Led Zep fan with brain the size of Britain

ON PAPER, David Frost is your quintessential diplomat – an Oxford education, 20 years in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and a CMG – the top Civil Service gong.

But for all his establishment credentials, it was Frost’s outspoken Euroscepticism that earned him the key job of Boris Johnson’s Europe adviser.

Born and raised in Derby, the 55-year-old was educated at Nottingham High School as a free scholar and read French and History at St John’s

College, Oxford.

A glittering career at the FCO followed, including stints in

New York, Paris and Brussels, before he was made Britain’s Ambassador to Denmark in 2006.

He left the Civil Service in 2013 to become the CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association, winning plaudits for successfully lobbying Ministers to cut punishing spirit duties. Following the EU referendum in 2016 he became special adviser to the FCO under the then Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson, who is said to hugely respect Frost’s intellect and knowledge of EU affairs, with insiders claiming ‘he has a brain the size of Britain’.

After Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in 2018,

Frost worked for the London Chamber of Commerce, where he gained respect for being unafraid to hit back at businesses critical of Brexit. He returned to Downing Street with Mr Johnson in July.

A fan of Motorhead and Led Zeppelin, Frost once named A Farewell To Kings by Canadian rock band Rush as best album of the 1970s. He’s also a keen history buff and his reference to Charles de Gaulle in last week’s seminal Brexit lecture was no throwaway line – Frost recently completed reading a weighty 928-page biography of the French leader.