A frisson of schadenfreude for us Brits as Europe's ice queen is eaten alive

For all the comedy drama of Donald Trump’s Scottish visit, the implications for UK Plc and London as its fulcrum are positive.

- BY ANNE McELYOY

Or rather, are a lot less negative than the EU-US trade deal, which left the EU Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen looking as if she had swallowed a particularly unappealing haggis.

It is also a moment which consigns the post-Brexit era to history — not because it has been healed, but because the major impacts of the tariff era are more far reaching. And because, bluntly, the damage to Europe from a US president remaking the global trade order by fiat is much more harmful than the dents to the UK of leaving the European Union.

Not so long ago the single market’s bargaining might as a trade block vis a vis the US was part of its competitive raison’ d’être and constituted a reason the UK was mad to leave it in the 2016 referendum. But now it finds itself saddled with a baseline of 15 per cent tariffs in dealings with the US while the UK landing zone is around 10 per cent. And without a substantial growth advantage over the UK — the Eurozone as a whole grew by a measly 0.1 per cent in the last quarter — that means, as one senior finance minister told me at a downbeat business gathering in Berlin recently, “our bruise is being pressed a lot harder than yours”.

The reaction since Air Force One jetted home has gone from relief that a deal was done — which let’s not forget avoided the initial 30 per cent tariff threat or retaliation the EU was in no position to conduct — to misery at the fallout.