Iain Duncan Smith has finally admitted that 'experts' need to be in charge of the Brexit negotiations
In the halcyon days on June 2016 (before the EU referendum) Michael Gove said that 'Britain has had enough of experts' but now his fellow Brexiteer, Iain Duncan Smith, believes that experts should now be handling the negotiations.
It's almost as if 'hypocrisy' isn't in the Brexit dictionary...
During an appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live on Monday, the former minister for work and pensions said that the current team negotiating the deal with the European Union aren't the right people for the job and that people with better expertise should be in charge.
I think there are problems ahead for the UK.
One of them is the quality of the people now working on this. If you haven't negotiated for 40 years you need to reach out to all those people that are involved in negotiations, really good transactional lawyers that exist in the City of London.
Proper trade economists. We've got very good ones at the moment but we need to bring them in from outside.
The chief negotiator is fine. All I would say is behind them you need people who are looking through absolutely everything with an understanding of what to look for. This is the key bit.
We are up against the EU and the EU has been negotiating trade deals for 40 years. So we need to make sure we draw upon the talents of anybody that has skills in this area.
There are good people in the civil service but some of the very very very specific skills may need to be farmed for outside.
To say that 'there are problems ahead for the UK' might be a bit of understatement, Mr Duncan Smith...
As you can imagine, the Tory MPs words struck a chord with some folks online who couldn't notice this remarkable reversal of opinion from the 65-year-old.
HT New European
More: The new British passports will be made in Poland and the jokes are writing themselves