Boris Johnson is sowing the seeds of “the biggest crisis of Brexit to date”, Britain’s former envoy to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers has said in a scathing verdict on the government’s “diplomatic amateurism”.

Less than three weeks before polling day, the man who resigned as the UK’s EU ambassador in January 2017 said Johnson was repeating Theresa May’s “strategy errors” and would soon find himself “unwisely” boxed in by his campaign promises.

When he launched the Conservative party manifesto on Sunday, Johnson repeated his promise not to extend an 11-month transition period that kicks in if the UK leaves the EU with the withdrawal agreement on 31 January 2020. Negotiating a trade deal with the EU in an unprecedentedly quick time is the centrepiece of the prime minister’s misleading pledge to “get Brexit done”.

In a lecture at Glasgow university on Monday night, Rogers, who resigned following a Tory backlash over his reports that an EU trade deal might take a decade, said “the biggest crisis of Brexit to date” was “virtually inevitable” in late 2020.

“In practice, this prime minister is, for all his talk of getting Brexit done, now basically replicating the strategy errors of 2016 and 2017, which brought his predecessor down,” he said. “This is diplomatic amateurism dressed up domestically as boldness and decisiveness.” Read more

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