International trade secretary says ‘dozens of countries’ are preparing to expand trading links with UK once it has left EU

The UK is already discussing informal trade deals with at least 12 countries, despite being notionally prevented from striking deals while still a member of the EU, according to Liam Fox’s international trade department.

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Fox said ministers, who had visited 55 countries, were “discussing the possible shape of new agreements once we have left the EU” and the department was conducting trade audits of key markets in order to identify potential pitfalls.

“We need maximum freedom to achieve this, which is why the prime minister was right to rule out full membership of the EU customs union,” Fox said.

“We have taken our first steps to establishing ourselves as the champions of free trade and taking our place, once again, as one of the greatest open trading nations in the world.

In his piece for the Telegraph, Fox said “dozens of countries” were preparing to expand their trading links to the UK. “As the foreign secretary discovered when he visited the United States, the UK is no longer ‘at the back of the queue’ with our largest single trading partner,” he wrote.

The Telegraph named New Zealand and the Gulf Co-operation Council as two potential new trade alliances being informally investigated. New Zealand’s prime minister, Bill English, visited the UK last week, and Theresa May recently addressed a meeting of the GCC in Bahrain, attended by all six Gulf nations.

On Wednesday, Prof Ted Malloch, tipped to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to the EU, said he believed a trade deal could be done “with the right people at the right level, within 90 days”.

Malloch told the Guardian he did not think the formal prohibition on a trade deal being sealed until the end of the two-year article 50 process would make a difference to that. “There’s nothing to stop a group of people going to a resort in Virginia and hammering this out, which isn’t a public affair,” he said. “We are talking politics here.”

In his article, Fox said he was concerned about what he called “a dangerous tide of protectionism”, an implicit reference to the forthcoming Trump administration in the US.

“Since joining the EU, trade as a percentage of GDP has stagnated in the UK. That is why it is time for Britain to get out into the world and rediscover its role as a great, global, trading nation.”

On Thursday, Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner for economic and financial affairs, repeated warnings that the UK could not expect to have as preferential a trade deal with the EU as a non-member.

“Brexit means Brexit and it is not the same to be in or out, and it cannot be better,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We need to reinvent a new kind of relationship, which I hope to be close, balanced and positive but that’s the outcome, not the start of the negotiations. Nobody can speculate, we need to move step by step.”

In the 24 hours since the prime minister’s speech, where May confirmed the UK would not seek to remain a full member of the single market, key Brussels negotiators told the prime minister she was being over-optimistic in her hope to achieve a quick, clean break from the EU with a trade deal within two years.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission, predicted that negotiating Brexit would be “very, very, very difficult”, because Britain would be considered a foreign country to the rest of the EU.

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Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit negotiator, said it was an “illusion to suggest that the UK will be permitted to leave the European Union, but then be free to opt back into the best parts of the European project, for example by asking for zero tariffs from the single market, without accepting the obligations that come with it”.