PUTTING Brexit itself to one side, I believe, this Government during EU negotiations has not served the country well for stupid ideological reasons which have now again prejudiced all our futures unnecessarily.

The best analogy I can draw is to ask you to imagine the EU negotiations were a poker game. What the Johnson government did was to take all the aces in our hand and give these to the negotiators on the other side.

On January 28, 2020, this government resigned the UK from EFTA and from the EEA. But if the UK had been in two or even three separate organisations simultaneously (and not just the EU as previously stated) it would have cut the ground right from beneath the EU side in negotiations. The EU side had quite literally nothing to negotiate.

Our government helped the EU side out of their very weak position in the transition negotiations. The UK side received precisely nothing for this.

This staggering level of incompetence in negotiations tells us all yet another reason why this PM and this cabinet now must go from office and never return.

Cllr Nigel Boddy (Lib Dem), Darlington.