Brexit: Dominic Raab didn't realise how reliant 'UK trade is on Dover-Calais crossing' - so everyone made the same joke

Just when you thought the Brexit negotiations couldn't get any worse, the Brexit secretary admits something so astonishing that it stops everyone in their tracks.

Speaking at the Tech Nation event in central London, Dominic Rabb, confessed that he had mistaken the importance of the trade route between Dover and Calais.

In his speech, the 44-year-old Tory MP said:

We want a bespoke arrangement on goods which recognises the peculiar, frankly, geographic economic entity that is the United Kingdom.

We are, and I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, if you look at the UK and look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.

And that is one of the reasons why we have wanted to make sure we have a specific and very proximate relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade at the border.

I don’t think it is a question so much of the risk of major shortages, but I think probably the average consumer might not be aware of the full extent to which the choice of goods that we have in the stores are dependent on one or two very specific trade routes.

Now, we hate to break it to you but it would appear that Mr Rabb was unaware that the UK was actually an island and that it's closest connection to mainland Europe was actually Calais.

This quite a stunning admission from the man who is supposed to be negotiating the UK's exit from the European Union, the deadline of which is due at the end of March 2019.

Given that the vast majority of the UK's trade will come from the port of Calais, including pharmaceutical goods and food (which there will be adequate supplies of) people have been left gobsmacked by Rabb's statement.

A lot of people are making the joke that Rabb fundamentally didn't know that the UK was an island.

People had other suggestions of what Raab might only just be realising.

In Raab's defence, he only took over from David Davis as Brexit secretary since July and it isn't the first time that someone has made a statement along these lines.

We'll leave you with this expletive-filled rant on the issue from Chris Addison, who incidentally starred in The Thick of It, a series this moment appears to have been lifted directly from.

HT inews