Name David Frost | Role British diplomat | |
Sir david frost interviews julian assange wikileaks aljazeera part 1of2
David George Hamilton Frost, CMG (born 1965), is a Special Adviser to British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, as of November 2016.
He spent most of his earlier professional career as a British diplomat, working among other things as British Ambassador in Denmark, EU Director in the FCO, and Director covering Europe and international trade at the Department for Business.
He left the Diplomatic Service in 2013 to become CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association[1], a major trade association. He was also a commentator on the European Union, global economic and commercial issues, and multilateral diplomacy, and a member of the Advisory Council of the EU think tank Open Europe. He returned to the FCO as a Special Adviser in 2016.
He was born in Derby and attended Nottingham High School on a free scholarship from 1976 to 1983. He studied at St John's College Oxford, where he took a First-Class degree in French and History, specialising in medieval European History and medieval French.
He joined the Foreign Office in 1987 and shortly after was posted to the British High Commission in Nicosia where he learned Greek and was responsible for covering Greek Cypriot politics and the Cyprus problem. In 1993 he was posted to the UK Representation to the EU in Brussels as First Secretary for Economic and Financial Affairs, where he worked on issues such as the EU Budget, the economic and financial implications of enlargement to Central Europe, and the ~Euro. He was then posted to the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he covered human rights and social and economic affairs.
He returned to London to be successively the Private Secretary to the Head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir John (now Lord) Kerr, and Deputy Head of the European Union External Department, covering international trade policy issues and relations with the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
He was posted as Economic Counsellor to the British Embassy in Paris in 2001, where he was responsible for reporting and lobbying on all aspects of French economic and commercial life, together with its EU policy. He returned to London to be Head of the EU (Internal) Department and then Director for the European Union in the Foreign Office. In this period he led work on a range of economic and social issues, notably the resistance to the initial Working Time Directive, and the negotiation on the EU's multiannual Budget framework. He was part of the UK's leadership team during the EU Presidency in 2005.
From May 2006 until October 2008, he was the British Ambassador to Denmark. He was then Director for Strategy and Policy Planning in the Foreign Office from October 2008 to October 2010. He then went on loan to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills where he served three years as Director for Europe, Trade, and International Affairs, Britain's most senior trade policy official.