Why does David Frost think the Remainers are regrouping?

David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, is a mysterious person at the heart of the story of our departure from the European Union.

It was his skill in devising the withdrawal agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol, that allowed the prime minister to Get Brexit Done.

He then negotiated the Trade and Cooperation Agreement that got the next bit of Brexit done – the part where we ceased to be subject to EU law in January 2021. He stayed on as the prime minister’s Europe adviser in No 10, as it turned out that there was more to negotiate.

There appeared to be tensions between him and Johnson, and it was rumoured that he wanted to leave. The prime minister persuaded him to stay. Having already given him a peerage, Johnson appointed him to the cabinet in March last year – so that he could continue the negotiations as a minister.

Those negotiations soon included an attempt to renegotiate the Northern Ireland protocol, which Lord Frost decided wasn’t working and needed to be taken apart and put back together again. Again, there were rumours of tensions, and after nine months in the cabinet, Frost resigned in December last year, saying that he had “concerns about the current direction of travel” of the government.

Most of these were nothing to do with Brexit: he objected to the raising of taxes, the net zero carbon target and coronavirus restrictions.

Since then he has been a frequent commentator on politics. His latest column for The Daily Telegraph warns that the “near-total victory for the advocates of a real Brexit” – that is, the clean break that he negotiated – is under threat. “The unreconciled Remainers are regrouping,” he writes.

It is a curious article, because the evidence for this resurgence of the Rejoin tendency appears to comprise the #brexitshambles hashtag on Twitter and three peers saying that his Brexit was a bad idea: Andrew Adonis, Nick Macpherson and Gavin Barwell. Lord Adonis is chair of the European Movement, and his view that “Brexit has failed” is hardly surprising. Lord Macpherson, the former permanent secretary at the Treasury, thinks that Brexit has made us slightly poorer than we would otherwise be. This is not a controversial view.

While Lord Barwell stands accused of “trying to rehabilitate his and Theresa May’s terrible backstop deal from 2019”. That is not a crime, in my view, as May’s deal, which would have kept the UK in the EU customs union, was an astonishingly good deal, and Labour MPs should have voted for it.

Frost admits that Keir Starmer will keep his distance from “these people”, and that “there is little chance of a serious ‘rejoin’ campaign developing in the short term”. So what is he up to?

I suspect the subtext of his article is aimed at the prime minister. It may be that Frost feels that Johnson has never really believed in, or understood, Brexit. Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, claimed last year that Johnson didn’t realise what a “hard” Brexit meant until October 2020: “I will never forget the look on his face when, after listening to Frost in a meeting on the final stage of the negotiation, he said, ‘No, no, no, Frosty, what happens with a deal?’”

According to Cummings, Frost replied: “PM, this is what happens with a deal; that’s what leaving the customs union means.”

When Frost writes that the Remainers are regrouping, does he really mean that the prime minister is backsliding from his “true” Brexit?

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator