Sajid Javid is under fire after wrongly claiming the UK “already” has the outline of a trade agreement with the EU, when those talks have yet to even start.

The chancellor also argued the EU’s trade commissioner believed the deal could be struck by the end of 2020 – when he actually said that was unlikely and predicted an agreement could take years.

And Mr Javid claimed Brussels had “agreed” to grant so-called ‘equivalence’ for financial services, which would protect the City of London, when that is not the case.

On the crucial trade deal, Mr Javid said: “There’s already an agreement in principle – it’s already there, it’s done there.”

But the claim was sharply criticised by the BBC’s ‘reality check’ reporter, who pointed out: “A non-binding political declaration, which is what we have, is not a trade agreement – not even in principle.

“There can’t be an agreement yet because the EU is not allowed to even start negotiating one until we’ve left.”

Chris Morris also dismissed Mr Javid’s claim that the trade talks would be straightforward because the starting point is full alignment with the EU.

“The point is most trade agreements move people closer together – we are trying to move further part,” Mr Morris told Radio 4’s Today programme.

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“He didn’t set out how he is going to negotiate full market access into the EU next year while diverging from those same EU rules.”

David Gauke, the former Conservative treasury minister, now running as an independent, told The Independent: “It simply not the case that we have resolved our future relationship.

“What we do know is that Boris Johnson’s ambition to diverge from the EU means that negotiating the future relationship will be complex, challenging and require years of work.”

Mr Javid repeated the Conservative slogan to ‘get Brexit done’ by the end of January, but Mr Morris said: “Good slogans don’t make trade agreements.”

The chancellor’s false claims come after Michael Gove was criticised for wrongly claiming there is no single market in services that the UK will fall out of if Brexit goes ahead.

In the interview, Mr Javid also failed to rule out a no-deal Brexit at the end of next year, leaving the door open for the UK to crash out of the EU without agreement.

He said he had “not a single doubt” that the prime minister could secure a complex free trade deal with the EU “within months”, if the election is won next week.

Chuka Umunna, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said: “Who does Sajid Javid think he's kidding?

“He's either incompetent or dishonest to pretend that the Tories could achieve a Canadian-style EU trade deal by December 2020.