With a year and a day to go to Brexit, David Davis sat down for an interview with Andrew Neil this evening. Davis was clear that there wouldn’t be a deal, and thus a £37bn payment to the EU, unless there was an agreement on the future relationship too.
Contrary to the received wisdom, David Davis told this special Spectator event that the UK and the EU will ‘get pretty substantively close’ to a free trade agreement by October. He argued that this meant that the withdrawal agreement would have a lot of detail on what the future trading relationship would be. He said that he thought that this would be necessary to get it – and permission to pay the EU £37bn – through parliament.
There were, though, reminders of how far apart the UK and the EU are on this FTA.
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