UK PM candidate Johnson will demand EU talks free trade

Boris Johnson will make an offer to the European Union over post-Brexit free trade but if it rejects that gambit then Britain will leave the bloc without a deal on October 31, the man in charge of his campaign to be prime minister said on Tuesday.

“With Boris, what he’s actually said clearly is: ‘We’re not going to go back and renegotiate’,” Johnson’s campaign chairman, Iain Duncan Smith, told Sky News.

“What we’re going to do is we will put a different offer down and say to them: ‘Look - we want to get to free trade. Now we can either start talking about that now if you are serious and you want to have a process that means we don’t end up ... with tariffs etcetera after the 31st - if that’s what you want, the EU, then we are prepared to talk,” Duncan Smith said.

“But if all you are interested in doing is saying: ‘All you can have is this deal’, then the answer is: we will be prepared to leave on the 31st.”