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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, after months of Europe looking on aghast at the excesses of the EU referendum campaign, the somewhat more sobering figure of Theresa May spent her first week visiting Berlin and Paris, to calm nerves and smooth the way.  Well the Prime Minister has bought a little time before she invokes Article 50 but how prepared is the country to negotiate a new relationship?  Well the Conservative peer Lord Maude was until February of course the government’s Trade Minister and has held a host of ministerial positions dating back 26 years to when he was appointed Europe Minister under Margaret Thatcher no less and he joins us now from Horsham, a very good morning Lord Maude.  First of all, I wondered if you would like to clear this up for us, what a month now since the referendum, the dust has settled, it was never clear whether you were a remainer or a leaver.  

LORD FRANCIS MAUDE:  I took no position in the referendum campaign, I thought the arguments were very finely balanced and I didn’t want to take part in the campaign and to be honest I thought both sides were making extravagant and overblown claims which made it look like a much more straightforward decision than it was.  For me it was very finely balanced with some potential short term downsides but some potential medium to long term upsides and that remains my view.

DM: Ah, well let’s talk about the upsides because as the phrase goes, we are where we are of course.  Do you detect then, and let’s talk specifically about trade and the economy, do you detect some opportunities here for the UK?

LORD FRANCIS MAUDE: Yes, I do but there is a lot of uncertainty at the moment.  I think one of the dangers that we face at the moment is that people made these great claims about how disaster would fall in if we voted to leave, there is a danger that that can be self-fulfilling and you saw that with a report of sentiment and intentions which came out I think a couple of days ago and that’s not what people are doing, it’s what people are saying and that will have been influenced by what a lot of people were saying, the Governor of the Bank of England, the IMF and so on, about what would happen to the economy.  Now actually what the Bank of England is finding is that the immediate effects on the economy are negligible.  As far as the upside is concerned, yes, this absolutely depends on what we do and how we do it.  There are undoubtedly some people who voted for us to leave the EU who did it on the basis that they want to withdraw from the world, they want to put the drawbridges up and actually that would be the worst possible thing we could do.  We as a country have flourished over the centuries by being outward looking, by being really engaged with the world, with the whole of the world and if we don’t use this opportunity to enhance our engagement with the world then we will have made a bad mistake and we could actually pay a real penalty for that.  So for me, getting ahead with engaging in trade and open negotiations with other countries, with non-EU countries and being welcoming to overseas investment in this country and so the decision this week by a big Japanese business to bid for ARM, a very important and serious Cambridge based tech company here, these are really important signals and I was so pleased that Philip Hammond was very quick to welcome that and say what a good thing it was because it is that kind of engagement where there is lots of British investment going around the world but lots of overseas investment coming in to Britain, that’s where our future lies.

DM: What is your view, Lord Maude, when it comes to trade on the crucial question – we know the huge bulk of our trade still is done and presumably continues to be done with members of the European Union – the question of the single market.  You and I know there are members of the leave campaign, I was speaking to one of them today, Nigel Farage, who say it doesn’t matter if we leave this single market because we must first and foremost get control over EU migration.  

LORD FRANCIS MAUDE: Well I mean this business of engagement with the single market, in the late 1980s I was negotiating a lot of those single market agreements, I sat at the Internal Market Council, I had a season ticket to Brussels and the single market is by no means complete.  Again it is not by any means binary, it’s not clear that you have to be totally in or else you are totally out, there are lots of parts of it – the energy single market, the digital single market, these are by no means complete, the services single market is not complete so this is not binary.  It is not also the case that the bulk of our trade is with the EU, it is no more than half and probably a bit less than half of it is with the EU and it is also worth making the point that countries like Australia have increased their trade with the EU more than Britain has despite our membership of the single market.  That is not to say that we should just turn our back on it, that would be the wrong thing to do but there are lots of different ways of engaging with the single market and the one thing I think that people voted for clearly in this referendum was for more control over our borders and so for those who say if you want to be in the single market you have to accept complete free movement of labour, that is not a choice that I think would be acceptable in the light of the referendum result.  What I think we should be clear about also is that this whole concept of free movement is under strain and tension and pressure for reasons unrelated to the Brexit referendum.  When we first thought about this we used to talk about freedom of movement of labour, the freedom of people to move to where they had a job and I think you are seeing both in France and Germany and in many other parts of the EU, the concept of complete freedom of movement is already coming under severe pressure and I think that some movement on that and reform on free movement is very likely to happen anyway.

DM: Okay and lastly, you are well placed to give us a view on the new Prime Minister, I mentioned your service under Margaret Thatcher, well you’ve seen the headlines, is Theresa May partly Maggie May?

LORD FRANCIS MAUDE: Well she is her own person, very much so. I sat around the Shadow Cabinet and Cabinet table with Theresa for very many years, I have huge admiration for her competence and grip and I think she has a huge task ahead of her, not only to continue the process of public service reform that David Cameron started and where we saw some very significant results but also to tackle and pull together a team of ministers dealing with all the issues around Brexit, that’s going to be very, very demanding and she’ll need lots of support to make that happen and she’ll need a parliamentary party that is willing to come behind her very solidly because she has a small majority and it will be tough to get things done.

DM: Always a pleasure talking to you, Lord Maude, thank you very much indeed.  Lord Maude, formerly Francis Maude there.