Trading places: George Eustice on Brexit, Sunak and the Australian deal 

Is Brexit failing? Those who believe it is point to George Eustice, the former Tory environment secretary, who told the Commons last week that the Australia trade deal was a dud. Here was a Brexiteer, a one-time Ukip candidate, saying that the biggest trade deal of the Boris Johnson years was deeply flawed – a belief Rishi Sunak is understood to share.

‘I don’t regret it,’ says Eustice as we sit in Portcullis House. ‘It was just not actually a very good deal.’ The agreement struck by Liz Truss, then the trade secretary, gave Australia and New Zealand unlimited access to the UK market for its beef and sheep while Australia bans the import of British beef. ‘Too much’ was given away under the agreement, says Eustice, whose nine years in government ended when Truss was elected. He fears that British beef could be undercut by Australasian hormone-treated beef.

In the Commons, Eustice claimed that Truss ‘shattered’ the UK’s negotiating position and that Crawford Falconer, the trade department’s top civil servant, ought to be sacked, having accepted concessions that ‘were against UK interests’. Eustice said that now he is on the backbenches he ‘no longer has to put such a positive gloss on what was agreed’, which is putting it mildly. 

When we met two days after that speech, I asked him what the reaction had been. ‘I’ve had a large number of Conservative MPs say that it needed saying and we must not repeat this mistake,’ he replies. Eustice says he spoke out because he fears the same mistake might be made under Sunak. Britain is in the final stages of talks for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and Eustice says he is ‘genuinely worried’ that it will go the same way as the Australia deal.