Speeches by Bryant.

“As much frictionless trade as is possible. What are the frictions in different sectors? You might have friction about business travel and whether people are able to do their business elsewhere in Europe. Some of that might be about mutual recognition of professional standards—”

“Earlier than that.”

“I irritate officials a lot. One of the difficulties with the EU on the SPS deal, for instance, is that, while we announced that we wanted to negotiate that last May, the Commission did not get its mandate from the EU until November, so we could not properly start negotiating until November. The United States of America…”

“Go on.”

“There is a technical reason why. Basically, what Canada was being offered in proportion to what it was seeking to achieve was very similar to the UK. If you want all the detail on that, we are happy to write to you, but Amanda is about to give some of it. As I say, British businesses are still able to participate, but …”

“I am doing my very best. One of the things I am conscious of in relation to negotiating with the EU is that I would obviously always prefer to move much faster. I would prefer to move much faster on everything, basically.”

“If I do SPS first, as I said earlier, the EU Commission got its mandate in November for negotiation on SPS, so we are undergoing that process at the moment. We have said that we want to complete that by the time of the next EU summit, which will be later this year. We still hope to be able to have all the legislation i…”

“India’s tariff, as you know, is going down from 150% to 75%, and then in later years down to 40%. We have also secured geographical identification in Argentina for Scotch whisky. We work on this all the time—it feels like it is one of our best clients.”

“Completely, yes.”

“They wanted something by 1 April, and I would be very upset if we had not announced something by then. I am not the person who gets to decide when announcements are made, but we are very close to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. I should say, because this may be an area that you want to ask me about, that one of t…”

“Sorry. I am very aware and we talk regularly to the Scotch Whisky Association—it says something here and I can’t read it. We are trying our best to get as good a deal as we possibly can.”

“I think they meant that they wanted an announcement by April, because between April and the end of June there will be the existing safeguard. They want an announcement about what will happen from July in relation to trade steel measures. As you know, under WTO rules whatever we do will be constructed in a different way…”

“I wish I could give you an answer, but the truth is that both of those elements are still in negotiation.”

“As you know, my preference would be towards transparency, but this is one of those areas where it takes two to tango, so being able to publish it will require not only analysing some of the commercial sensitivities that there might be but persuading the US to agree with us. I am quite happy to write on that.”

“Go on, Kate—I am not telling you to publish it; I am just saying you should answer.”

“The existing safeguard that we inherited from our membership of the European Union, as you know, Mr Madders, runs out at the end of June. We have said several times in public, and I say again today, that we will have a set of steel trade measures after that. We have not quite dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s yet, but…”

“Some of that discussion is for DSIT, but I remember that, 18 months ago, a lot of life sciences companies were threatening to leave the United Kingdom, not talking about coming here. I think that this deal has reassured a great many of them.”

“I am not going to set a timeline for options being on my table because it is not only my or our Department’s responsibility; it goes across Government. I want to say one other thing, on another aspect that is my responsibility: the person who is probably rubbing their hands with glee the most at the moment is Vladimir …”

“No, I do not think R&D is lagging behind; I think we have done phenomenally well, but we have been living off a past legacy, and we have been living off the fact that the NHS is able to buy drugs at a significant discount because it is such a large single buyer. But, as Patrick Vallance has said, one of the great stren…”

“Thank you—you don’t sound it!”