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Trade expert Sam Lowe from the pro-EU think tank, the Centre for European Reform, disagreed. He said No 10 was too focused on tackling the virus to properly focus on trade talks.“We’re not in a place where we’re even thinking about that [negotiations],” he told the Independent. “In order to get to a point where you can make those compromises you have to go through a lot of political theatre, I think, and at the moment everyone’s focused on Covid-19. Which is fine.”

“We’re all doing it,” says Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow and trade expert at the Centre for European Reform. “We all know what the limitations are when it comes to teleconferencing. You lose all of the informal interaction. Just by personalities interacting you get a much better grasp of the person you’re talking to.

Charles Grant, from the Centre for European Reform, said: “I think the EU will set three conditions for this, which will be very very hard for Boris Johnson’s Government to comply with. “The first condition is a so-called level-playing field — the EU will insist that our rules on social and environmental standards, state aid, taxation are automatically updated to follow EU rules. “Because they’re very worried, genuinely worried, that we will turn into Singapore-on-Thames, kind of slash and burn, cut our regulations and steal lots of investment from them by being a deregulated economy.”

“We are still seeing a divide in government between those who want to sign whatever the US puts in front of it,” Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform and a member of the UK government’s Strategic Trade Advisory Group, told EURACTIV. “The US, as with the EU, tends to get what it wants,” said Lowe.

"It's highly likely that international borders will remain partly closed until the pandemic is under control both in Europe and in the US, which is unlikely to happen at the same time," said Mr Luigi Scazzieri, an expert on migration and transatlantic relations at the Centre for European Reform in London.

The Centre for European Reform said the EU’s slow response to Italy’s outbreak, the worst-hit in Europe, has led to a surge in euroscepticism in Italy including among pro-Europeans.
The research centre wrote on April 2: “After the migration and eurozone crises, the EU’s initially poor response has reinforced concerns that the bloc is unwilling to help when Italy is most in need.”
 

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, who is regularly in touch with diplomats in EU capitals, said: “It will be very hard for both sides to reach the outlines of a free trade agreement by autumn, or indeed by June, which is when the PM wants to take a decision on whether it is worth pursuing a free trade agreement.

Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in Berlin, put it like this: The “Anglo-Saxon idolising of Merkel is a bit pathetic, but understandable,” Odendahl’s scathing comment on Twitter went: “The political leadership of both the US and the UK is a parody, and so you are naturally drawn to the polar opposite – which is Merkel.”