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The Conservative Cabinet have been using their recess from Parliament to continue their World Tour of dodgy dictators and morally bankrupt heads of state as they desperately scrabble around for post-Brexit trade deals wherever they can find them.

Currently Liam Fox is sitting in a room with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, a person who compared the killings of suspected drug addicts to the Holocaust, said Barack Obama should ‘go to hell’ and has admitted to personally murdering people.

He has even gone so far as to say he would kill his own children if they took drugs.

This is the man that Liam Fox has chosen to spend his time with, chosen to put at the top of his list of people he needs to meet now that we have started the process of leaving the EU.

Duterte is one of the 21st century’s most sinister leaders and Liam Fox has flown halfway around the world to grovel to him.

(Image: Getty)

The fact that the first visit made by Fox since triggering Article 50 is to the Philippines shows just how low this government are willing to stoop in order to secure even a minimal trade deal in the future.

Not only are the Tories blind to the horrific human rights abuses and endemic corruption in the Philippines, but they are also clearly oblivious to the actual realities of doing trade with them.

Our exports to the Philippines are just £500million a year, of a total of more than £28billion a month.

This is a drop in the ocean yet Liam Fox is willing to chase a deal, whilst ignoring the estimated 7,000 killed without trial in Duterte’s brutal war on drugs.

(Image: REUTERS)

With Theresa May cosying up to the Saudis and pandering to the increasingly despotic regime in Turkey, and now Fox sitting down with a self-declared murderer, this Government seem to be only too willing to abandon their morals if the price is right.

Far from the UK ‘taking back control’, Brexit is pushing the UK into the pockets of dodgy dictators.

* Tom Brake MP is the Lib Dem Foreign Affairs spokesman