Vince Cable Says May Should Fire Johnson Over Brexit Article

(Bloomberg) -- Vince Cable, leader of the U.K.’s Liberal Democrat Party, said Prime Minister Theresa May should fire her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, over an article he published on Saturday about Britain’s departure from the European Union.

There is “civil war in the cabinet and the government,” Cable told BBC TV’s “Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday. “It’s a terrible situation, it puts Theresa May in an impossible position, I can’t understand why she hasn’t fired him,” he added.

The undermining of May’s authority will increase the difficulty of negotiations with the EU over Brexit, he said.

“The whole point about Boris Johnson’s intervention is he has a completely and utterly different view of what Brexit means from the rest of the cabinet,” Cable said.

Writing in the Telegraph, the figurehead of last year’s campaign to leave the EU outlined what he called a “glorious” vision for the U.K. He said Britain shouldn’t pay to access Europe’s single market for goods and services after Brexit, countering suggestions of Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond and Brexit Secretary David Davis.

To contact the reporter on this story: Thomas Penny in London at tpenny@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Steve Geimann, Kristine Aquino