Taskforce Europe faces an uphill battle to hit PM’S target

A bare-bones trade deal which would hit the economy hard looms on the horizon, writes Martyn Mclaughlin

Hello, good evening, and welcome to David Frost. No, not the late broadcaster who helped usher in a new era of British satire.

Instead, it is the other David Frost, the man who, without a hint of irony, styled himself as Boris Johnson’s ‘Sherpa’ in Europe, and who has now been tasked with arguably the most important job in government.

Mr Frost has long walked in the shadow cast by his famous namesake, known only to Foreign and Commonwealth Office wonks. But in the coming weeks he will step into the limelight. Whether it is for the right reasons remains to be seen.

As the man tasked with spearheading Britain’s trade negotiations with Europe on Mr Johnson’s behalf, Mr Frost’s moment of truth will arrive on Friday evening, when the Department for Exiting the European Union is shut down. In its place comes Taskforce Europe, which could easily be mistaken as the title of a straight-to-vhs Lee Marvin film, or a Spinal Tap tour of Scandinavian puppet theatres.

In actual fact, it is a typically Johnsonian moniker for a 40-strong crack team given the unenviable task of playing hardball with Brussels and turning the Prime Minister’s used Jaguar dealer bluster into something tangible.

Its members will be drawn from across Whitehall, but the nature of its creation – one which apparently sidelines Liz Truss, the Trade Secretary, and asserts supremacy over the Department for International Trade and the Foreign Office – offers a clear vision of how Mr Johnson wants things to be done: behind closed doors, with as little oversight as possible.

The House of Lords EU Select

Committee is among a growing group of critics who warn of insufficient parliamentary scrutiny of how the trade negotiations will be carried out. It has tried – and so far failed – to haul Stephen Barclay, the outgoing Brexit Secretary, before peers for a grilling.

Mr Johnson has said little about the UK Government’s plans for the negotiations, possibly because they are still being scribbled down on the back of a Strangers’ Bar beermat.

Given the very real prospect that hubris and a newfound parliamentary majority have somehow tricked him into believing the next leg of the Brexit marathon will be a downhill daunder, others with considerably more experience in European politics have warned him that will not be the case.

On a visit to Britain earlier this month, Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the European Commission, stressed that whatever the future relationship between Britain and the EU, it “cannot and will not be as close as before”.

She cautioned: “With every choice comes a consequence. With every decision comes a trade off … The more divergence there is, the more distant the relationship has to be.”

As the equivalent of Michel Barnier, the EU’S chief negotiator, it will be up to Mr Frost to fight the UK’S corner, and ultimately, provide the outline for the future shape of our economy.

If his diverse career – spent drifting in and out of the Foreign Office – throws up ambiguity over his beliefs in what government should stand for, a speech he gave last year while working as chief executive of the London Chamber of Commerce sheds some light.

In an address which struck a chord with Mr Johnson’s values, the 54-year-old railed against business