Ross Clark

he shot them down. Now, with fewer than eight months to go until Britain’s official leaving date, we are still no closer to knowing what the trading and customs arrangements will be after Brexit. You can’t blame business leaders for being worried.

In the Remain lobby’s fanciful minds, the lack of progress is all down to Mrs May and her Government. Their conceit is that the British public now regrets voting for Brexit and would reverse its decision were it allowed to vote again.

But they are fooling themselves. British voters can see for themselves the intransigence and obstruction shown by Barnier and his team. If the EU had set out deliberately to show its worst side, it could not have done a better job.

The Remain lobby’s fatal miscalculation is that it cannot bring itself to criticise the EU for anything. On the contrary, it cheers on Barnier whenever he rejects the Government’s proposals. Its failure to stand up for British interests is not going down well with the public, even among those who voted Remain.

Theresa May has not always handled the negotiations well. Yet her position has been clear since her Lancaster House speech of January 2015, in which she said she wanted Britain to withdraw from the single market and customs union and to supplant them with a comprehensive free trade deal.

There is no reason why this should not have been negotiated quickly. We already have a trading relationship with the EU, which could simply be rolled over into a free trade agreement.

The only substantial issue to resolve is how to deal with the free movement of goods between Britain and the EU when we have different external tariffs – the duties we charge on goods imported from the rest of the world. Yet this ought to be solvable by tracking goods to their final destination electronically.

Even now, customs officials have to cope with different national duty rates on alcohol and tobacco. The reason a free trade agreement has not already been signed off is not because it is difficult – it is because the EU negotiating team has refused to engage.

This is where Theresa May’s charm offensive comes in. Commercial interests across the EU, who want to continue to do business with Britain, have long shown their frustration at the lack of progress. Germany’s BDI – its equivalent of the CBI – has been appealing for a free trade deal with Britain ever since the referendum vote.

UNLIKE the unelected Barnier, national leaders are accountable to business leaders and their employees. They can’t afford to ignore the concerns of business any more than the PM, which is why there is still every reason to be hopeful that a deal will be done.

Meanwhile, there must be no let up in the campaign to establish new trading relations with countries outside the EU. It speaks volumes about the desperation of Remain-supporting newspapers that the only aspect of Jeremy Hunt’s visit to China that they chose to cover was his slip of the tongue in describing his wife as Japanese rather than Chinese.

The real progress that the new Foreign Secretary made in advancing trading relations with China was lost amid that piece of trivia. It might be the silly season but there is nothing silly about that.

‘Barnier’s tactic is clear: to stonewall’