Liam Fox said his new department would focus on a “GDP map of the world” instead of the capital cities and diplomacy

Liam Fox has reignited his row with the Foreign Office, suggesting the department has a “cartographer’s view of the world” and is too interested in politics at the expense of trade.

In his speech to Tory activists, Dr Fox dismissed the “Foreign Office view of the world” for focusing on capital cities and diplomacy rather than commerce.

He vowed that his new Department for International Trade would instead “look at the GDP map of the world” — noting that the city of Los Angeles had higher gross domestic product than the whole of Saudi Arabia. “We have to start to think about [the world] in a totally different way,” he told the Conservative Way Forward reception.

“We’ve got to change from the cartographer’s view of