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Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said it was “nonsensical” to argue there could be a big enough surge in US-UK trade to make up such a gap because London and Washington do not envisage a free trade agreement remotely as deep as the EU single market.“We are hugely integrated in the EU economy and for any US deal, the most we are looking at is tariff reduction,” he said. Other motors of trade such as common standards and regulatory alignment would be much less touched by any US-UK agreement.

“The US has long taken issue with the fact that the NHS’s approach to drug procurement… pulls down prices worldwide,” said Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, in an op-ed.

“It’s significant that an established centrist party is at last prepared to open up the discussion whether the debt brake still makes sense,” said Christian Odendahl, the chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “That party should really have been the Social Democrats, but they were too cautious about offending fiscal conservatives among their electorate.”

As Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, puts it: “Finding the next ECB chief is part of a larger puzzle of hugely important personnel decisions that EU leaders have to make after the European Parliament elections.”

Sam Lowe, trade expert at the Centre For European Reform, described it on Twitter as “most coherent proposal I’ve seen so far from a leadership candidate.” He later added that this was “a relative statement.”

“I don’t think we will be signing a large-scale trade agreement with the US any time soon,” said Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. The only way that could happen in the short term is if the UK leaves the EU without a deal to smooth its exit, he added, a prospect that the government has warned could do serious damage to the economy.

In an invaluable new paper Sam Lowe looks in detail at the kind of alternative arrangements that would be needed to keep the Border free of physical infrastructure and associated checks after Brexit.He points out that, even if efficient systems of online predeclaration of goods, trusted trader schemes and tracking technology are developed, some checks will still be necessary away from the Border. And any system would require an intensification in anti-smuggling measures near the Border, either through intelligence-led policing or electronic surveillance.