By Ben Kerrigan-
The former ambassador to the EU has accused Boris Johnson of deceiving voters by claiming he will “get Brexit done” quickly and hiding the “biggest crisis” yet to come, a former ambassador to the EU is warning.
Ivan Rogers has accused the prime minister of “diplomatic amateurism” he claims will condemn the UK to a hugely damaging trade deal or a crash-out Brexit in little over a year’s time. Sir Ivan accused Mr Johnson of repeating Theresa May’s blunders after boxing himself to a tight deadline of a trade deal by the end of 2020.
The result he said, was likely to be a “quick and dirty” agreement that would almost certainly exclude the UK’s crucial services sector, because negotiating power had been handed to Brussels.
His comments are in response to a vow by the prime minister not to extend the Brexit transition period beyond its current end date of December 2020. The implication of this insistence is that UK and EU negotiators will have less than 12 months to secure a brand new free trade deal.
The transition period is designed to give businesses and people time to prepare for life outside of the EU, a period during which the UK will continue to follow EU trading rules.
STRATEGY ERRORS
In a speech at the University of Glasgow he said: “In practice, this Prime Minister is, for all his talk of getting Brexit done, now basically replicating the strategy errors of 2016 and 2017, which brought his predecessor down.
“This is diplomatic amateurism dressed up domestically as boldness and decisiveness.”
Sir Ivan, who resigned as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU in January 2017, said the crisis was “virtually inevitable” as there was “no escape from ball-achingly technical and lengthy negotiations” on the small print of free-trade deals.
Mr Rogers said although he was aware this “makes me the rather forbidding Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come”, the UK should be braced for “a repetition of exactly the syndrome we have suffered” for the last three years.
And he said the pressure to “get Brexit done” will mean Mr Johnson will have to make “a lot of concessions” to the EU secure any deal by the end of the year
Sir Rogers insists that failure to secure a deal will lead Britain to drop out onto costly World Trade Organisation Rules at the end of the transition period, which the government’s own analysis suggests would cause significant damage to the economy.
Rogers, who resigned as the UK’s most senior representative to the EU in 2017, said Johnson’s “get Brexit done” approach meant a fresh crisis in 2020 was “virtually inevitable,” as there won’t be enough time to negotiate a new trade deal.
CORBYN ATTACK
The ex-ambassador was also critical of Jeremy Corbyn, saying his plan to stay neutral in a second referendum “frankly deserves the Brussels eye-rolling it duly gets”. Sir Rogers also attacked Remainers “who think the clock can be put back” saying they were “in denial about where mainstream continental elite opinion is”.