Trump will demand high price for UK trade deal, says former ambassador

Kim Darroch said it was ‘impossible’ that the US congress would ratify any trade deal by the end of the year.

Donald Trump will push in trade talks for the U.K. to pay high prices for drugs and for U.S. food producers to have more market access, Britain's former ambassador to Washington told the Guardian.

Laying out the tough trade-offs that Boris Johnson's government will have to consider in trade negotiations with the U.S. after Brexit, Kim Darroch said Trump would strongly defend the interests of farmers and corporate America.

“I know what the U.S. will be pitching for when they negotiate a free-trade deal with us. They will pitch for massively greater access for agricultural products. People talk about chlorinated chicken — it is a lot more than that. Farmers in America vote for Trump, pretty much all of them vote for Trump," said Darroch in his first interview since he resigned last year after diplomatic cables in which he criticized the U.S. president were leaked.

“They also want us to pay the same for American pharmaceuticals as they pay in their own market. Do they want us to pay more for their pharmaceuticals? Do the pharmaceutical companies want to use this leverage? Of course they do.”

Darroch said that U.K. negotiators would push for more access to the U.S. financial services market, as well as for concessions on aviation, arms sales and public procurement, but these would be strongly resisted by the U.S. — or come at a high price.

“Maybe Boris’s relationship with Donald Trump is so fantastic that Trump will give him all this as a gift,” Darroch said. “But are they going to while we’re saying we are not going to have chlorinated chicken, not going to have your hormone-treated beef, not going to have all your genetically modified crops and we are not going to pay twice as much as we do now for American pharmaceuticals.”

He added that it was "impossible" for any deal to get through the U.S. Congress by the end of the year.