Liam Fox will '˜resign in a huff' over Brexit, predicts Nick Clegg

Mr Clegg said he expected the International Trade Secretary to “resign in a huff” within 18 months when it becomes clear he has no trade deals to negotiate.

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And he said slow progress on Brexit will inevitably foster a “betrayal myth” among Tory backbenchers, who will blame their own leadership for failing to pull Britain out immediately after the June 23 referendum vote to leave.

Speaking to a Westminster lunch, Mr Clegg said Britain will not be in a position to negotiate new trade deals unless it leaves the European customs union, which is “still an open question in Whitehall”. Even if it does, it will have to wait for the end of lengthy negotiations with the remaining EU before it can embark on new agreements, as was seen last week when Australian ministers said they would like to do a deal with Britain but could not do so for two and a half years at least.

“If I was a betting man, I would put a fair amount of money that Liam Fox will resign in a huff within the next 18 months,” said Mr Clegg. “He doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t appear to have realised that yet.”

The International Trade Secretary is “a proud man” and will start coming under pressure from Tory backbench colleagues who believe Brexit is not happening fast enough, said the former DPM.

“They will get increasingly agitated and at one point Liam Fox will have to ask himself ‘Am I going to sit here and become an increasing laughing stock because I’ve got nothing to do, or do I join my spiritual fellow travellers - the Angry Brigade on the right wing - and say I was also betrayed?’” said Mr Clegg. “He will do that. I would put a fair amount of money that he will do that within the next 18-24 months.”

Mr Clegg said the Leave vote had papered over a “great faultline” between competing Tory demands for untrammelled free trade alongside complete parliamentary sovereignty.

Tensions between the “mutually incompatible” goals were already surfacing in incidents such as the slapdown administered by Downing Street to Brexit Secretary David Davis when he suggested it was “improbable” the UK could remain part of the single market while regaining control over migration.

“It’s the contest, the tension between the two sides of the Conservative brain,” said Mr Clegg. “You cannot have untrammelled or extensive (single market) access without in one way or another being subservient to the rules set in that market. You can’t negotiate your way around it, you cannot paper over that tension.

“And so - odd though it might seem, given how unassailable the Conservative position appears to be at the moment - if I was to make any prediction about where the major fireworks in British politics are likely to detonate in the next few years, it would be within the Conservative Party.

“That great faultline between free trade and a hankering for the kind of 19th-century parliamentary sovereignty of the days of gunboat diplomacy has only been deferred. It wasn’t settled on June 23, because the Brexit crew didn’t think they were going to win and certainly never bothered to explain to us how you reconcile those two things.”

Mr Clegg predicted that the Government would be “incapable of fighting its way out of the cul-de-sac it has found itself in”.

He said he expected Mrs May will have to come to Parliament to admit that negotiating a new relationship with the remaining EU will take longer than the two years laid down in Article 50.

And he warned that other EU states will not go out of their way to help the Prime Minister resolve her problems.

“I was in Berlin last week speaking to senior folk in the political world in Germany,” he said. “We should be under no illusions - however favourably they might be disposed to us, however much they may wish it hadn’t happened on June 23, however Anglophile they might be... at the end of the day they are going to be as flinty and hard-headed as anyone else in the remaining EU.

“Their first, absolute, almost existential priority is to stop Brexit becoming the catalyst for the wider unravelling of their club. So anyone who thinks that what is going to happen in the next few years is that we are going to have our cake and eat it ... needs to be more hard-headed about the reality we face.”

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