Ever bold, always cocky and never a mission accomplished: this will be the tale of PM Truss

theguardian.com:

Most political plans go wrong either because unforeseen events get in the way or because wholly foreseeable events were ignored in the planning. Liz Truss’s ambitions for a policy blitz in her first weeks as prime minister belong in the first category. She couldn’t have known the Queen would die, and politics would be suspended for national mourning.

The prime minister’s admission on Monday night, en route to New York, that there will be no UK-US free trade deal is the second kind of failure. The scale of it must not be downplayed just because it feels inevitable.

When Truss was international trade secretary, a free-trade agreement with Washington was very much Plan A. It was to be the crowning glory of Britain’s triumphant liberation from Brussels: an apotheosis of economic sovereignty and transatlantic solidarity. In Eurosceptic mythology, the Washington deal was a bridge to utopia, and the slam-dunk rebuttal to all those gloomy remoaner economists who fretted over the cost of leaving the EU single market.

Now Truss admits that there aren’t even any negotiations. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has listened to what US diplomats and trade experts have been saying for years.

Americans need compelling commercial incentives to open their markets up to foreigners. They aren’t going to do it as a favour for Truss, no matter how “special” the relationship with Britain. Also, the UK’s petulant unilateral abrogations of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement have advertised the country as a vandal of international law and a flaky trading partner.

Truss does not seem perturbed by the sinking of the Brexit trade flagship because she has long since moved on to a new plan. It will be presented to the Commons by the