Dyson: I think Britain is putting forward very positive suggestions and they’re not being reciprocated by the other side. But that doesn’t particularly surprise me and I suspect that we’ll have to leave without a deal and that we’ll have to trade under WTO regulations which frankly are going to hurt the Europeans more than they hurt the British. 

BBC: Would they not hurt your business?

Dyson: Not at all actually, we already pay the WTO tariff into Europe and it hasn’t hurt us at all… It’s quite wrong to call it a single market. It’s a series of different markets with different languages, different marketing required and different laws, and in our case different plugs and different boxes. So we don’t view it as a single market, it’s actually a very highly complex and broken up market… The rest of the world is growing at a far greater rate than Europe so the opportunity is to export to the rest of the world and to capitalise on that.

People are being told WTO rules would be the end of the world. The government could do more to explain why it isn’t…