Iain Duncan Smith says it’s time for experts to handle Brexit as ‘there are problems ahead’

In the latest strategy from the Leavers, civil servants appear to be getting the blame for Brexit’s potential to go terribly wrong.

Iain Duncan Smith is one of the leading pro-Brexit voices who now claims that the negotiating team are the wrong ones to secure satisfactory deals with the EU and US.

He told 5 Live Politics: “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 former Tory leader explained that expertise from outside the civil service might now be needed to help battle with the European Union’s skilled negotiators.

“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”.

He added the “biggest area of weakness is in the transactional lawyers section which is where the city scores over everybody else but where we in the civil service don’t have very good people”.

He continued: “There are good people in the civil service but some of the very very very specific skills may need to be farmed for outside.”

Ignoring warnings ahead of the EU referendum vote in 2016, Brexiteer minister Michael Gove famously claimed that “people in this country have had enough of experts”.