Trump envoy: Eurocrats in plot to destroy US-UK deal

DONALD TRUMP’S ‘man in London’ today l aunches an extraordinary broadside against the European Union for ‘ strangling i nnovation’ and attempting to wreck UK and US relations.

Risking a major rift between Washington and Brussels, Woody Johnson, US Ambassador to the UK, accuses Eurocrats of scaremongering in a bid to hinder a ‘revolutionary’ US/UK trade deal.

In a powerful intervention in The Mail on Sunday, the billionaire businessman turned diplomat says for too long Britain has been ‘stymied in the EU’ with ‘needless interventions’ and red tape from Brussels.

And the major Trump donor takes aim at ‘ short- sighted European bureaucrats who put their own political and commercial interests first’.

Mr Johnson highlights the row over the possible import of chlorinated chicken from the US. He says the storm is designed to scare the UK ‘out of doing a great trade deal that would give Britain huge competitive advantage’.

And the tycoon lays the blame firmly at the door of the European Commission, saying the confected row is ‘ simply the EU’s way of blocking fair competition’.

Mr Johnson, who has been the US Ambassador since January 2017, argues that ‘ultimately, the issue of how chicken should be cleaned is just a distraction’.

And he points out that in the UK, ‘you already eat chlorinated salads and drink chlorinated water and until 1997 you ate chlorinated chicken. The fact is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with chlorine washes’. And he says fears over a treatment given to just one in five US chickens is not a valid reason to risk a comprehensive free trade deal with America, as consumers would still have a choice.

‘ At the end of the day, if you don’t want to buy certain types of US chicken – and only around 20 per cent is even washed in chlorine – you won’t have to,’ he writes.

Downing Street said last week: ‘We have always been clear that we will not lower food standards as part of a future trading agreement.’