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The ex-Cabinet minister, who quit his job alongside Johnson last year in protest at the deal Theresa May proposed with Brussels, said the prime minister would use the Conservatives' 80-seat majority to push through his Brexit vision.
“The negotiating hand Boris has is much stronger, that is just an objective fact,” Davis told the BBC's Today program. “The second objective fact is that Boris himself does want to diverge. I lived with him in Cabinet. We resigned within days of each other because we both wanted divergence.”
Davis predicted only minor divergence in existing industries, such as car manufacturing, as global rules are already similar and there would be little benefit to a radical rejection of EU regulations. But on emerging industries he expected the U.K. to go much further.
He said it was areas such as artificial intelligence, genetics and other biological sciences “where we are strong leaders in the world that is why we need to control that.”
On Friday, European Council President Charles Michel said at the end of an EU leaders summit in Brussels that, “The EU will negotiate to ensure to have a close cooperation in the future with the U.K.” He added that “the integrity of the Single Market is a very important issue for us.”