Brexit news - live: Trade issues not ‘teething problem’, warns Cameron as PM branded ‘unrepentant liar’

Nicola Sturgeon (Getty Images)
Nicola Sturgeon (Getty Images)

Businesses affected by red tape at the UK’s border are paying the price for Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit, David Cameron has said.

The former prime minister told CNN that the issues seen in recent months are not merely “teething problems”, warning that “bureaucracy” was the inevitable result of leaving the EU’s single market.

“I hope they [the government] can tackle as many of these problems as possible but, ultimately, some of them are because we chose to leave the single market and become a third country,” he said.

Mr Cameron also weighed in on the subject of corporation tax, ahead of next week’s Budget. The former prime minister said it “wouldn’t make any sense at all” to raise this rate, given the current state of the economy.

Elsewhere, Boris Johnson has been branded an “unrepentant and inveterate liar” by a former French ambassador to the UK.

In her new book, Sylvie Bermann, France’s top representative in London during the EU referendum, said the prime minister uses “lies to embellish reality, as a game and as instrument of power”.