Will the US-UK trade deal make Labour popular again?

To general surprise, at least as to the location and the timing, the British prime minister and the American president have confirmed that the US-UK economic prosperity deal (EPD) has indeed been signed and will now be in force.

- SEAN O'GRADY

It is the first, and only, trade deal of any kind to have been signed by the Trump administration since "Liberation Day" on 2 April. It was a notable moment, but for Keir Starmer, one question will be how far it will go in helping his government recover from its rapid fall from grace since the general election...

What's with the optics?

Obviously, someone possibly in the British embassy in Washington came up with the idea of the president and his counterpart springing the announcement on the world's media when they were least expecting it, for maximum impact. So instead of the usual photo-op in the Oval Office, with Trump signing the executive order and then posing with it for the cameras, it was displayed in the open air at an impromptu press conference.

The pages fell out of the presidential folder, to be retrieved by Starmer, but that just seemed to add to the easy informality of the occasion. The prime minister was allowed to address the president as "Donald", and Trump said nice things about him.

The British are to be shielded from further tariffs because, as Trump put it, "I like them", and he thinks Starmer's team are "great people".

What's missing?

Steel, most urgently. The Americans insist that steel "made in Britain" should be virgin and not dependent on raw materials from, let us say, China or the EU. For the steel works at Port Talbot that implies trouble, because the capacity to make such steel has been lost with the closure of the last blast furnace, now replaced with electric arc technology. So the ruinous 25 per cent tariff on UK steel exports to the US will stay, after all, and will rise to a prohibitive 50 per cent on 9 July.