He said: “By the early part of next year, you will see an Article 50 letter which we will invoke and, in that letter, I am sure we will be setting out some parameters for how we propose to take this forward.
“You invoke Article 50 in the early part of next year [and] you have two years to pull it off. I don't actually think you need to spend the full two years, but let’s see how we go.”
What experts have said about Brexit
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The MP dismissed fears that Britain will suffer during the negotiations as the EU offers harsh terms to stop other countries contemplating an exit.
He said they would “benefit from fantastic opportunities for free trade with our friends in the EU”.
Meanwhile, at a recent summit about potential trade deals with Turkey, Mr Johnson expressed relief that the subject of a poem he wrote claiming the Turkish president had sex with goats didn’t come up.
The new departments for Exiting the European Union and International Trade have been frantically recruiting staff to be able to start negotiations with the EU but they reportedly “don’t have the infrastructure they need to hire”.
Speaking at a fringe event of the Labour party conference in Liverpool, the Sinn Fein politician said: “I asked her about when she will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty [and she said] that she was going to do it not this year but very early next year.
“So we are working on the basis that early next year, the article will be triggered.”
He said: “Prime Minister May was very open and honest with me.
“She declared that it's almost impossible to trigger Article 50 this year, but it's quite likely that they will be ready maybe in January, maybe in February, next year.”
Mr Tusk said Britain’s vote to leave was “sad moment” for Europe but reconfirmed the EU view that Brexit negotiations must favour the interests of the remaining members, not the departing country.
Yanis Varoufakis
The former Greek finance minister has said Article 50 must be triggered immediately in order to “create space and time during which to prepare yourself as a nation and a government”.
He said the UK needed to have a “robust debate” about what it actually meant because the discussion prior to the referendum had been of a “very low quality”.
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