London: Britain wants a trade deal with the European Union that includes the best parts of the bloc’s agreements with Japan, Canada and South Korea, along with financial services, Brexit Secretary David Davis said, expressing optimism that such a pact can be struck within a year.

In an interview with BBC on Sunday, Davis said the likelihood of leaving the EU without a deal, or of the UK exiting on World Trade Organisation rules, has now “dropped dramatically.” Nevertheless, he signalled the painstaking agreement struck on Friday to end the first phase of Brexit negotiations isn’t binding, and that Britain’s exit payment of as much as £39 billion (Dh192 billion, $52 billion) is contingent on reaching a free-trade agreement. Doing so, he said, “is not that complicated.”

“We start in full alignment: we start in complete convergence with the EU, so we then work it out from there,” Davis said on BBC-TV’s Andrew Marr Show. “What we want is a bespoke outcome: We’ll probably start with the best of Canada, the best of Japan and the best of Korea and then add to that the bits that are missing, which is services,” he said. “Canada plus plus plus would be one way of putting it.”

One year

The Brexit secretary’s optimism belies the noise coming from his counterparts in the EU. It’s taken eight months of at times bitter haggling to make sufficient progress on what was supposed to be the easiest part of the talks — resolving Britain’s exit payment, its future border with Ireland, and the rights of EU and UK citizens living in each other’s territories.

European Council President Donald Tusk spoke on Friday of the challenges ahead: “So much time has been devoted to the easier part of the task and now to negotiate a transition arrangement and the framework for our future relationship we have, de facto, less than a year,” he said in Brussels. “We all know that breaking up is hard but breaking up and building a new relation is much harder.”

Davis cited his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, in describing the next phase as being about “how we manage divergence so it doesn’t undercut the access to the market.” He said Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet has discussed a vision for “an overarching free trade deal, but including services, which Canada doesn’t, with individual, specific arrangements for aviation, for nuclear, for data, a whole series of strands which we’ve worked out, most of them based on where we start now.”