DAVID Frost was recently appointed as National Security Adviser by Boris Johnson after Mark Sedwill stepped down as both as cabinet secretary and NSA.
Boris Johnson’s choice of David Frost as the new National Security Adviser has caused concern among some members of Britain’s intelligence and security architecture.Questions have been raised as to how an official with minimal intelligence and security experience can be expected to direct MI5 and MI6 tasking. “They want to get things done and they think bureaucratic opposition stops getting things done, therefore you have to remove the bureaucratic opposition.
The new National Security Advisor David Frost will be a political appointment - which a former head of the Civil Service said left him 'worried'
“Raw intelligence is not fact,” Mr Gaskarth says. But who is David Frost and what is his backgro… Britain's chief Brexit trade deal negotiator, and from September the National Security Adviser, David Frost in Brussels, Belgium. “It may be an overheard conversation on a telephone and it might not be true. “You wouldn’t!”“If they’re appointed because they agree with the Prime Minister politically it creates all sorts of problems,” he says.If, for example, the NSA tasked MI5 to look into trade union or environmentalist activities, or focus on political rather than national threats, it would be a problem, Mr Gaskarth says.Another problem may be the reluctance of the NSA to withstand pressure from the Prime Minister to see raw intelligence from MI5, MI6 or GCHQ. May and Gove on national security advisor David Frost. He was then posted to the UK Mission to the United Nations where he covered Human Rights and Social and Economic Affairs.Frost returned to the UK where he was successively appointed as the Private Secretary to the Head of the Diplomatic Service.
That did not happen in 2003, partly due to the speed of events at the time, but also because of the loose structures in place. The NSA is designed to be the final gatekeeper to prevent such a situation reoccurring. “If not David Frost, it will have to shift to someone else”.Lord Ricketts, appointed in 2010 by David Cameron to be the UK’s first NSA, said that Mr Frost’s appointment seemed to “point in the opposite direction” to that described by Michael Gove in the Ditchley Park lecture on June 27.In his speech, titled ‘The privilege of public service’, Michael Gove called on civil servants to show “the mastery of deep knowledge” in their subject areas.“If those in Government have deep subject knowledge they move from reciters of the jargon generated by producer interests into the creators of original policy that serve the widest possible public interest,” Mr Gove said. And yet they are actually dismantling it,” Mr Gaskarth says.
Jamie Gaskarth, a former adviser on the National Security Strategy and now Reader in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the University of Birmingham, said the fact the NSC hasn’t met during the whole of the Covid-19 crisis shows that double (or triple) hatting the role under Sir Mark Sedwill “didn’t function well”.
"The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. National security advisor and chief Brexit negotiator 2020-07-01 DAVID Frost was recently appointed as National Security Adviser by Boris Johnson after Mark Sedwill stepped down … July 1, 2020. National security issues include both national defence issues and UK foreign relations.The NSA job was created in May 2010 as part of the reforms that saw the creation of the National Security Council. '"Why then is the new national security adviser a political appointee with no proven expertise in national security?