A former head of the Foreign Office today urged Boris Johnson to open up the next round of Brexit negotiations to businesses.
Sir Simon Fraser said future talks needed to be “more transparent” than the secretive negotiations conducted by Theresa May, and that the Government should be prepared to delay its December 2020 deadline for a trade agreement.
“If he holds to the timetable, either he has got to soften the deal so we stay closer to the EU … or he is going to get a very thin free trade agreement which is basically a goods-based agreement which will not be so good for our economy,” Sir Simon told the BBC’s Today.
He said the Prime Minister’s argument that a deal could be struck quickly because the UK is aligned with EU laws was “rather simplistic” because “actually unpicking that relationship is possibly even more complicated than putting together a more limited relationship from a position of greater distance”.
Sir Simon said negotiations should be conducted from the Cabinet Office, which some reports say will take charge of a new super ministry headed by Michael Gove.
He added: “One thing that’s got to happen is it has got to be more transparent, more broad-based than the previous one.
"It’s got to engage business in particular and other stakeholders. And it is going to have to involve the devolved administrations.”
It came as one of the Liberal Democrats’ new MPs admitted the party’s election strategy on Brexit had not been successful.
Wendy Chamberlain, MP for North East Fife, said: “When our policy is to stop Brexit, if we were to win a majority in government then the most straightforward way to do that would be to revoke. But I do accept that as a strategy it has not been successful.”
