Sign up here to receive the daily news briefing in your inbox every morning with exclusive insight from the BrexitCentral team Boris Johnson hits back at UK statistics chief over ‘£350m Brexit payments’ claim Chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir David Norgrove wrote to the Foreign Secretary saying he was “surprised and disappointed” at the move and branding it a “clear misuse” of official statistics. But Mr Johnson responded in strongly-worded letter last night calling the intervention a “wilful distortion of the text of my article” and demanding it be withdrawn. This was not the first time the watchdog had disputed the claim, after hitting the headlines during the EU referendum when its former chair Sir Andrew Dilnot said the £350m claim peddled by Vote Leave was “misleading and undermines trust in official statistics”. – PoliticsHome Boris Johnson accuses statistics regulator of ‘wilfully distorting’ his words in spat over claim Britain will gain £350m a week from Brexit – Telegraph (£) Johnson seeks to re-establish himself as leading Brexiter – FT (£) Boris Johnson is right: we must pledge an extra £350 million a week to the NHS right away – Andrew Murrison MP for the Telegraph (£) Boris Johnson’s Brexit demands are a breath of fresh air for voters during stale EU negotiations – Trevor Kavanagh for The Sun Keep calm, Tories, Boris Johnson is not the only minister pushing the boundaries and now Theresa May has the chance to re-assert her authority – The Sun says Boris Johnson and Theresa May in Brexit showdown: Foreign Secretary to tell PM £30bn ‘divorce’ bill is not acceptable Boris Johnson will use a showdown meeting with Theresa May this week to demand reassurances that the Prime Minister will not agree to make substantial payments to the EU after Brexit. The Foreign Secretary is concerned by reports that Mrs May is preparing to announce that she will carry on paying up to £10 billion per year to the EU during a transition period, which could be as long as three years. – Telegraph Boris Johnson will ‘not be sacked’ over Brexit article, says PM ally – Telegraph Theresa May flies to Canada for talks on post-Brexit trade deal Theresa May will fly to Canada on Monday to “prepare the ground” for a post-Brexit trade deal, after deep cabinet splits emerged once more over her government’s approach to leaving the EU. The Prime Minister and her Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau are expected to agree that the new trade deal between the EU and Canada – which comes into effect on 21 September – should be “swiftly transitioned” to form the basis of a bilateral deal between their two countries when Britain quits the EU. – Sky News Theresa May to focus on trade and Boeing in Trudeau meeting – FT (£) Canada’s trade deal with the EU will form the basis for Britain’s Brexit deal – Telegraph Theresa May to kick-start free trade talks with Canada in a boost for whisky exporters – The Sun Britain will pay to remain a part of Europol after Brexit, David Davis says Britain will continue to pay to remain a part of Europol as part of new security treaty with the EU after Brexit, David Davis has announced. The Brexit Secretary said security links should be secured with a new legal pact to make sure the fight against terror continues unhindered after March 2019. – Telegraph Nicola Sturgeon urged to ‘decouple’ Brexit and independence on third anniversary of referendum David Mundell will today challenge Nicola Sturgeon to drop “once and for all” her claim that Brexit could justify a second independence referendum and claim her administration is secretly cooperating with the UK Government. Speaking on the third anniversary of the 2014 referendum, the Scottish Secretary will state the SNP “deliberately conflated” last year’s EU vote with independence in the hope of re-opening the issue. – Telegraph (£) UK woos foreign tech investors to boost post-Brexit digital economy The government is ramping up its efforts to woo foreign tech investors and give the UK digital economy a fresh boost after Brexit. The culture secretary Karen Bradley will this week visit Scandanavian tech hubs to meet with investors and companies, including Ericsson, which is working with UK researchers on tests of 5G technology. – City A.M. Low-skilled Brit workers have been neglected as big businesses prefer cheap foreign labour, says Iain Duncan Smith A generation of low-skilled British workers have been “neglected” because of an addiction to cheap foreign labour, an ex-Cabinet Minster claims. Tory veteran Iain Duncan Smith lashed out as a think tank he chairs called for huge investment by big business post-Brexit into “upskilling” the UK’s youth and new technology. – The Sun BBC host skewers Labour’s Barry Gardiner over Brexit stance A BBC presenter ripped into Labour’s shadow international trade secretary Barry Gardiner over Labour’s changing stance on Brexit. Radio 5 Live’s John Pienaar grilled the politician over his party’s ambitions to preserve access to the benefits of the single market and the customs union after Brexit. The broadcaster repeatedly asked if any such deal would involve the UK making “indefinite payments of the kind we see now into the EU”. – Express We need some cast‑iron assurances in Brexit plan – Anneliese Dodds MP and Barry Gardiner MP for the Times (£) Jacob Rees-Mogg: Boris Johnson has revived the romantic vision of Brexit we so desperately need Since that day of legend and song when we voted to leave the EU, the administrative approach has been to promise competence in negotiation to achieve the best in difficult circumstances. In the general election campaign, all that was promised was managerial efficiency, not a revivification of the British economy. The policy seemed to be directed by reluctance rather than enthusiasm and was phrased in terms of the process of leaving rather than the benefits once we had left. Boris has changed that, and has made the Government and Mrs May stronger by so doing. – Jacob Rees-Mogg MP for the Telegraph (£) Daniel Hannan: What Europhiles really despise most about Boris Johnson is his irrepressible cheerfulness What particularly irks his critics is that Boris is, in their eyes, a class traitor. Clever, multilingual and educated partly in Brussels, he is someone Continuity Remainers feel ought to have been one of them. They can dismiss most of the 52 per cent as bigots and dimwits, but Boris infuriates them. Hence their briefings that he is underperforming as Foreign Secretary – a view you never hear from his officials, who point to successes in pacifying Somalia and Libya, restraining Trump in the Middle East, rallying Europe against Putin and ensuring that foreign aid is determined by British interests, not by the prejudices of Leftist NGOs. We will look back on Brexit as we do on White Wednesday, and wonder what all the fuss was about. – Daniel Hannan MEP for the Telegraph (£) Liam Halligan: ‘The idea that the UK should vote again is scandalous’ Such practices are not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic. The fact that the European Commission acts in this way, and governments have allow it to do so, with the politicians involved often ending up with well-paid jobs in Brussels, is one reason that public support for the EU, across the entire continent, has plummeted in recent years. The idea that the UK, arguably Europe’s most vibrant democracy, should vote again on an issue of major constitutional significance because the first vote was at odds with ‘Project Europe’ is scandalous. – Liam Halligan for the Telegraph (£) Juliet Samuel: The EU is groaning under the weight of its own contradictions – but it’s too proud to change course now It is the EU’s own half-finished schemes that are creating this momentum. The euro and borderless Schengen travel area require the EU to introduce reforms to avoid repeats of the crises of the past decade. Both projects have created problems that can only be solved either by their abolition or by a massive increase in EU power. Since their abolition carries enormous costs, European elites tend to favour the latter. – Juliet Samuel for the Telegraph (£) Nadhim Zahawi: We should be willing to consider paying for continued access to the Single Market The rarest of events happened last week. Jean Claude Juncker did us a favour. The President of the European Commission set out his vision of where the European Union will go, and it could not have been a better explanation of why the United Kingdom should leave. Juncker detailed his view that more help should be given to countries to join the Euro as soon as possible, and that there should be a European finance minister. In addition, despite attempts by many countries to enhance intra-EU border security during the migrant crisis, and controversies around the free movement of terrorists, he also wants Schengen to be widened. – Nadhim Zahawi MP for ConservativeHome Spectator: Why is the UK’s supposedly impartial statistics watchdog joining the Boris-bashing? Okay, it’s a rainy Sunday, but surely the new chief of the UK Statistics Authority has better things to do than send angry tweets to the Foreign Secretary? Alas not. Today Sir David Norgrove, the newish chairman of the UK Statistics Agency, tweeted out a letter declaring himself ‘surprised and disappointed’ that BoJo has ‘chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union’. He says that this ‘confuses gross and net contributions…. It is a clear misuse of official statistics’. – Spectator Christopher Booker: How Jean-Claude Juncker’s grand plan for the EU was first laid out 84 years ago If ever there were a reason why Britain should leave the European Union, it was that blueprint for its future laid out last week by Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission president. The moment Britain leaves, he proposed, the EU must take a further giant leap forward to becoming a single state, with a single president, completely controlling the financial affairs of the countries making it up, which will all have to join the euro. – Christopher Booker for the Telegraph (£) Brendan O’Neill: ‘Brexit murder’ of Pole Arek Jozwik was nothing of the sort – and Remain campaigners should be ashamed for peddling the lie it was They called it a Brexit murder. A political killing. An act of Leave-fuelled xenophobic hatred. The death of a Polish man after a brawl in Essex in August 2016 was proof, they said, that Britons voting to leave the EU had unleashed dark prejudices. And now, they warned, these prejudices were turning violent. Politicians, EU bureaucrats and campaigners rushed to pontificate about the death of 40-year-old Arek Jozwik in Harlow — a town where 68 per cent of voters had chosen Leave in the referendum. – Brendan O’Neill for The Sun Christian May: Finally, firms are getting a look-in at the Brexit negotiating table There are valid criticisms that can be made of the government’s approach to the Brexit negotiations, but one oft-repeated attack is wearing a bit thin. “The government is ignoring the business community” is a charge levelled almost daily – sometimes by political opponents, sometimes by pundits and sometimes (it must be said) by businesses themselves. But this simplistic criticism masks a more complex reality. – Christian May for City A.M. Brexit in brief How complicated is Brexit? – John Redwood MP for John Redwood’s Diary If Theresa May refuses to communicate, she can’t blame Boris for doing it for her – Charles Moore for the Telegraph (£) Tim Farron: Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are cowards over Brexit – Politics Home Nicky Morgan – “I disagree that no deal is better than a bad deal” – Sky News European Parliament President says Theresa May should admit the UK needs the EU – Independent