Strange defeat
I may have spoken too quickly about the PM’s visit to Washington and how bad it was, but the news this morning does rather put a new light on matters. The UK is at the back of the queue for a trade deal with the US. It doesn’t care, isn’t bothered and hasn’t got the time or energy to waste on one, so stop asking. That was the message from the White House.
On top of that President Biden publicly lectured Boris Johnson on an internal UK matter, its relationship with Northern Ireland. Awfully bad luck for Lord Frost, who is now back in his box, Brussels and Dublin will have been listening very carefully to what Mr. Biden had to say and how it strictly limits the UK. It also seems that the UK was taken by surprise by the US relaxation of its travel ban to cover all of Europe and not allow the UK to declare even that as a unique success.
Now we are being spun the idea that our cunning back up plan is to join NAFTA. The fact that we are pathetically knocking on the door begging to be let into a club that negotiated a deal in its own favour years ago, is brushed aside as a mere detail.
This is humiliating, Johnson must have expected more after the US/UK/Aus submarine deal which burnt his bridges to France. But he is coming home with nothing.
The coverage in the media doesn’t say this but let’s not blame the hacks. This is a long running management problem. If you send political correspondents in the same plane as the PM, they report as if they are still in Westminster. This used to happen in Brussels a lot when pol. corrs. would turn up for conferences and report seriously that the UK had got everything it wanted.
Really? Another meeting of 27+ sovereign states and the UK gets everything it wants? Again? What are the odds?
Listen to the local journalists, they know or the foreign correspondents. They have been sent abroad at huge expense to cover just these subjects and find out what is really happening.
The President has done nothing to spare the UK’s blushes. Obama was right and the Brexiteers were wrong, again.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.