someone whose privacy is “intense” or “fierce” or “closely guarded”.

But it is not exactly the case that the national security adviser has ever assigned much of a personal security detail to his private affairs. Mr Frost’s privacy has been guarded like the proverbial house during the Blitz. The front door is wide open but there is nothing inside worth taking.

What is known is that Frost went on full scholarship to the fee-paying Nottingham High School, where he was a couple of years below future Labour cabinet ministers Ed Balls and Geoff Hoon, and from there to Oxford where he studied French and history.

Earlier this year, seeking to find out more about the man chosen by Boris Johnson to negotiate the UK’s path out of the EU, the BBC called up several of his Oxford lecturers and former classmates. Most could not remember who he was. For those that could, the simple fact of his existence was the most they could recall about him.

What is also known is that he was despatched to the UK’s representative team in Brussels in 1993, at the same time Boris Johnson was despatched there by the Daily Telegraph. Johnson’s wild despatches are the stuff of terrible legend, but only a true cynic could say that the now prime minister did not develop a genuine cynicism towards the European Union’s ideals in that time. Though the evolution of Mr Frost’s views on the same subject at the same time cannot be analysed through the prism of a newspaper cuttings archive, they appear to have followed the same trajectory.

David Frost pictured during his stint as chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA)

Foreign Office insiders intimate that it is no coincidence that the rightward evolution of Frost’s views on the EU is what led him off the path of the chosen. He would later become ambassador to Denmark, he would work on international trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and then there was the job with the Scotch Whisky Association.

A look at the list of former Her Majesty’s Ambassadors to Denmark marks it out as a clear staging post to the big time. I spoke to several of Mr Frost’s former colleagues, most still actively employed within the Foreign Office, who point out that what is not known.

In 2015, having left the Foreign Office, Frost wrote an essay for the Eurosceptic think tank Open Europe, advising Cameron how best to negotiate with the European Union. He wrote then that, “Officials in the Foreign Office and elsewhere are far from starry-eyed about Europe and there is plenty of private Euroscepticism around.”

Private is the crucial word, here. What is not known, or rather what no one who does know will say, is whether Frost became disillusioned with Foreign Office life at this point, or if the disillusion was the other way around.

One former colleague from that time, which was not so long ago, recalls precious little more about him than his university friends, other than that he had become aware that Frost was “of the right”.

A mere decade ago, that was what a diplomat would call a suboptimal state of affairs. It is certainly not, now.

Though there is still plenty of suboptimacy around for Mr Frost to negotiate. Theresa May’s clearly visible anger in the House of Commons reflected the depth of her feeling on the subject. As she pointed out, she sat on the National Security Council for nine years, as home secretary and prime minister. She understands the grave seriousness of the work it does. That its principal official should now be someone with no experience in national security areas, but has been a rare Brexit-believing diamond in Whitehall who has thus found favour with the government of the day, is a significant departure from the causes for which the position was created.

Lord Ricketts, a former Foreign Office permanent secretary, wrote of the appointment: “The national security adviser has to be able to win the confidence of those who have spent their careers in the most secret areas of government and to represent their interests authoritatively when dealing at close quarters with the prime minister, other NSC ministers and foreign counterparts.

“His main credential for the role is that he is a trusted political adviser to the prime minister. That will be a further problem in winning the trust of the national security community.”

Still, if Brexit has had one defining theme over the last four years, it is that there are no such thing as problems, only opportunities.

Frost serves a government that is not there to win the trust of the Whitehall establishment. It rarely seems happier than when it is issuing threats of its intention to smash it up. That there, for example, a “hard rain” coming for it.

Those who make it to the summit of Everest tend to carry a reverence for the mountain within them for evermore.

Frost carries no such reverence, and thus the back way has opened up for him. We are led to believe that the wrecking is about to start.

The path ahead is shrouded in mist. We shall have to wait and see exactly what happens to those who sabotage the foundations on which they stand, though the rough direction of travel should be clear enough.