Opinion

Tom Collins: Touch of Frost puts UK on the road to disaster

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

This week, Brexit minister Lord David Frost was threatening the European Union from the Tory Party conference in Manchester. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.
This week, Brexit minister Lord David Frost was threatening the European Union from the Tory Party conference in Manchester. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire. This week, Brexit minister Lord David Frost was threatening the European Union from the Tory Party conference in Manchester. Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.

Among his impressive list of honours, the former Scotch whisky salesman David Frost, is a companion of the most distinguished order of St Michael and St George, abbreviated to CMG.

Afficionados of Yes Minister, once thought of as a situation comedy but now regarded as a lid-lifting documentary series on the palace of Westminster, will be familiar with Sir Humphrey’s description of the order’s abbreviations. CMG, he said, stands for Call Me God.

Frost, who left a career in diplomacy in 2013 to become the chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association, famously wrote a defence of the UK’s membership of the European Union and the single market in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

Voting leave would be “risky”, he said.

“Can any future trading arrangements… be as good as the current ones provided by membership?

“I have doubts,” he said, before extolling the virtues of an arrangement which meant “no tariffs, no paperwork, and no administrative barriers”.

Call Me God Frost – in words of simple clarity – said: “If, as is the case of the UK, a country is already part of a customs union and has already adapted its trading arrangements to it, the case for change has to be overwhelming. It isn’t.”

He went on to predict that in any negotiations, Europe would have the upper hand.

“There is no doubt that leaving would be fraught with economic risk. It would be step into uncertainty and, in many key respects, into the unknown.”

It’s coincidence I am sure that his U-turn was followed by the offer of a seat on the red benches in the House of Lords.

Call Me God went on to negotiate the very same shoddy deal he had predicted, knowing full well that he was writing a suicide note for the UK economy.

The consequences can be clearly seen today – petrol stations run dry, harvests rotting in the fields, empty supermarket shelves, 100,000 pigs about to be culled and incinerated, and the army on the streets. Add to that the border down the Irish Sea, dangerously febrile unionism, and a destabilised peace process, and you get some sense of the failure of governance by this current British administration.

Call Me God’s about-face is on a par with the cynicism of his prime minister who wrote two articles for the Daily Telegraph, one pro-Brexit and one anti-Brexit, before deciding to submit the one he felt would benefit his political career, rather than the one that would benefit his country.

This week, Call Me God, now Brexit minister, was threatening the European Union from the bully-pulpit of the Tory Party conference in Manchester.

Europe is expected soon to give its official response to the UK government’s demand for a renegotiation of the Northern Ireland Protocol – an agreement, let us not forget, that Call Me God negotiated and signed.

Call Me God told Tory party members that If the EU insisted on sticking to his agreement, the UK would be “robust” in its response. Robust is code for breaking the agreement and in the process threatening Northern Ireland’s economic viability and long-term security.

In a companion piece in Manchester, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson also threatened the economic viability of the statelet his party co-governs. He has given Boris Johnson until the end of this month to kill off the protocol.

If Johnson doesn’t, Donaldson threatens to pull down Stormont and any hope of progress on the issues which really affect his constituents: jobs, an effective health service, food on the table, education and a decent life for their children and grandchildren.

Political absurdism then is manifest in Manchester.

We have a British government in denial about the destruction it has wrought, being lectured to by a beknighted politician who is demanding an outcome which will significantly diminish the wealth and welfare of his own people.

You really could not make it up.

Having been at the receiving end of more than enough Anglo-Saxon words from the red-top tabloids, you would forgive Europe for flinging a few choice phrases back at them. A four-letter word followed by off springs to mind.

The EU’s ambassador to the UK, Joao Vale de Almedia, is much more sophisticated than that, and he refused to rise to Call Me God’s bait.

Europe knows, as do we all, that Britain’s bluster is an attempt to disguise its weakness. We are witnessing its decline and fall, and not even Call Me God can save it.